This is just a little set of photos (24, I think) not exactly a real "project" and very little thought went into the compiling, sequencing, whatever, editing of the images. Just a quickie while avoiding anything of substance. Please do not try to extrapolate any deeper meaning or higher concept. There is very little here. With that said, enjoy the show.

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

CROP_ Domingo Milella, Kodak Portra 160 NC 8x10".

Drum Scan by CastorScan

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CastorScan's philosophy is completely oriented to provide the highest scan and postproduction

quality on the globe.

  

We work with artists, photographers, agencies, laboratories etc. who demand a state-of-the-art quality at reasonable prices.

  

Our workflow is fully manual and extremely meticulous in any stage.

  

We developed exclusive workflows and profilation systems to obtain unparallel results from our scanners not achievable through semi-automatic and usual workflows.

  

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Il servizio offerto da CastorScan è completamente orientato

a fornire la massima qualità di scansione e postproduzione sul

mercato internazionale.

  

Lavoriamo con artisti, fotografi, agenzie e laboratori che richiedono

una qualità allo Stato dell'Arte a prezzi ragionevoli.

  

Il nostro flusso di lavoro è completamente manuale ed estremamente meticoloso

in ogni sua fase.

  

Abbiamo sviluppato workflows e sistemi di profilatura esclusivi che ci consentono

di ottenere risultati impareggiabili dai nostri scanners, non raggiungibili

attraverso workflows semiautomatici e/o convenzionali.

  

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CastorScan uses the best scanners in circulation, Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II, the best and most advanced scanner ever made, Kodak-Creo IQSmart 3, a high-end flatbed scanner, and Imacon 848.

  

The image quality offered by our Dainippon Screen 8060 scanner is much higher than that achievable with the best flatbed scanners or filmscanners dedicated and superior to that of scanners so-called "virtual drum" (Imacon – Hasselblad,) and, of course, vastly superior to that amateur or prosumer obtained with scanners such as Epson V750 etc .

  

Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II exceeds in quality any other scanner, including Aztek Premier and ICG 380 (in the results, not just in the technical specifications).

  

8060's main features: 12000 dpi, Hi-Q Xenon lamp, 25 apertures, 2 micron

  

Aztek Premier's main features: 8000 dpi, halogen lamp, 18 apertures, 3 micron

  

ICG 380's main features: 12000 dpi, halogen lamp, 9 apertures, 4 micron

  

Some of the features that make the quality of our drum scanners better than any other existing scan system include:

  

The scans performed on a drum scanner are famous for their detail, depth and realism.

Scans are much cleaner and show fewer imperfections than scans obtained from CCD scanners, and thus save many hours of cleaning and spotting in postproduction.

Image acquisition by the drum scanner is optically similar to using a microscopic lens that scans the image point by point with extreme precision and without deformation or distortion of any kind, while other scanners use enlarger lenses (such as the Rodenstock-Linos Magnagon 75mm f8 used in the Hasselblad-Imacon scanners) and have transmission systems with rubber bands: this involves mild but effective micro-strain and micro-geometric image distortions and quality is not uniform between the center and edges.

Drum scanners are exempt from problems of flatness of the originals, since the same are mounted on a perfectly balanced transparent acrylic drum; on the contrary, the dedicated film scanners that scan slides or negatives in their plastic frames are subject to quite significant inaccuracies, as well as the Imacon-Hasselblad scanners, which have their own rubber and plastic holders: they do not guarantee the perfect flatness of the original and therefore a uniform definition between center and edge, especially with medium and large size originals, which instead are guaranteed by drum scanners.

Again, drum scanners allow scanning at high resolution over the entire surface of the cylinder, while for example the Hasselblad Imacon scans are limited to 3200 dpi in 120 format and 2000 dpi in 4x5" format (the resolution of nearly every CCD scanner in the market drops as the size of the original scanned is increased).

Drum scanners allow complete scanning of the whole negative, including the black-orange mask, perforations etc, while using many other scanners a certain percentage of the image is lost because it is covered by frames or holders.

Drum scanners use photomultiplier tubes to record the light signal, which are much more sensitive than CCDs and can record many more nuances and variations in contrast with a lower digital noise.

If you look at a monitor at 100% the detail in shadows and darker areas of a scan made with a CCD scanner, you will notice that the details are not recorded in a clear and clean way, and the colors are more opaque and less differentiated. Additionally the overall tones are much less rich and differentiated.

  

We would like to say a few words about an unscrupulous and deceitful use of technical specifications reported by many manufacturers of consumer and prosumer scanners; very often we read of scanners that promise cheap or relatively cheap “drum scanner” resolutions, 16 bits of color depth, extremely high DMAX: we would like to say that these “nominal” resolutions do not correspond to an actual optical resolution, so that even in low-resolution scanning you can see an enormous gap between drum scanners and these scanners in terms of detail, as well as in terms of DMAX, color range, realism, “quality” of grain. So very often when using these consumer-prosumer scanners at high resolutions, it is normal to get a disproportionate increase of file size in MB but not an increase of detail and quality.

To give a concrete example: a drum scan of a 24x36mm color negative film at 3500 dpi is much more defined than a scan made with mostly CCD scanner at 8000 dpi and a drum scan at 2500 dpi is dramatically clearer than a scan at 2500 dpi provided by a CCD scanner. So be aware and careful with incorrect advertisement.

  

Scans can be performed either dry or liquid-mounted. The wet mounting further improves cleanliness (helps to hide dirt, scratches and blemishes) and plasticity of the image without compromising the original, and in addition by mounting with liquid the film grain is greatly reduced and it looks much softer and more pleasant than the usual "harsh" grain resulting from dry scans.

  

We use Kami SMF 2001 liquid to mount the transparencies and Kami RC 2001 for cleaning the same. Kami SMF 2001 evaporates without leaving traces, unlike the traditional oil scans, ensuring maximum protection for your film. Out of ignorance some people prefer to avoid liquid scanning because they fear that their films will be dirty or damaged: this argument may be plausible only in reference to scans made using mineral oils, which have nothing to do with the specific professional products we use.

We strongly reiterate that your original is in no way compromised by our scanning liquid and will return as you have shipped it, if not cleaner.

  

With respect to scanning from slides:

Our scanners are carefully calibrated with the finest IT8 calibration targets in circulation and with special customized targets in order to ensure that each scan faithfully reproduces the original color richness even in the most subtle nuances, opening and maintaining detail in shadows and highlights. These color profiles allow our scanners to realize their full potential, so we guarantee our customers that even from a chromatic point of view our scans are noticeably better than similar scans made by mostly other scan services in the market.

In addition, we remind you that our 8060 drum scanner is able to read the deepest shadows of slides without digital noise and with much more detail than CCD scanners; also, the color range and color realism are far better.

  

With respect to scanning from color and bw negatives: we want to emphasize the superiority of our drum scans not only in scanning slides, but also in color and bw negative scanning (because of the orange mask and of very low contrast is extremely difficult for any ccd scanner to read the very slight tonal and contrast nuances in the color negative, while a perfectly profiled 8060 drum scanner – also through the analog gain/white calibration - can give back much more realistic images and true colors, sharper and more three-dimensional).

  

In spite of what many claim, a meticulous color profiling is essential not only for scanning slides, but also, and even more, for color negatives. Without it the scan of a color negative will produce chromatic errors rather significant, thus affecting the tonal balance and then the naturalness-pleasantness of the images.

  

More unique than rare, we do not use standardized profiles provided by the software to invert each specific negative film, because they do not take into account parameters and variables such as the type of development, the level of exposure, the type of light etc.,; at the same time we also avoid systems of "artificial intelligence" or other functions provided by semi-automatic scanning softwares, but instead we carry out the inversion in a full manual workflow for each individual picture.

  

In addition, scanning with Imacon-Hasselblad scanners we do not use their proprietary software - Flexcolor – to make color management and color inversion because we strongly believe that our alternative workflow provides much better results, and we are able to prove it with absolute clarity.

  

At each stage of the process we take care of meticulously adjusting the scanning parameters to the characteristics of the originals, to extrapolate the whole range of information possible from any image without "burning" or reductions in the tonal range, and strictly according to our customer's need and taste.

  

By default, we do not apply unsharp mask (USM) in our scans, except on request.

  

To scan reflective originals we follow the same guidelines and guarantee the same quality standard.

  

We guarantee the utmost thoroughness and expertise in the work of scanning and handling of the originals and we provide scans up to 12,000 dpi of resolution, at 16-bit, in RGB, GRAYSCALE, LAB or CMYK color mode; unless otherwise indicated, files are saved with Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB color profile.

  

WWW.CASTORSCAN.COM

Agfaphoto APX400 @ 1066 ISO (D76 dev), F3 (recalibrated +1EV), 50mm/f1.4 (shot at f/16) gradient filter.

 

Pushing APX400 to 1066 wasn't trivial, I extrapolated the development time from available data and gave it a shot using D76. Think I got it right:)

 

Near Ujazd, a small Polish town that suffered 70% destruction in WW2, there stood a picturesque old manor I loved photographing. Recently, it was razed to the ground. So while passing the grounds on a freezing (-15C) morning, the view previously blocked by the house was open, and here's what I saw!

Paper print scan (foma c-something).

an extrapolation of the shrouded inkspot by good friend and innovative sculptor Jol Dupuy .. another large piece made up of a number of layers of glass and, photographed from above , with smoke pumped in from below

You can view his original works on Flickr www.flickr.com/photos/jdsculpture/

 

The Postcard

 

A carte postale that was published by L.L. The stamp has been removed along with the date of posting, but we do know that the card was posted in Cairo to:

 

Miss Cross,

'The Croft',

Headington Hill,

Oxford,

England.

 

The message on the divided back was as follows:

 

"Dear Winnie,

Thank you for your note.

I was so very pleased to

hear from it that Mrs.

Gittins & you all were

well.

We had been hoping so

much that Mrs. Gittins had

not been suffering from

the very cold weather you

have had."

 

The Great Sphinx of Giza

 

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human, and the body of a lion.

 

Facing directly from west to east, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile. The face of the Sphinx appears to represent the pharaoh Khafre.

 

The original shape of the Sphinx was cut from the bedrock, and has since been restored with layers of limestone blocks.

