14 March, LVI A.S.

9sense Episode List, Year LVI A.S. Episode List / / 9sense, Antikithera Mechanism, Creature Feature, Infernal Informant, Men in Kilts, Migrant Children, Reverend Campbell, Selfishness, The Devil's Advocate

1. The Devil’s Advocate

Time Stamp: 12:40​

  • Selfishness from Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order
    • you are free do anything you want because you do not have to care about anyone else
    • the future is coming… And you are best advised to be ready for it.
    • you are required by harsh necessity to take all of those “yous” into account.
      • Present and future
    • there is some utility in discounting the importance of the “yous”  who exist far enough into the future, because the future is uncertain
    • Here is what the future means: If you are going to take care of yourself, you are already burdened (or privileged) with a social responsibility. The you for whom you are caring is a community that exists across time. The necessity for considering this society of the individual, so to speak, is a burden and an opportunity that seems uniquely characteristic of human beings.
    • We discovered the future, some long time ago – and now the future is where we each live, in potential. We treat that as reality. It is a reality that only might be — but it is one with a high probability of becoming now, eventually, and we are driven to take that into account.
    • narrow selfishness is destined to be nonproductive. It is for this reason, among others, that a strictly individualist ethic is a contradiction in terms. There is in fact little difference between how you should treat yourself – once you realize that you are a community that extends across time – and how you should treat other people.
      • Active engagement with others v passive engagement
    • The First Satanic Statement
      • Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!
      • Indulgence… NOT Compulsion! Chapter (Essay) in The Satanic Bible
    • (my Star Wars take) Be mindful of the present, but not forgetful of past orthodoxies.