 

It measures 73 m (240 ft) long from paw to tail, 20 m (66 ft) high from the base to the top of the head, and 19 m (62 ft) wide at its rear haunches.

 

Its nose was broken off for unknown reasons between the 3rd. and 10th. centuries AD.

 

The Sphinx is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt, and one of the most recognisable statues in the world.

 

The archaeological evidence suggests that it was created by ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of Khafre (c. 2558 - 2532 BC).

 

The Great Sphinx's Name

 

The commonly used name "Sphinx" was given to the monument in classical antiquity, about 2,000 years after the commonly accepted date of its construction by reference to a Greek mythological beast with the head of a woman, a falcon, a cat, or a sheep and the body of a lion with the wings of an eagle. (Although, like most Egyptian sphinxes, the Great Sphinx has a man's head and no wings).

 

The English word sphinx comes from the ancient Greek Σφίγξ from the verb σφίγγω (meaning to squeeze in English), after the Greek sphinx who strangled anyone who failed to answer her riddle.

 

History of the Great Sphinx

 

The Sphinx is a monolith carved from the bedrock of the plateau, which also served as the quarry for the pyramids and other monuments in the area.

 

Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz has suggested that the head of the Sphinx may have been carved first, out of a natural yardang, i.e. a ridge of bedrock that had been sculpted by the wind. These can sometimes achieve shapes which resemble animals.

 

El-Baz suggests that the "moat" or "ditch" around the Sphinx may have been quarried out later to allow for the creation of the full body of the sculpture.

 

The archaeological evidence suggests that the Great Sphinx was created around 2500 BC for the pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the Second Pyramid at Giza. The stones cut from around the Sphinx's body were used to construct a temple in front of it.

 

However, neither the enclosure nor the temple were ever completed, and the relative scarcity of Old Kingdom cultural material suggests that a Sphinx cult was not established at the time.

 

Selim Hassan, writing in 1949 on recent excavations of the Sphinx enclosure, made note of this circumstance:

 

"Taking all things into consideration, it seems that

we must give the credit of erecting this, the world's

most wonderful statue, to Khafre, but always with

this reservation: that there is not one single

contemporary inscription which connects the Sphinx

with Khafre, so sound as it may appear, we must treat

the evidence as circumstantial, until such time as a

lucky turn of the spade of the excavator will reveal to

the world a definite reference to the erection of the

Sphinx."

 

In order to construct the temple, the northern perimeter-wall of the Khafre Valley Temple had to be deconstructed, hence it follows that the Khafre funerary complex preceded the creation of the Sphinx and its temple.

 

Furthermore, the angle and location of the south wall of the enclosure suggests the causeway connecting Khafre's Pyramid and Valley Temple already existed before the Sphinx was planned. The lower base level of the Sphinx temple also indicates that it doesn't pre-date the Valley Temple.

 

The Great Sphinx in the New Kingdom

 

Some time around the First Intermediate Period, the Giza Necropolis was abandoned, and drifting sand eventually buried the Sphinx up to its shoulders.

 

The first documented attempt at an excavation dates to c. 1400 BC, when the young Thutmose IV gathered a team and, after much effort, managed to dig out the front paws. Between them he erected a shrine that housed the Dream Stele, an inscribed granite slab (possibly a re-purposed door lintel from one of Khafre's temples).

 

When the stele was discovered, its lines of text were already damaged and incomplete. An excerpt reads:

 

"... the royal son, Thothmos, being arrived, while

walking at midday and seating himself under the

shadow of this mighty god, was overcome by

slumber and slept at the very moment when Ra is

at the summit of heaven.

He found that the Majesty of this august god spoke

to him with his own mouth, as a father speaks to his

son, saying:

'Look upon me, contemplate me, O my son Thothmos;

I am thy father, Harmakhis-Khopri-Ra-Tum; I bestow

upon thee the sovereignty over my domain, the

supremacy over the living ... Behold my actual condition

that thou mayest protect all my perfect limbs. The sand

of the desert whereon I am laid has covered me. Save

me, causing all that is in my heart to be executed.'"

 

The Dream Stele associates the Sphinx with Khafre, however this part of the text is not entirely intact:

 

"... which we bring for him: oxen ... and all the young

vegetables; and we shall give praise to Wenofer ...

Khaf ... the statue made for Atum-Hor-em-Akhet."

 

Egyptologist Thomas Young, finding the Khaf hieroglyphs in a damaged cartouche used to surround a royal name, inserted the glyph ra to complete Khafre's name. However when the Stele was re-excavated in 1925, the lines of text referring to Khaf flaked off and were destroyed.

 

In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx became more specifically associated with the sun god Hor-em-akhet. Pharaoh Amenhotep II built a temple to the northeast of the Sphinx nearly 1000 years after its construction, and dedicated it to the cult of Hor-em-akhet.

 

The Great Sphinx in the Graeco-Roman Period

 

By Graeco-Roman times, Giza had become a tourist destination - the monuments were regarded as antiquities. Some Roman Emperors visited the Sphinx out of curiosity, and for political reasons.

 

The Sphinx was cleared of sand again in the first century AD in honour of Emperor Nero and the Governor of Egypt, Tiberius Claudius Balbilus.

 

A monumental stairway more than 12 metres (39 ft) wide was erected, leading to a pavement in front of the paws of the Sphinx. At the top of the stairs, a podium was positioned that allowed view into the Sphinx sanctuary.

 

Further back, another podium neighboured several more steps. The stairway was dismantled during the 1931–32 excavations by Émile Baraize.

 

Pliny the Elder described the face of the Sphinx being coloured red and gave measurements for the statue:

 

"In front of these pyramids is the Sphinx, a still more

wondrous object of art, but one upon which silence

has been observed, as it is looked upon as a divinity

by the people of the neighbourhood.

It is their belief that King Harmaïs was buried in it, and

they will have it that it was brought there from a distance.

The truth is, however, that it was hewn from the solid

rock; and, from a feeling of veneration, the face of the

monster is coloured red.

The circumference of the head, measured round the

forehead, is one hundred and two feet, the length of the

feet being one hundred and forty-three, and the height,

from the belly to the summit of the asp on the head,

sixty-two."

 

A stela dated to 166 AD commemorates the restoration of the retaining walls surrounding the Sphinx.

 

The last Emperor connected with the monument was Septimius Severus, around 200 AD. With the downfall of Roman power, the Sphinx was once more engulfed by the sands.

 

The Great Sphinx in the Middle Ages

 

Some ancient non-Egyptians saw the Sphinx as a likeness of the god Horon. The cult of the Sphinx continued into medieval times. The Sabians of Harran saw it as the burial place of Hermes Trismegistus.

 

Arab authors described the Sphinx as a talisman which guarded the area from the desert. Al-Maqrizi describes it as "The Talisman of the Nile" on which the locals believed the flood cycle depended.

 

Muhammad al-Idrisi stated that those wishing to obtain bureaucratic positions in the Egyptian government should give an incense offering to the monument.

 

Over the centuries, writers and scholars have recorded their impressions and reactions upon seeing the Sphinx. The vast majority were concerned with a general description, often including a mixture of science, romance and mystique. A typical description of the Sphinx by tourists and leisure travelers throughout the 19th. and 20th. century was made by John Lawson Stoddard:

 

"It is the antiquity of the Sphinx which thrills us as

we look upon it, for in itself it has no charms. The

desert's waves have risen to its breast, as if to

wrap the monster in a winding-sheet of gold. The

face and head have been mutilated by Moslem

fanatics. The mouth, the beauty of whose lips was

once admired, is now expressionless. Yet grand in

its loneliness, - veiled in the mystery of unnamed

ages, - the relic of Egyptian antiquity stands solemn

and silent in the presence of the awful desert -

symbol of eternity. Here it disputes with Time the

empire of the past; forever gazing on and on into

a future which will still be distant when we, like all

who have preceded us and looked upon its face,

have lived our little lives and disappeared."

 

From the 16th. century, European observers described the Sphinx having the face, neck and breast of a woman.

 

Most early Western images were book illustrations in print form, elaborated by a professional engraver from either previous images available, or some original drawing or sketch supplied by an author, and usually now lost.

 

Seven years after visiting Giza, André Thévet (Cosmographie de Levant, 1556) described the Sphinx as:

 

"The head of a colossus, caused to be

made by Isis, daughter of Inachus, then

so beloved of Jupiter".

 

He, or his artist and engraver, pictured it as a curly-haired monster with a grassy dog collar.

 

Athanasius Kircher (who never visited Egypt) depicted the Sphinx as a Roman statue (Turris Babel, 1679).

 

Johannes Helferich's (1579) Sphinx is a pinched-face, round-breasted woman with a straight-haired wig.

 

George Sandys stated in 1615 that the Sphinx was a harlot; Balthasar de Monconys interpreted the headdress as a kind of hairnet, while François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz's Sphinx had a rounded hairdo with bulky collar.

 

Richard Pococke's Sphinx was an adoption of Cornelis de Bruijn's drawing of 1698, featuring only minor changes, but is closer to the actual appearance of the Sphinx than anything previously drawn.

 

The print versions of Norden's drawings for his Voyage d'Egypte et de Nubie (1755) clearly show that the nose was missing.

 

Later Excavations

 

In 1817, the first modern archaeological dig, supervised by the Italian Giovanni Battista Caviglia, uncovered the Sphinx's chest completely.

 

In 1887, the chest, paws, the altar, and the plateau were all made visible. Flights of steps were unearthed, and finally accurate measurements were taken of the great figures.

 

The height from the lowest of the steps was found to be one hundred feet, and the space between the paws was found to be thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide. Here there was formerly an altar; and a stele of Thûtmosis IV was discovered, recording a dream in which he was ordered to clear away the sand that even then was gathering round the site of the Sphinx.

 

One of the people working on clearing the sands from around the Great Sphinx was Eugène Grébaut, a French Director of the Antiquities Service.

 

Opinions of Early Egyptologists

 

Early Egyptologists and excavators were divided regarding the age of the Sphinx and its associated temples.

 

In 1857, Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, unearthed the much later Inventory Stela (estimated to be from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, c. 664 - 525 BC), which tells how Khufu came upon the Sphinx, already buried in sand.

 

Although certain tracts on the Stela are likely accurate, this passage is contradicted by archaeological evidence, thus considered to be Late Period historical revisionism, a purposeful fake, created by the local priests as an attempt to imbue the contemporary Isis temple with an ancient history it never had.

 

Such acts became common when religious institutions such as temples, shrines and priests' domains were fighting for political attention and for financial and economic donations.

 

Flinders Petrie wrote in 1883 regarding the state of opinion of the age of the Khafre Valley Temple, and by extension the Sphinx:

 

"The date of the Granite Temple has been so

positively asserted to be earlier than the fourth

dynasty, that it may seem rash to dispute the

point.

Recent discoveries, however, strongly show that

it was really not built before the reign of Khafre,

in the fourth dynasty."

 

Gaston Maspero, the French Egyptologist and second director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, conducted a survey of the Sphinx in 1886. He concluded that because the Dream Stela showed the cartouche of Khafre in line 13, it was he who was responsible for the excavation, and therefore the Sphinx must predate Khafre and his predecessors - possibly Fourth Dynasty, c. 2575 - 2467 BC. Maspero believed the Sphinx to be "the most ancient monument in Egypt".

 

Ludwig Borchardt attributed the Sphinx to the Middle Kingdom, arguing that the particular features seen on the Sphinx are unique to the 12th. dynasty, and that the Sphinx resembles Amenemhat III.

 

E. A. Wallis Budge agreed that the Sphinx predated Khafre's reign, writing in The Gods of the Egyptians (1904):

 

"This marvellous object was in existence in the

days of Khafre, or Khephren, and it is probable

that it is a very great deal older than his reign,

and that it dates from the end of the archaic

period [c. 2686 BC]."

 

Modern Dissenting Hypotheses

 

Rainer Stadelmann, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, examined the distinct iconography of the nemes (headdress) and the now-detached beard of the Sphinx, and concluded that the style is more indicative of the pharaoh Khufu (2589–2566 BC).

 

He was known to the Greeks as Cheops, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza and Khafre's father. Rainer supports this by suggesting Khafre's Causeway was built to conform to a pre-existing structure, which, he concludes, given its location, could only have been the Sphinx.

 

In 2004, Vassil Dobrev of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale in Cairo announced that he had uncovered new evidence that the Great Sphinx may have been the work of the little-known pharaoh Djedefre (2528–2520 BC).

 

Djedefre was Khafra's half brother, and a son of Khufu. Dobrev suggests Djedefre built the Sphinx in the image of his father Khufu, identifying him with the sun god Ra in order to restore respect for their dynasty.

 

Dobrev also says that the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid to the temples was built around the Sphinx, suggesting that it was already in existence at the time.

 

Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick responded to Dobrev by saying that:

 

"It is not implausible. But I would need more explanation,

such as why he thinks the pyramid at Abu Roash is a sun

temple, something I'm sceptical about.

I have never heard anyone suggest that the name in the

graffiti at Zawiyet el-Aryan mentions Djedefre.

I remain more convinced by the traditional argument of it

being Khafre or the more recent theory of it being Khufu."

 

Recent Restorations of the Great Sphinx

 

In 1931, engineers of the Egyptian government repaired the head of the Sphinx. Part of its headdress had fallen off in 1926 due to erosion, which had also cut deeply into its neck. This questionable repair was by the addition of a concrete collar between the headdress and the neck, creating an altered profile.

 

Many renovations to the stone base and raw rock body were done in the 1980's, and then redone in the 1990's.

 

Natural and Deliberate Damage to the Great Sphinx

 

The limestone of the area consists of layers which offer differing resistance to erosion (mostly caused by wind and windblown sand), leading to the uneven degradation apparent in the Sphinx's body.

 

The lowest part of the body, including the legs, is solid rock. The body of the animal up to its neck is fashioned from softer layers that have suffered considerable disintegration. The layer from which the head was sculpted is much harder.

 

A number of "dead-end" shafts are known to exist within and below the body of the Great Sphinx, most likely dug by treasure hunters and tomb robbers.

 

The Great Sphinx's Missing Nose

 

Examination of the Sphinx's face shows that long rods or chisels were hammered into the nose area, one down from the bridge and another beneath the nostril, then used to pry the nose off towards the south, resulting in the one-metre wide nose still being lost to date.

 

Drawings of the Sphinx by Frederic Louis Norden in 1737 show the nose missing. Many folk tales exist regarding the destruction of its nose, aiming to provide an answer as to where it went or what happened to it.

 

One tale erroneously attributes it to cannonballs fired by the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. Other tales ascribe it to being the work of Mamluks. Since the 10th. century, some Arab authors have claimed it to be a result of iconoclastic attacks.

 

The Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the 15th. century, attributes the loss of the nose to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim who in 1378 found the local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest; he therefore defaced the Sphinx in an act of iconoclasm.

 

According to al-Maqrīzī, many people living in the area believed that the increased sand covering the Giza Plateau was retribution for al-Dahr's act of defacement.

 

Al-Minufi stated that the Alexandrian Crusade in 1365 was divine punishment for a Sufi sheikh breaking off the nose.

 

The Great Sphinx's Beard

 

In addition to the lost nose, a ceremonial pharaonic beard is thought to have been attached, although this may have been added in later periods after the original construction.

 

Egyptologist Vassil Dobrev has suggested that had the beard been an original part of the Sphinx, it would have damaged the chin of the statue upon falling. However the lack of visible damage supports his theory that the beard was a later addition.

 

The British Museum has limestone fragments which are thought to be from the Sphinx's beard.

 

Residues of red pigment are visible on areas of the Sphinx's face, and traces of yellow and blue pigment have also been found elsewhere on the Sphinx, leading Mark Lehner to suggest that:

 

"The monument was once decked

out in gaudy comic book colours".

 

However, as with the case of many ancient monuments, the pigments and colours have virtually disappeared, resulting in the yellow/beige appearance that the Sphinx has today.

 

Holes and Tunnels in the Great Sphinx

 

-- The Hole in the Sphinx's Head

 

Johann Helffrich visited the Sphinx during his travels in 1565 - 1566. He reports that a priest went into the head of the Sphinx, and when he spoke it was as if the Sphinx itself was speaking.

 

Many New Kingdom stelae depict the Sphinx wearing a crown. If it in fact existed, the hole could have been the anchoring point for it.

 

Émile Baraize closed the hole with a metal hatch in 1926.

 

-- Perring's Hole

 

Howard Vyse directed Perring in 1837 to drill a tunnel into the back of the Sphinx, just behind the head. The boring rods became stuck at a depth of 27 feet (8.2 m).

 

Attempts to blast the rods free caused further damage. The hole was cleared in 1978, and among the rubble was a fragment of the Sphinx's nemes headdress.

 

-- The Major Fissure

 

A major natural fissure in the bedrock cuts through the waist of the Sphinx. This was first excavated by Auguste Mariette in 1853.

 

The fissure measures up to 2 metres (6.6 ft) in width. In 1926 Baraize sealed the sides and roofed it with iron bars, limestone and cement. He then installed an iron trap door at the top. The sides of the fissure might have been artificially squared; however, the bottom is irregular bedrock, about 1 metre (3.3 ft) above the outside floor. A very narrow crack continues deeper.

 

-- The Rump Passage

 

When the Sphinx was cleared of sand in 1926 under direction of Baraize, it revealed an opening to a tunnel at floor-level on the north side of the rump. It was subsequently closed by masonry and nearly forgotten.

 

More than fifty years later, the existence of the passage was recalled by three elderly men who had worked during the sand clearing as basket carriers. This led to the rediscovery and excavation of the rump passage in 1980.

 

The passage consists of an upper and a lower section, which are angled roughly 90 degrees to each other. The upper part ascends to a height of 4 metres (13 ft) above the ground-floor at a northwest direction. It runs between masonry veneer and the core body of the Sphinx, and ends in a niche 1 metre (3.3 ft) wide and 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) high.

 

The ceiling of the niche consists of modern cement, which likely spilled down from the filling of the gap between masonry and core bedrock, some 3 metres (9.8 ft) above.

 

The lower part descends steeply into the bedrock towards the northeast, for a distance of approximately 4 metres (13 ft) and a depth of 5 metres (16 ft). It terminates in a pit at groundwater level.

 

At the entrance it is 1.3 metres (4.3 ft) wide, narrowing to about 1.07 metres (3.5 ft) towards the end. Among the sand and stone fragments, a piece of tin foil and the base of a modern ceramic water jar was found.

 

The clogged bottom of the pit contained modern fill. Among it, more tin foil, modern cement and a pair of shoes.

 

It is possible that the entire passage was cut top down, beginning high up on the rump, and that the current access point at floor-level was made at a later date.

 

Vyse noted in his diary in 1837 that he was "boring" near the tail, which indicates him as the creator of the passage, as no other tunnel has been identified at this location. Another interpretation is that the shaft is of ancient origin, perhaps an exploratory tunnel or an unfinished tomb shaft.

 

-- The Niche in the Northern Flank

 

There is a niche in the Sphinx's core body. It was closed during the 1925-6 restorations.

 

-- The Space Behind the Dream Stele

 

The space behind the Dream Stele, between the paws of the Sphinx, was covered by an iron beam and cement roof and then fitted with an iron trap door.

 

-- The Keyhole Shaft

 

At the ledge of the Sphinx enclosure there is a square shaft opposite the northern hind paw. It was cleared during excavation in 1978 and measures 1.42 by 1.06 metres (4.7 by 3.5 ft) and about 2 metres (6.6 ft) deep.

 

Lehner interpreted the shaft to be an unfinished tomb, and named it the "Keyhole Shaft", because a cutting in the ledge above the shaft is shaped like the lower part of a keyhole, upside down.

 

The Great Pyramid of Giza

 

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid, and the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu. Built in the 26th. century BC during a period of around 27 years, it is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact.

 

Initially standing at 146.6 metres (481 feet), the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years. Over time, most of the smooth white limestone casing was removed, which lowered the pyramid's height to the present 138.5 metres (454.4 ft).