2. Infernal Informant

Time Stamp: 29:54​

  • Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera mechanism
    • https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/03/scientists-solve-another-piece-of-the-puzzling-antikythera-mechanism/
    • Scientists have long struggled to solve the puzzle of the gearing system on the front of the so-called Antikythera mechanism—a fragmentary ancient Greek astronomical calculator, perhaps the earliest example of a geared device. Now, an interdisciplinary team at University College London (UCL) has come up with a computational model that reveals a dazzling display of the ancient Greek cosmos, according to a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The team is currently building a replica mechanism, moving gears and all, using modern machinery.
    • “Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the descriptions in the scientific inscriptions engraved on the mechanism itself,” said lead author Tony Freeth, a mechanical engineer at UCL. “The Sun, Moon, and planets are displayed in an impressive tour de force of ancient Greek brilliance.”
    • “We believe that our reconstruction fits all the evidence that scientists have gleaned from the extant remains to date,” co-author Adam Wojcik, a materials scientist at UCL, told the Guardian.
    • The hand-powered Antikythera mechanism has a long history. In 1900, a Greek sponge diver named Elias Stadiatis discovered the wreck of an ancient cargo ship off the coast of Antikythera island in Greece. He and other divers recovered all kinds of artifacts from the ship. A year later, an archaeologist named Valerios Stais was studying what he thought was just a piece of rock recovered from the shipwreck, but he noticed there was a gear wheel embedded in it. It turned out to be an ancient mechanical device. The Antikythera mechanism is now housed in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. 
    • The 82 surviving fragments of the device were originally housed in a wooden box roughly the size of a shoebox, with dials on the outside, containing a complex assembly of gear wheels within. The largest piece is known as Fragment A, which has bearings, pillars, and a block. Another piece, Fragment D, has a disk, a 63-tooth gear, and plate. The mechanism’s very existence offers strong evidence that such technology existed as early as 150-100 BC, but the knowledge was subsequently lost. Similar machines with equivalent complexity didn’t appear again until the 18th century. While it was found on a Roman cargo ship, historians believe it is Greek in origin, possibly from the island of Rhodes, which was known for impressive displays of mechanical engineering.
    • It took decades just to clean the device off, and in 1951, a British science historian named Derek J. de Solla Price began investigating the theoretical workings of the device. Based on X-ray and gamma ray photographs of the fragments, Price and physicist Charalampos Karakalos published a 70-page paper in 1959 in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Based on those images, Price hypothesized that the mechanism had been used to calculate the motions of stars and planets—making it the first known analog computer.
    • In 2002, Michael Wright, then curator of mechanical engineering at the Science Museum in London, made headlines with new, more detailed X-ray images of the device taken via linear tomography—which means that only features in a particular plane come into focus, enabling closer inspection and pinning the exact location of each gear. Wright’s closer analysis revealed a fixed central gear in the mechanism’s main wheel, around which other moving gears could rotate. He concluded that the device was specifically designed to model “epicyclic” motion, in keeping with the ancient Greek notion that celestial bodies moved in circular patterns called epicycles. (This was pre-Copernicus, so the fixed point around which they moved was believed to be the Earth.)
    • Freeth and his co-authors have been working to reconstruct the cosmos display, described in the inscriptions on the mechanism’s back cover, featuring planets moving on concentric rings with marker beads as indicators. X-rays of the front cover accurately represent the cycles of Venus and Saturn—462 and 442 years, respectively.
    • “After considerable struggle, we managed to match the evidence in Fragments A and D to a mechanism for Venus, which exactly models its 462-year planetary period relation, with the 63-tooth gear playing a crucial role,” said co-author David Higgon. This enabled the team to derive the cycles of the other planets as well and to create mechanisms to calculate the astronomical cycles while minimizing the number of gears so that everything would fit into the tight space of the device.  The team also suggests there may have been a double-ended pointer to predict eclipses, which they have dubbed a “Dragon Hand.”
    • There are still plenty of mysteries surrounding the Antikythera mechanism, however, such as whether this latest version could really have been built using ancient manufacturing techniques. “The concentric tubes at the core of the planetarium [that carried the astronomical outputs] are where my faith in Greek tech falters, and where the model might also falter,” Wojcik told the Guardian. “Lathes would be the way today, but we can’t assume they had those for metal.”
    • Furthermore, he added, “Although metal is precious, and so would have been recycled, it is odd that nothing remotely similar has been found or dug up. If they had the tech to make the Antikythera mechanism, why did they not extend this tech to devising other machines, such as clocks?”
    • Nonetheless, “This is a key theoretical advance on how the cosmos was constructed in the Mechanism,” said Wojcik. “Now we must prove its feasibility by making it with ancient techniques.”
  • FEMA deployed to help process migrant children amid overcrowding in border facilities
    • https://www.cbsnews.com/news/immigration-migrant-children-border-facilities-overcrowding-fema/
    • The Biden administration on Saturday instructed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help process the increasing number of unaccompanied migrant children entering U.S. border custody amid reports of overcrowding in holding facilities.
    • Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced he has ordered FEMA to help U.S. immigration officials receive and shelter migrant minors crossing the southern border without parents or legal guardians for the next 90 days.
    • The deployment of FEMA officials illustrates the formidable logistical and humanitarian test the Biden administration is facing at the U.S.-Mexico border due to a sharp increase in the number of migrant children being taken into custody in recent weeks.
    • Nearly 9,500 unaccompanied minors, most of them from Central America, entered U.S. border custody in February — a 21-month high. More than 7,000 of them were transferred to the U.S. refugee agency, which has been struggling to find enough bed space in its network of shelters. The shelters had previously been operating at reduced capacity because of social distancing measures put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.
    • The dwindling bed space at U.S. refugee agency shelters has created a massive backlog of minors in Border Patrol holding facilities, most of which were built to briefly detain adult migrants, not children. The number of children held in Border Patrol custody this week has averaged more than 3,000.
    • On Friday, CBS News reported that children detained at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in south Texas told lawyers they were being held in overcrowded conditions. The children also reported having to sleep on the floor, not being able to call family members, having limited access to showers and not seeing sunlight in nearly a week.
    • In his announcement of the FEMA assignment, Mayorkas acknowledged that his department’s border holding facilities are unfit to house minors.
    • “I am incredibly proud of the agents of the Border Patrol, who have been working around the clock in difficult circumstances to take care of children temporarily in our care,” Mayorkas said. “Yet, as I have said many times, a Border Patrol facility is no place for a child.”
    • CBS News has requested access to the migrant holding facility in Donna, Texas.
    • A FEMA spokesperson told CBS News the agency is working with the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the refugee agency, to “quickly expand capacity for safe and appropriate shelter, and to provide food, water and basic medical care.”
    • Mayorkas said U.S. border officials are working to transfer unaccompanied minors to the refugee office “as quickly as possible,” but he noted the task is being complicated by the pandemic.
    • In addition to the FEMA deployment, Mayorkas said officials from other Department of Homeland Security agencies, including the Federal Protective Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), were also providing assistance with shelter operations and security.
    • In 2014, the Obama administration tapped FEMA to oversee the government’s response to then-record numbers of Central American children crossing the U.S. southern border without parents.
    • While the Biden administration has so far continued to rely on a public health authority invoked by the Trump administration to swiftly expel most migrant adults and some families without a court hearing, it has allowed unaccompanied children to continue their proceedings in the U.S., as outlined by U.S. law. 
    • Republicans have said the rising number of children crossing the border alone stems from the Biden administration’s policy changes and its pledges to undo Trump-era asylum restrictions.
    • On Saturday, however, DHS said the marked rise in border crossings could be attributed to poverty, violence and food insecurity in Central America, which is also recovering from two devastating, back-to-back hurricanes that made landfall last fall.

3. Creature Feature

Time Stamp: 58:09​

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