 

What is seen today is the underlying core structure. The base was measured to be 230.3 metres (755.6 ft) square, giving a volume of roughly 2.6 million cubic metres (92 million cubic feet).

 

The Great Pyramid was built by quarrying an estimated 2.3 million large blocks weighing 6 million tonnes in total. The majority of stones are not uniform in size or shape, and are only roughly dressed.

 

The outside layers were bound together by mortar. Primarily local limestone from the Giza Plateau was used. Other blocks were imported by boat down the Nile: white limestone from Tura for the casing, and granite blocks from Aswan, weighing up to 80 tonnes, for the King's Chamber.

 

There are three known chambers inside the Great Pyramid. The lowest was cut into the bedrock, but it remained unfinished. The Queen's Chamber and the King's Chamber, that contains a granite sarcophagus, are higher up, within the pyramid structure.

 

Khufu's vizier, Hemiunu, is believed to be the architect of the Great Pyramid. Many varying scientific and alternative hypotheses attempt to explain the exact construction techniques.

 

Attribution to Khufu

 

Historically the Great Pyramid has been attributed to Khufu based on the words of authors of classical antiquity, first and foremost Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.

 

However, during the middle ages a number of other people were credited with the construction of the pyramid, for example Joseph, Nimrod or King Saurid.

 

In 1837 four additional Relieving Chambers were found above the King's Chamber after tunneling to them. The chambers, previously inaccessible, were covered in hieroglyphs of red paint.

 

The workers who were building the pyramid had marked the blocks with the names of their gangs, which included the pharaoh's name (e.g.: “The gang, The white crown of Khnum-Khufu is powerful”).

 

The names of Khufu were spelled out on the walls over a dozen times. Another of these graffiti was found by Goyon on an exterior block of the 4th layer of the pyramid.

 

Throughout the 20th. century the cemeteries next to the pyramid were excavated. Family members and high officials of Khufu were buried there. Most notably the wives, children and grandchildren of Khufu, along with the funerary cache of Hetepheres I, mother of Khufu.

 

As Hassan puts it:

 

"From the early dynastic times, it was always the

custom for the relatives, friends and courtiers to

be buried in the vicinity of the king they had served

during life. This was quite in accordance with the

Egyptian idea of the Hereafter."

 

The cemeteries were actively expanded until the 6th. dynasty, but used less frequently afterwards. The earliest pharaonic name of seal impressions is that of Khufu, the latest of Pepi II.

 

Worker graffiti was written on some of the stones of the tombs as well; for instance, "Mddw" (Horus name of Khufu) on the mastaba of Chufunacht, probably a grandson of Khufu.

 

In 1954 two boat pits, one containing the Khufu ship, were discovered buried at the south foot of the pyramid. The cartouche of Djedefre was found on many of the blocks that covered the boat pits. As the successor and eldest son he would have presumably been responsible for the burial of Khufu.

 

The second boat pit was examined in 1987; excavation work started in 2010. Graffiti on the stones included 4 instances of the name "Khufu", 11 instances of "Djedefre", a year (in reign, season, month and day), measurements of the stone, various signs and marks, and a reference line used in construction, all done in red or black ink.

 

During excavations in 2013 the Diary of Merer in the form of rolls of papyrus was found at Wadi al-Jarf. It documents the transportation of white limestone blocks from Tura to the Great Pyramid, which is mentioned by its original name Akhet Khufu dozens of times.

 

The diary records that the stones were accepted at She Akhet-Khufu ("The pool of the pyramid Horizon of Khufu") and Ro-She Khufu (“The entrance to the pool of Khufu”) which were under supervision of Ankhhaf, half brother and vizier of Khufu, as well as owner of the largest mastaba of the Giza East Field.

 

The Age of the Great Pyramid

 

The age of the Great Pyramid has been determined by two principal approaches:

 

-- Indirectly, through its attribution to Khufu and his chronological age, based on archaeological and textual evidence.

 

-- Directly, via radiocarbon dating of organic material found in the pyramid and included in its mortar. Mortar was used generously in the Great Pyramid's construction. In the mixing process, ashes from fires were added to the mortar, organic material that could be extracted and radiocarbon dated.

 

A total of 46 samples of the mortar were taken in 1984 and 1995, making sure they were clearly inherent to the original structure and could not have been incorporated at a later date.

 

The results were calibrated to 2871–2604 BC. A reanalysis of the data gave a completion date for the pyramid between 2620 and 2484 BC.

 

In 1872 Waynman Dixon opened the lower pair of air-shafts that were previously closed at both ends by chiseling holes into the walls of the Queen's Chamber.

 

One of the objects found within was a cedar plank, which came into possession of James Grant, a friend of Dixon. After inheritance it was donated to the Museum of Aberdeen in 1946. However it had broken into pieces, and was filed incorrectly.

 

Lost in the vast museum collection, it was only rediscovered in 2020, when it was radiocarbon dated to 3341–3094 BC. Being over 500 years older than Khufu's chronological age, Abeer Eladany suggests that the wood originated from the center of a long-lived tree, or had been recycled for many years prior to being deposited in the pyramid.

 

Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza

 

-- Preparation of the Site

 

A hillock forms the base on which the pyramid stands. It was cut back into steps, and only a strip around the perimeter was leveled. Using modern equipment, this has been measured to be horizontal and flat to within 21 millimetres (0.8 in).

 

The bedrock reaches a height of almost 6 metres (20 ft) above the pyramid base at the location of the Grotto.

 

Along the sides of the base platform a series of holes are cut in the bedrock. Lehner hypothesizes that they held wooden posts used for alignment.

 

Edwards, among others, has suggested that water was used in order to level the base, although it is unclear how workable such a system would be.

 

-- Materials

 

The Great Pyramid consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks. Approximately 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite, and 500,000 tonnes of mortar were used in the construction.

 

Most of the blocks were quarried at Giza just south of the pyramid, an area now known as the Central Field.

 

The white limestone used for the casing originated from Tura 10 km (6.2 mi) south of Giza), and was transported by boat down the Nile.

 

The granite stones in the pyramid were transported from Aswan, more than 900 km (560 mi) away. The largest, weighing up to 80 tonnes, forms the roofs of the King's Chamber.

 

Ancient Egyptians cut stone into rough blocks by hammering grooves into natural stone faces, inserting wooden wedges, then soaking these with water. As the water was absorbed, the wedges expanded, breaking off workable chunks. Once the blocks were cut, they were carried by boat either up or down the Nile River to the pyramid.

 

-- The Workforce

 

The Greeks believed that slave labour was used, but modern discoveries made at nearby workers' camps associated with construction at Giza suggest that it was built instead by thousands of conscript laborers.

 

Worker graffiti found at Giza suggest haulers were divided into groups of 40 men, consisting of four sub-units that each had an "Overseer of Ten".

 

As to the question of how over two million blocks could have been cut within Khufu's lifetime, stonemason Franck Burgos conducted an archaeological experiment based on an abandoned quarry of Khufu discovered in 2017.

 

Within it, an almost completed block and the tools used for cutting it had been uncovered: hardened arsenic copper chisels, wooden mallets, ropes and stone tools. In the experiment, replicas of these were used to cut a block weighing about 2.5 tonnes (the average block size used for the Great Pyramid).

 

It took 4 workers 4 days (with each working 6 hours a day) to excavate it. The initially slow progress sped up six times when the stone was wetted with water.

 

Based on the data, Burgos extrapolates that about 3,500 quarry-men could have produced the 250 blocks per day needed to complete the Great Pyramid within 27 years.

 

A construction management study conducted in 1999, in association with Mark Lehner and other Egyptologists, has estimated that the total project required an average workforce of about 13,200 individuals, with a peak workforce of roughly 40,000.

 

Surveys and Design of the Great Pyramid

 

The first precise measurements of the pyramid were made by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1880–1882, published as The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh.

 

Many of the casing-stones and inner chamber blocks of the Great Pyramid fit together with high precision, with joints, on average, only 0.5 millimetres (0.020 in) wide. On the contrary, core blocks were only roughly shaped, with rubble inserted between larger gaps. Mortar was used to bind the outer layers together and to fill gaps and joints.

 

The block height and weight tends to get progressively smaller towards the top. Petrie measured the lowest layer to be 148 centimetres (4.86 ft) high, whereas the layers towards the summit barely exceed 50 centimetres (1.6 ft).

 

The accuracy of the pyramid's perimeter is such that the four sides of the base have an average error of only 58 millimetres (2.3 inches) in length, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc.

 

Ancient Egyptians used seked - how much length for one cubit of rise - to describe slopes. For the Great Pyramid a seked of 5+ palms was chosen, a ratio of 14 up to 11 in.

 

Some Egyptologists suggest this slope was chosen because the ratio of perimeter to height (1760/280 cubits) equals 2π to an accuracy of better than 0.05 percent (corresponding to the well-known approximation of π as 22/7).

 

Verner wrote:

 

"We can conclude that although the ancient

Egyptians could not precisely define the value

of π, in practice they used it.

"These relations of areas and of circular ratio

are so systematic that we should grant that

they were in the builder's design".

 

Alignment to the Cardinal Directions

 

The sides of the Great Pyramid's base are closely aligned to the four geographic (not magnetic) cardinal directions, deviating on average 3 minutes and 38 seconds of arc. Several methods have been proposed for how the ancient Egyptians achieved this level of accuracy:

 

-- The Solar Gnomon Method: the shadow of a vertical rod is tracked throughout a day. The shadow line is intersected by a circle drawn around the base of the rod. Connecting the intersecting points produces an east-west line.

 

An experiment using this method resulted in lines being, on average, 2 minutes, 9 seconds off due east–west. Employing a pinhole produced much more accurate results (19 arc seconds off), whereas using an angled block as a shadow definer was less accurate (3′ 47″ off).

 

-- The Pole Star Method: the polar star is tracked using a movable sight and fixed plumb line. Halfway between the maximum eastern and western elongations is true north.

 

Thuban, the polar star during the Old Kingdom, was about two degrees removed from the celestial pole at the time.

 

-- The Simultaneous Transit Method: the stars Mizar and Kochab appear on a vertical line on the horizon, close to true north around 2500 BC. They slowly and simultaneously shift east over time, which is used to explain the relative misalignment of the pyramids.

 

Construction Theories

 

Many alternative, often contradictory, theories have been proposed regarding the pyramid's construction. One mystery of the pyramid's construction is its planning. John Romer suggests that they used the same method that had been used for earlier and later constructions, i.e. laying out parts of the plan on the ground at a 1-to-1 scale.

 

He writes that:

 

"Such a working diagram would also serve to

generate the architecture of the pyramid with

precision unmatched by any other means".

 

The basalt blocks of the pyramid temple show clear evidence of having been cut with some kind of saw with an estimated cutting blade of 15 feet (4.6 m) in length. Romer suggests that this "super saw" may have had copper teeth and weighed up to 140 kilograms (310 lb).

 

He theorizes that such a saw could have been attached to a wooden trestle support, and possibly used in conjunction with vegetable oil, cutting sand, emery or pounded quartz to cut the blocks, which would have required the labour of at least a dozen men to operate it.

 

The Exterior Casing

 

At completion, the Great Pyramid was cased entirely in white limestone. There is a casing stone from the Great Pyramid in the British Museum.

 

Precisely worked blocks were placed in horizontal layers and carefully fitted together with mortar, their outward faces cut at a slope and smoothed to a high degree. Together they created four uniform surfaces, angled at 51°50'40.

 

Unfinished casing blocks of the pyramids of Menkaure and Henutsen at Giza suggest that the front faces were smoothed only after the stones were laid, with chiseled seams marking correct positioning, and where the superfluous rock would have to be trimmed off.

 

An irregular pattern is noticeable when looking at the pyramid's layers in sequence, where layer height declines steadily only to rise sharply again.

 

"Backing stones" supported the casing which were (unlike the core blocks) precisely dressed, and bound to the casing with mortar. These stones give the structure its visible appearance, following the dismantling of the pyramid in the middle ages.

 

In 1303 AD, a massive earthquake loosened many of the outer casing stones, which were said to have been carted away by Bahri Sultan An-Nasir Nasir-ad-Din al-Hasan in 1356 for use in nearby Cairo.

 

Many more casing stones were removed from the site by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the early 19th. century to build the upper portion of his Alabaster Mosque in Cairo.

 

Later explorers reported massive piles of rubble at the base of the pyramid left over from the continuing collapse of the casing stones, which were subsequently cleared away during continuing excavations of the site.

 

Today a few of the casing stones from the lowest course can be seen in situ on each side, with the best preserved on the north below the entrances, excavated by Vyse in 1837.

 

The mortar was chemically analyzed and contains organic inclusions (mostly charcoal), samples of which were radiocarbon dated to 2871–2604 BC. It has been theorized that the mortar enabled the masons to set the stones exactly by providing a level bed.

 

The Missing Pyramidion

 

The pyramid was once topped by a capstone known as a pyramidion. The material it was made from is subject to much speculation; limestone, granite or basalt are commonly proposed, while in popular culture it is often said to be solid gold or gilded.

 

All known 4th. dynasty pyramidia (of the Red Pyramid, the Satellite Pyramid of Khufu and the Queen's Pyramid of Menkaure are of white limestone, and were not gilded.

 

Only from the 5th. dynasty onward is there evidence of gilded capstones.

 

The Great Pyramid's pyramidion was already lost in antiquity, as Pliny the Elder and later authors report of a platform on its summit. Nowadays the pyramid is about 8 metres (26 ft) shorter than it was when intact, with about 1,000 tonnes of material missing from the top.

 

In 1874 a mast was installed on the top of the pyramid by the Scottish astronomer Sir David Gill who, whilst returning from work involving observing a rare Venus transit, was invited to survey Egypt. He began by surveying the Great Pyramid.

 

His measurements of the pyramid were accurate to within 1mm, and the survey mast is still in place to this day.

 

Interior of the Great Pyramid

 

The internal structure consists of three main chambers (the King's-, Queen's- and Subterranean Chamber), the Grand Gallery and various corridors and shafts.

 

There are two entrances into the pyramid; the original and a forced passage, which meet at a junction. From there, one passage descends into the Subterranean Chamber, while the other ascends to the Grand Gallery. From the beginning of the gallery three paths can be taken:

 

(a) A vertical shaft that leads down, past a grotto, to meet the descending passage.

 

(b) A horizontal corridor leading to the Queen's Chamber.

 

(c) A path up the gallery itself to the King's Chamber that contains the sarcophagus.

 

Both the King's and Queen's Chamber have a pair of small "air-shafts". Above the King's Chamber are a series of five Relieving Chambers.

 

--The Original Entrance

 

The original entrance is located on the north side, 15 royal cubits (7.9 m; 25.8 ft) east of the center-line of the pyramid. Before the removal of the casing in the middle ages, the pyramid was entered through a hole in the 19th. layer of masonry, approximately 17 metres (56 ft) above the pyramid's base level.

 

The height of that layer – 96 centimetres (3.15 ft) – corresponds to the size of the entrance tunnel which is commonly called the Descending Passage. According to Strabo (64–24 BC) a movable stone could be raised to enter this sloping corridor, however it is not known if it was a later addition or original.

 

A row of double chevrons diverts weight away from the entrance. Several of these chevron blocks are now missing, as the slanted faces they used to rest on indicate.

 

Numerous, mostly modern, graffiti is cut into the stones around the entrance. Most notable is a large, square text of hieroglyphs carved in honor of Frederick William IV, by Karl Richard Lepsius's Prussian expedition to Egypt in 1842.

 

-- The North Face Corridor

 

In 2016 the ScanPyramids team detected a cavity behind the entrance chevrons using muography, which was confirmed in 2019 to be a corridor at least 5 metres (16 ft) long, running horizontal or sloping upwards. Whether or not it connects to the Big Void above the Grand Gallery remains to be seen.

 

-- The Robbers' Tunnel

 

Today tourists enter the Great Pyramid via the Robbers' Tunnel, which was long ago cut straight through the masonry of the pyramid. The entrance was forced into the 6th. and 7th. layer of the casing, about 7 metres (23 ft) above the base.

 

After running more-or-less straight and horizontal for 27 metres (89 ft) it turns sharply left to encounter the blocking stones in the Ascending Passage. It is possible to enter the Descending Passage from this point, but access is usually forbidden.

 

The origin of this Robbers' Tunnel is the subject of much discussion. According to tradition, the tunnel was excavated around 820 AD by Caliph al-Ma'mun's workmen with a battering ram.

 

The digging dislodged the stone in the ceiling of the Descending Passage which hid the entrance to the Ascending Passage, and the noise of that stone falling then sliding down the Descending Passage alerted them to the need to turn left.

 

Unable to remove these stones, the workmen tunneled up beside them through the softer limestone of the Pyramid until they reached the Ascending Passage.

 

Due to a number of historical and archaeological discrepancies, many scholars contend that this story is apocryphal. They argue that it is much more likely that the tunnel had been carved shortly after the pyramid was initially sealed.

 

This tunnel, the scholars argue, was then resealed (likely during the Ramesside Restoration), and it was this plug that al-Ma'mun's ninth-century expedition cleared away. This theory is furthered by the report of patriarch Dionysius I Telmaharoyo, who claimed that before al-Ma'mun's expedition, there already existed a breach in the pyramid's north face that extended into the structure 33 metres (108 ft) before hitting a dead end.

 

This suggests that some sort of robber's tunnel predated al-Ma'mun, and that the caliph simply enlarged it and cleared it of debris.

 

-- The Descending Passage

 

From the original entrance, a passage descends through the masonry of the pyramid and then into the bedrock beneath it, ultimately leading to the Subterranean Chamber.

 

It has a slanted height of 4 Egyptian feet (1.20 m; 3.9 ft) and a width of 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft). Its angle of 26°26'46" corresponds to a ratio of 1 to 2 (rise over run).

 

After 28 metres (92 ft), the lower end of the Ascending Passage is reached; a square hole in the ceiling, which is blocked by granite stones and might have originally been concealed.

 

To circumvent these hard stones, a short tunnel was excavated that meets the end of the Robbers' Tunnel. This was expanded over time and fitted with stairs.

 

The passage continues to descend for another 72 metres (236 ft), now through bedrock instead of the pyramid superstructure.

 

Lazy guides used to block off this part with rubble in order to avoid having to lead people down and back up the long shaft, until around 1902 when Covington installed a padlocked iron grill-door to stop this practice.

 

Near the end of this section, on the west wall, is the connection to the vertical shaft that leads up to the Grand Gallery.

 

A horizontal shaft connects the end of the Descending Passage to the Subterranean Chamber, It has a length of 8.84 m (29.0 ft), width of 85 cm (2.79 ft) and height of 91–95 cm (2.99–3.12 ft).

 

-- The Subterranean Chamber

 

The Subterranean Chamber, or "Pit", is the lowest of the three main chambers, and the only one dug into the bedrock beneath the pyramid.

 

Located about 27 m (89 ft) below base level, it measures roughly 16 cubits (8.4 m; 27.5 ft) north-south by 27 cubits (14.1 m; 46.4 ft) east-west, with an approximate height of 4 m (13 ft).

 

The western half of the room, apart from the ceiling, is unfinished, with trenches left behind by the quarry-men running east to west. The only access, through the Descending Passage, lies on the eastern end of the north wall.

 

Although seemingly known in antiquity, according to Herodotus and later authors, its existence had been forgotten in the middle ages until rediscovery in 1817, when Giovanni Caviglia cleared the rubble blocking the Descending Passage.

 

Opposite the entrance, a blind corridor runs straight south for 11 m (36 ft) and continues at a slight angle for another 5.4 m (18 ft), measuring about 0.75 m (2.5 ft) squared. A Greek or Roman character was found on its ceiling, suggesting that the chamber had indeed been accessible during Classical antiquity.

 

In the middle of the eastern half, there is a large hole called Pit Shaft or Perring's Shaft. The upmost part may have ancient origins, about 2 m (6.6 ft) squared in width, and 1.5 m (4.9 ft) in depth. Caviglia and Salt enlarged it to the depth of about 3 m (9.8 ft).

 

In 1837 Vyse directed the shaft to be sunk to a depth of 50 ft (15 m), in hopes of discovering the chamber encompassed by water that Herodotus alludes to. However no chamber was discovered after Perring and his workers had spent one and a half years penetrating the bedrock to the then water level of the Nile, some 12 m (39 ft) further down.

 

The rubble produced during this operation was deposited throughout the chamber. Petrie, visiting in 1880, found the shaft to be partially filled with rainwater that had rushed down the Descending Passage. In 1909, when the Edgar brothers' surveying activities were encumbered by the material, they moved the sand and smaller stones back into the shaft. The deep, modern shaft is sometimes mistaken to be part of the original design.

 

-- The Ascending Passage

 

The Ascending Passage connects the Descending Passage to the Grand Gallery. It is 75 cubits (39.3 m; 128.9 ft) long, and of the same width and height as the shaft it originates from, although its angle is slightly lower at 26°6'.

 

The lower end of the shaft is plugged by three granite stones, which were slid down from the Grand Gallery to seal the tunnel. The uppermost stone is heavily damaged.

 

The end of the Robbers' Tunnel concludes slightly below the stones, so a short tunnel was dug around them to gain access to the Descending Passage.

 

-- The Well Shaft and Grotto

 

The Well Shaft (also known as the Service Shaft or Vertical Shaft) links the lower end of the Grand Gallery to the bottom of the Descending Passage, about 50 metres (160 ft) further down.

 

It takes a winding and indirect course. The upper half goes through the nucleus masonry of the pyramid. It runs vertical at first for 8 metres (26 ft), then slightly angled southwards for about the same distance, until it hits bedrock approximately 5.7 metres (19 ft) above the pyramid's base level.

 

Another vertical section descends further, which is partially lined with masonry that has been broken through to a cavity known as the Grotto. The lower half of the Well Shaft goes through the bedrock at an angle of about 45° for 26.5 metres (87 ft) before a steeper section, 9.5 metres (31 ft) long, leads to its lowest point. The final section of 2.6 metres (8.5 ft) connects it to the Descending Passage, running almost horizontal. The builders evidently had trouble aligning the lower exit.

 

The purpose of the shaft is commonly explained as a ventilation shaft for the Subterranean Chamber, and as an escape shaft for the workers who slid the blocking stones of the Ascending Passage into place.

 

The Grotto is a natural limestone cave that was likely filled with sand and gravel before construction, before being hollowed out by looters. A granite block rests in it that probably originated from the portcullis that once sealed the King's Chamber.

 

-- The Queen's Chamber

 

The Horizontal Passage links the Grand Gallery to the Queen's Chamber. Five pairs of holes at the start suggest the tunnel was once concealed with slabs that laid flush with the gallery floor. The passage is 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft) wide and 1.17 m (3.8 ft) high for most of its length, but near the chamber there is a step in the floor, after which the passage increases to 1.68 m (5.5 ft) high.

 

The Queen's Chamber is exactly halfway between the north and south faces of the pyramid. It measures 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south, 11 cubits (5.8 m; 18.9 ft) east-west,[146] and has a pointed roof that apexes at 12 cubits (6.3 m; 20.6 ft) tall.

 

At the eastern end of the chamber there is a niche 9 cubits (4.7 m; 15.5 ft) high. The original depth of the niche was 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft), but it has since been deepened by treasure hunters.

 

Shafts were discovered in the north and south walls of the Queen's Chamber in 1872 by British engineer Waynman Dixon, who believed shafts similar to those in the King's Chamber must also exist. The shafts were not connected to the outer faces of the pyramid, and their purpose is unknown.

 

In one shaft Dixon discovered a ball of diorite, a bronze hook of unknown purpose and a piece of cedar wood. The first two objects are currently in the British Museum. The latter was lost until recently when it was found at the University of Aberdeen.

 

The northern shaft's angle of ascent fluctuates, and at one point turns 45 degrees to avoid the Great Gallery. The southern shaft is perpendicular to the pyramid's slope.

 

The shafts in the Queen's Chamber were explored in 1993 by the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink using a crawler robot he designed, called Upuaut 2.

 

After a climb of 65 m (213 ft), he discovered that one of the shafts was blocked by a limestone "door" with two eroded copper "handles".

 

The National Geographic Society created a similar robot which, in September 2002, drilled a small hole in the southern door, only to find another stone slab behind it. The northern passage, which was difficult to navigate because of its twists and turns, was also found to be blocked by a slab.

 

Research continued in 2011 with the Djedi Project which used a fibre-optic "micro snake camera" that could see around corners. With this, they were able to penetrate the first door of the southern shaft through the hole drilled in 2002, and view all the sides of the small chamber behind it.

 

They discovered hieroglyphics written in red paint. Egyptian mathematics researcher Luca Miatello stated that the markings read "121" – the length of the shaft in cubits.

 

The Djedi team were also able to scrutinize the inside of the two copper "handles" embedded in the door, which they now believe to be for decorative purposes. They additionally found the reverse side of the "door" to be finished and polished, which suggests that it was not put there just to block the shaft from debris, but rather for a more specific reason.

 

-- The Grand Gallery

 

The Grand Gallery continues the slope of the Ascending Passage towards the King's Chamber, extending from the 23rd. to the 48th. course, a rise of 21 metres (69 ft). It has been praised as a truly spectacular example of stonemasonry.

 

It is 8.6 metres (28 ft) high and 46.68 metres (153.1 ft) long. The base is 4 cubits (2.1 m; 6.9 ft) wide, but after two courses - at a height of 2.29 metres (7.5 ft) - the blocks of stone in the walls are corbelled inwards by 6–10 centimetres (2.4–3.9 in) on each side.

 

There are seven of these steps, so, at the top, the Grand Gallery is only 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft) wide. It is roofed by slabs of stone laid at a slightly steeper angle than the floor so that each stone fits into a slot cut into the top of the gallery, like the teeth of a ratchet.

 

The purpose was to have each block supported by the wall of the Gallery, rather than resting on the block beneath it, in order to prevent cumulative pressure.

 

At the upper end of the Gallery, on the eastern wall, there is a hole near the roof that opens into a short tunnel by which access can be gained to the lowest of the Relieving Chambers.

 

At the top of the gallery, there is a step onto a small horizontal platform where a tunnel leads through the Antechamber, once blocked by portcullis stones, into the King's Chamber.

 

The Big Void

 

In 2017, scientists from the ScanPyramids project discovered a large cavity above the Grand Gallery using muon radiography, which they called the "ScanPyramids Big Void". Its length is at least 30 metres (98 ft) and its cross-section is similar to that of the Grand Gallery.

 

The purpose of the cavity is unknown, and it is not accessible. Zahi Hawass speculates that it may have been a gap used in the construction of the Grand Gallery, but the research team state that the void is completely different to previously identified construction spaces.

 

The Antechamber

 

The last line of defense against intrusion was a small chamber specially designed to house portcullis blocking stones, called the Antechamber. It is cased almost entirely in granite, and is situated between the upper end of the Grand Gallery and the King's Chamber.

 

Three slots for portcullis stones line the east and west wall of the chamber. Each of them is topped with a semi-circular groove for a log, around which ropes could be spanned.

 

The granite portcullis stones were approximately 1 cubit (52.4 cm; 20.6 in) thick and were lowered into position by the aforementioned ropes which were tied through a series of four holes at the top of the blocks. A corresponding set of four vertical grooves are on the south wall of the chamber, recesses that make space for the ropes.

 

The Antechamber has a design flaw: the space above them can be accessed, thus all but the last block can be circumvented. This was exploited by looters who punched a hole through the ceiling of the tunnel behind, gaining access to the King's Chamber.

 

Later on, all three portcullis stones were broken and removed. Fragments of these blocks can be found in various locations in the pyramid.

 

The King's Chamber

 

The King's Chamber is the uppermost of the three main chambers of the pyramid. It is faced entirely with granite, and measures 20 cubits (10.5 m; 34.4 ft) east-west by 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south.

 

Its flat ceiling is about 11 cubits and 5 digits (5.8 m;19.0 ft) above the floor, formed by nine slabs of stone weighing in total about 400 tons. All the roof beams show cracks due to the chamber having settled 2.5–5 cm (0.98–1.97 in).

 

The walls consist of five courses of blocks that are uninscribed, as was the norm for burial chambers of the 4th dynasty. The stones are precisely fitted together. The facing surfaces are dressed to varying degrees, with some displaying remains of bosses not entirely cut away.

 

The back sides of the blocks were only roughly hewn to shape, as was usual with Egyptian hard-stone facade blocks, presumably to save work.

 

The Sarcophagus

 

The only object in the King's Chamber is a sarcophagus made out of a single, hollowed-out granite block. When it was rediscovered in the early middle ages, it was found broken open and any contents had already been removed.

 

It is of the form common for early Egyptian sarcophagi; rectangular in shape with grooves to slide the now missing lid into place with three small holes for pegs to fixate it. The coffer was not perfectly smoothed, displaying various tool marks matching those of copper saws and tubular hand-drills.

 

The internal dimensions are roughly 198 cm (6.50 ft) by 68 cm (2.23 feet), the external 228 cm (7.48 ft) by 98 cm (3.22 ft), with a height of 105 cm (3.44 ft). The walls have a thickness of about 15 cm (0.49 ft). The sarcophagus is too large to fit around the corner between the Ascending and Descending Passages, which indicates that it must have been placed in the chamber before the roof was put in place.

 

Air Shafts

 

In the north and south walls of the King's Chamber are two narrow shafts, commonly known as "air shafts". They face each other, and are located approximately 0.91 m (3.0 ft) above the floor, with a width of 18 and 21 cm (7.1 and 8.3 in) and a height of 14 cm (5.5 in).

 

Both start out horizontally for the length of the granite blocks they go through before changing to an upwards direction. The southern shaft ascends at an angle of 45° with a slight curve westwards. One ceiling stone was found to be distinctly unfinished which Gantenbrink called a "Monday morning block".

 

The northern shaft changes angle several times, shifting the path to the west, perhaps to avoid the Big Void. The builders had trouble calculating the right angles, resulting in parts of the shaft being narrower. Nowadays they both lead to the exterior. If they originally penetrated the outer casing is unknown.

 

The purpose of these shafts is not clear: They were long believed by Egyptologists to be shafts for ventilation, but this idea has now been widely abandoned in favour of the shafts serving a ritualistic purpose associated with the ascension of the king's spirit to the heavens. Ironically, both shafts were fitted with ventilators in 1992 to reduce the humidity in the pyramid.

 

The idea that the shafts point towards stars has been largely dismissed as the northern shaft follows a dog-leg course through the masonry and the southern shaft has a bend of approximately 20 centimetres (7.9 in), indicating no intention to have them point to any celestial objects.

 

The Relieving Chambers

 

Above the roof of the King's Chamber are five compartments, named (from lowest upwards) "Davison's Chamber", "Wellington's Chamber", "Nelson's Chamber", "Lady Arbuthnot's Chamber", and "Campbell's Chamber".

 

They were presumably intended to safeguard the King's Chamber from the possibility of the roof collapsing under the weight of stone above, hence they are referred to as "Relieving Chambers".

 

The granite blocks that divide the chambers have flat bottom sides but roughly shaped top sides, giving all five chambers an irregular floor, but a flat ceiling, with the exception of the uppermost chamber which has a pointed limestone roof.

 

Nathaniel Davison is credited with the discovery of the lowest of these chambers in 1763, although a French merchant named Maynard informed him of its existence. It can be reached through an ancient passage that originates from the top of the south wall of the Grand Gallery.

 

The upper four chambers were discovered in 1837 by Howard Vyse after discovering a crack in the ceiling of the first chamber. This allowed the insertion of a long reed, which, with the employment of gunpowder and boring rods, forced a tunnel upwards through the masonry. As no access shafts existed for the upper four chambers they were completely inaccessible until this point.

 

Numerous graffiti of red ochre paint were found to cover the limestone walls of all four newly discovered chambers. Apart from leveling lines and indication marks for masons, multiple hieroglyphic inscriptions spell out the names of work-gangs.

 

Those names, which were also found in other Egyptian pyramids like that of Menkaure and Sahure, usually included the name of the pharaoh they were working for. The blocks must have received the inscriptions before the chambers became inaccessible during construction.

 

Their orientation, often side-ways or upside down, and their sometimes being partially covered by blocks, indicates that the stones were inscribed before being laid.

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

This grand panorama of the Southern Patagonia Icefield (center) was imaged by an Expedition 38 crew member on the International Space Station on one of the rare clear days in the southern Andes Mountains. With an area of 13,000 square kilometers, the icefield is the largest temperate ice sheet in the Southern Hemisphere.

 

Storms that swirl into the region from the southern Pacific Ocean (top) bring rain and snow (equivalent to a total of 2-11 meters of rainfall per year) resulting in the buildup of the ice sheet shown here (center). During the ice ages the glaciers were far larger. Geologists now know that ice tongues extended far onto the plains in the foreground, completely filling the great Patagonian lakes on repeated occasions.

 

Similarly, ice tongues extended into the dense network of fjords (arms of the sea) on the Pacific side of the icefield. Ice tongues today appear tiny compared to the view that an "ice age" astronaut would have seen. A study of the surface topography of sixty-three glaciers, based on Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data, compared data from 2000 to data from studies going back about 30 years (1968-1975). Many glacier tongues showed significant annual "retreat" of their ice fronts, a familiar signal of climate change. The study also revealed that the almost invisible loss by glacier thinning is far more significant in explaining ice loss.

 

The researchers concluded that volume loss by frontal collapse is 4-10 times smaller than that caused by thinning. Scaled over the entire icefield, including frontal loss (so-called calving when ice masses collapse into the lakes), it was calculated that 13.5 cubic kilometers of ice was lost each year over the study period. This number becomes more meaningful compared with the rate measured in the last five years of the study (1995-2000), when the rate increased almost threefold, averaging 38.7 cubic kilometers per year.

 

Extrapolating results from the low altitude glacier tongues implies that the high plateau ice on the spine of the Andes is thinning as well. In the decade since this study the often-imaged Upsala Glacier has retreated a further three kilometers, as shown recently in images taken by crew members aboard the space station. Glacier Pio X, named for Pope Pius X, is the only large glacier that is growing in length.

 

About Crew Earth Observations:

 

In Crew Earth Observations (CEO), crewmembers on the International Space Station (ISS) photograph the Earth from their unique point of view located 200 miles above the surface. Photographs record how the planet is changing over time, from human-caused changes like urban growth and reservoir construction, to natural dynamic events such as hurricanes, floods and volcanic eruptions. A major emphasis of CEO is to monitor disaster response events in support of the International Disaster Charter (IDC). CEO imagery provides researchers on Earth with key data to understand the planet from the perspective of the ISS. Crewmembers have been photographing Earth from space since the early Mercury missions beginning in 1961. The continuous images taken from the ISS ensure this record remains unbroken.

 

Image credit: NASA

 

Original image:

www.nasa.gov/content/southern-patagonia-icefield/

 

More about space station research:

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/index.html

 

View more photos like this in the "NASA Earth Images" Flickr photoset:

www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N05

 

________________________________

These official NASA photographs are being made available for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photographs. The photographs may not be used in materials, advertisements, products, or promotions that in any way suggest approval or endorsement by NASA. All Images used must be credited. For information on usage rights please visit: www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/features/MP_Photo_Guidelin...

1. The Mind-Body Problem and the History of Dualism

1.1 The Mind-Body Problem

The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?

Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self. Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by anyone. Some physical properties – like those of an electron – are not directly observable at all, but they are equally available to all, to the same degree, with scientific equipment and techniques. The same is not true of mental properties. I may be able to tell that you are in pain by your behaviour, but only you can feel it directly. Similarly, you just know how something looks to you, and I can only surmise. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them of a kind no-one has to the physical. The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem breaks down into a number of components. The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?

The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?

Different aspects of the mind-body problem arise for different aspects of the mental, such as consciousness, intentionality, the self. The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How is it related to the brain and the body? The problem of the self: what is the self? How is it related to the brain and the body? Other aspects of the mind-body problem arise for aspects of the physical. For example:

 

The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?

The seemingly intractable nature of these problems have given rise to many different philosophical views.

 

Materialist views say that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just physical states. Behaviourism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and the computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists attempt to explain how this can be so. The most common factor in such theories is the attempt to explicate the nature of mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behaviour, but there are versions of materialism that try to tie the mental to the physical without explicitly explaining the mental in terms of its behaviour-modifying role. The latter are often grouped together under the label ‘non-reductive physicalism’, though this label is itself rendered elusive because of the controversial nature of the term ‘reduction’.

 

Idealist views say that physical states are really mental. This is because the physical world is an empirical world and, as such, it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.

 

Dualist views (the subject of this entry) say that the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other. For the various forms that dualism can take and the associated problems, see below.

 

In sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body.

 

Other entries which concern aspects of the mind-body problem include (among many others): behaviorism, consciousness, eliminative materialism, epiphenomenalism, functionalism, identity theory, intentionality, mental causation, neutral monism, and physicalism.

 

1.2 History of dualism

In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.

 

The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts’. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato’s dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics.

 

One problem with Plato’s dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.

 

Aristotle did not believe in Platonic Forms, existing independently of their instances. Aristotelian forms (the capital ‘F’ has disappeared with their standing as autonomous entities) are the natures and properties of things and exist embodied in those things. This enabled Aristotle to explain the union of body and soul by saying that the soul is the form of the body. This means that a particular person’s soul is no more than his nature as a human being. Because this seems to make the soul into a property of the body, it led many interpreters, both ancient and modern, to interpret his theory as materialistic. The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind – and, indeed, of his whole doctrine of form – remains as live an issue today as it was immediately after his death (Robinson 1983 and 1991; Nussbaum 1984; Rorty and Nussbaum, eds, 1992). Nevertheless, the text makes it clear that Aristotle believed that the intellect, though part of the soul, differs from other faculties in not having a bodily organ. His argument for this constitutes a more tightly argued case than Plato’s for the immateriality of thought and, hence, for a kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because if it were material it could not receive all forms. Just as the eye, because of its particular physical nature, is sensitive to light but not to sound, and the ear to sound and not to light, so, if the intellect were in a physical organ it could be sensitive only to a restricted range of physical things; but this is not the case, for we can think about any kind of material object (De Anima III,4; 429a10–b9). As it does not have a material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.

 

It is common for modern Aristotelians, who otherwise have a high view of Aristotle’s relevance to modern philosophy, to treat this argument as being of purely historical interest, and not essential to Aristotle’s system as a whole. They emphasize that he was not a ‘Cartesian’ dualist, because the intellect is an aspect of the soul and the soul is the form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny (1989) argues that Aristotle’s theory of mind as form gives him an account similar to Ryle (1949), for it makes the soul equivalent to the dispositions possessed by a living body. This ‘anti-Cartesian’ approach to Aristotle arguably ignores the fact that, for Aristotle, the form is the substance.

 

These issues might seem to be of purely historical interest. But we shall see in below, in section 4.5, that this is not so.

 

The identification of form and substance is a feature of Aristotle’s system that Aquinas effectively exploits in this context, identifying soul, intellect and form, and treating them as a substance. (See, for example, Aquinas (1912), Part I, questions 75 and 76.) But though the form (and, hence, the intellect with which it is identical) are the substance of the human person, they are not the person itself. Aquinas says that when one addresses prayers to a saint – other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to retain her body in heaven and is, therefore, always a complete person – one should say, not, for example, ‘Saint Peter pray for us’, but ‘soul of Saint Peter pray for us’. The soul, though an immaterial substance, is the person only when united with its body. Without the body, those aspects of its personal memory that depend on images (which are held to be corporeal) will be lost.(See Aquinas (1912), Part I, question 89.)

 

The more modern versions of dualism have their origin in Descartes’ Meditations, and in the debate that was consequent upon Descartes’ theory. Descartes was a substance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks. Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body was quite different from that held in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, there is no exact science of matter. How matter behaves is essentially affected by the form that is in it. You cannot combine just any matter with any form – you cannot make a knife out of butter, nor a human being out of paper – so the nature of the matter is a necessary condition for the nature of the substance. But the nature of the substance does not follow from the nature of its matter alone: there is no ‘bottom up’ account of substances. Matter is a determinable made determinate by form. This was how Aristotle thought that he was able to explain the connection of soul to body: a particular soul exists as the organizing principle in a particular parcel of matter.

 

The belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one reason for Aristotle’s rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it is already a collection of determinate objects in its own right, and it becomes natural to regard the properties of macroscopic substances as mere summations of the natures of the atoms.

 

Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except where there are minds interfering with it, matter proceeds deterministically, in its own right. Where there are minds requiring to influence bodies, they must work by ‘pulling levers’ in a piece of machinery that already has its own laws of operation. This raises the question of where those ‘levers’ are in the body. Descartes opted for the pineal gland, mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain, so it is a candidate for having a unique, unifying function.

 

The main uncertainty that faced Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not where interaction took place, but how two things so different as thought and extension could interact at all. This would be particularly mysterious if one had an impact view of causal interaction, as would anyone influenced by atomism, for whom the paradigm of causation is like two billiard balls cannoning off one another.

 

Various of Descartes’ disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, concluded that all mind-body interactions required the direct intervention of God. The appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. Now it would be convenient to think that occasionalists held that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body. In fact they generalized their conclusion and treated all causation as directly dependent on God. Why this was so, we cannot discuss here.

 

Descartes’ conception of a dualism of substances came under attack from the more radical empiricists, who found it difficult to attach sense to the concept of substance at all. Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness as objects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims, and proclaimed the self to be nothing more than a concatenation of its ephemeral contents.

 

In fact, Hume criticised the whole conception of substance for lacking in empirical content: when you search for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find nothing but further properties. Consequently, the mind is, he claimed, nothing but a ‘bundle’ or ‘heap’ of impressions and ideas – that is, of particular mental states or events, without an owner. This position has been labelled bundle dualism, and it is a special case of a general bundle theory of substance, according to which objects in general are just organised collections of properties. The problem for the Humean is to explain what binds the elements in the bundle together. This is an issue for any kind of substance, but for material bodies the solution seems fairly straightforward: the unity of a physical bundle is constituted by some form of causal interaction between the elements in the bundle. For the mind, mere causal connection is not enough; some further relation of co-consciousness is required. We shall see in 5.2.1 that it is problematic whether one can treat such a relation as more primitive than the notion of belonging to a subject.

 

One should note the following about Hume’s theory. His bundle theory is a theory about the nature of the unity of the mind. As a theory about this unity, it is not necessarily dualist. Parfit (1970, 1984) and Shoemaker (1984, ch. 2), for example, accept it as physicalists. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they wish to ascribe the unity to the brain or the organism as a whole. Before the bundle theory can be dualist one must accept property dualism, for more about which, see the next section.

 

A crisis in the history of dualism came, however, with the growing popularity of mechanism in science in the nineteenth century. According to the mechanist, the world is, as it would now be expressed, ‘closed under physics’. This means that everything that happens follows from and is in accord with the laws of physics. There is, therefore, no scope for interference in the physical world by the mind in the way that interactionism seems to require. According to the mechanist, the conscious mind is an epiphenomenon (a notion given general currency by T. H. Huxley 1893): that is, it is a by-product of the physical system which has no influence back on it. In this way, the facts of consciousness are acknowledged but the integrity of physical science is preserved. However, many philosophers found it implausible to claim such things as the following; the pain that I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see the ferocious lion bearing down on me or the conscious sense of understanding I have when I hear your argument – all have nothing directly to do with the way I respond. It is very largely due to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness that we owe the concern of twentieth century philosophy to devise a plausible form of materialist monism. But, although dualism has been out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviourism (Watson 1913) and in philosophy since Ryle (1949), the argument is by no means over. Some distinguished neurologists, such as Sherrington (1940) and Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977) have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can preserve the data of consciousness. Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century. At least some of the reasons for this should become clear below.

 

2. Varieties of Dualism: Ontology

There are various ways of dividing up kinds of dualism. One natural way is in terms of what sorts of things one chooses to be dualistic about. The most common categories lighted upon for these purposes are substance and property, giving one substance dualism and property dualism. There is, however, an important third category, namely predicate dualism. As this last is the weakest theory, in the sense that it claims least, I shall begin by characterizing it.

 

2.1 Predicate dualism

Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d’etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances. Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)

 

2.2 Property Dualism

Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane. One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism. In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon.

 

2.3 Substance Dualism

There are two important concepts deployed in this notion. One is that of substance, the other is the dualism of these substances. A substance is characterized by its properties, but, according to those who believe in substances, it is more than the collection of the properties it possesses, it is the thing which possesses them. So the mind is not just a collection of thoughts, but is that which thinks, an immaterial substance over and above its immaterial states. Properties are the properties of objects. If one is a property dualist, one may wonder what kinds of objects possess the irreducible or immaterial properties in which one believes. One can use a neutral expression and attribute them to persons, but, until one has an account of person, this is not explanatory. One might attribute them to human beings qua animals, or to the brains of these animals. Then one will be holding that these immaterial properties are possessed by what is otherwise a purely material thing. But one may also think that not only mental states are immaterial, but that the subject that possesses them must also be immaterial. Then one will be a dualist about that to which mental states and properties belong as well about the properties themselves. Now one might try to think of these subjects as just bundles of the immaterial states. This is Hume’s view. But if one thinks that the owner of these states is something quite over and above the states themselves, and is immaterial, as they are, one will be a substance dualist.

 

Substance dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian dualism’, but some substance dualists are keen to distinguish their theories from Descartes’s. E. J. Lowe, for example, is a substance dualist, in the following sense. He holds that a normal human being involves two substances, one a body and the other a person. The latter is not, however, a purely mental substance that can be defined in terms of thought or consciousness alone, as Descartes claimed. But persons and their bodies have different identity conditions and are both substances, so there are two substances essentially involved in a human being, hence this is a form of substance dualism. Lowe (2006) claims that his theory is close to P. F. Strawson’s (1959), whilst admitting that Strawson would not have called it substance dualism.

 

3. Varieties of Dualism: Interaction

If mind and body are different realms, in the way required by either property or substance dualism, then there arises the question of how they are related. Common sense tells us that they interact: thoughts and feelings are at least sometimes caused by bodily events and at least sometimes themselves give rise to bodily responses. I shall now consider briefly the problems for interactionism, and its main rivals, epiphenomenalism and parallelism.

 

3.1 Interactionism

Interactionism is the view that mind and body – or mental events and physical events – causally influence each other. That this is so is one of our common-sense beliefs, because it appears to be a feature of everyday experience. The physical world influences my experience through my senses, and I often react behaviourally to those experiences. My thinking, too, influences my speech and my actions. There is, therefore, a massive natural prejudice in favour of interactionism. It has been claimed, however, that it faces serious problems (some of which were anticipated in section 1).

 

The simplest objection to interaction is that, in so far as mental properties, states or substances are of radically different kinds from each other, they lack that communality necessary for interaction. It is generally agreed that, in its most naive form, this objection to interactionism rests on a ‘billiard ball’ picture of causation: if all causation is by impact, how can the material and the immaterial impact upon each other? But if causation is either by a more ethereal force or energy or only a matter of constant conjunction, there would appear to be no problem in principle with the idea of interaction of mind and body.

 

Even if there is no objection in principle, there appears to be a conflict between interactionism and some basic principles of physical science. For example, if causal power was flowing in and out of the physical system, energy would not be conserved, and the conservation of energy is a fundamental scientific law. Various responses have been made to this. One suggestion is that it might be possible for mind to influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity. (See Averill and Keating 1981). Another response is to challenge the relevance of the conservation principle in this context. The conservation principle states that ‘in a causally isolated system the total amount of energy will remain constant’. Whereas ‘[t]he interactionist denies…that the human body is an isolated system’, so the principle is irrelevant (Larmer (1986), 282: this article presents a good brief survey of the options). This approach has been termed conditionality, namely the view that conservation is conditional on the physical system being closed, that is, that nothing non-physical is interacting or interfering with it, and, of course, the interactionist claims that this condition is, trivially, not met. That conditionality is the best line for the dualist to take, and that other approaches do not work, is defended in Pitts (2019) and Cucu and Pitts (2019). This, they claim, makes the plausibility of interactionism an empirical matter which only close investigation on the fine operation of the brain could hope to settle. Cucu, in a separate article (2018), claims to find critical neuronal events which do not have sufficient physical explanation.This claim clearly needs further investigation.

 

Robins Collins (2011) has claimed that the appeal to conservation by opponents of interactionism is something of a red herring because conservation principles are not ubiquitous in physics. He argues that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. Why then, should we insist on it in mind-brain interaction?

 

Most discussion of interactionism takes place in the context of the assumption that it is incompatible with the world’s being ‘closed under physics’. This is a very natural assumption, but it is not justified if causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible. There could then be a complete physical cause of behaviour, and a mental one. The strongest intuitive objection against overdetermination is clearly stated by Mills (1996: 112), who is himself a defender of overdetermination.

 

For X to be a cause of Y, X must contribute something to Y. The only way a purely mental event could contribute to a purely physical one would be to contribute some feature not already determined by a purely physical event. But if physical closure is true, there is no feature of the purely physical effect that is not contributed by the purely physical cause. Hence interactionism violates physical closure after all.

 

Mills says that this argument is invalid, because a physical event can have features not explained by the event which is its sufficient cause. For example, “the rock’s hitting the window is causally sufficient for the window’s breaking, and the window’s breaking has the feature of being the third window-breaking in the house this year; but the facts about prior window-breakings, rather than the rock’s hitting the window, are what cause this window-breaking to have this feature.”

 

The opponent of overdetermination could perhaps reply that his principle applies, not to every feature of events, but to a subgroup – say, intrinsic features, not merely relational or comparative ones. It is this kind of feature that the mental event would have to cause, but physical closure leaves no room for this. These matters are still controversial.

 

The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess. Some argue that indeterminacy manifests itself only on the subatomic level, being cancelled out by the time one reaches even very tiny macroscopic objects: and human behaviour is a macroscopic phenomenon. Others argue that the structure of the brain is so finely tuned that minute variations could have macroscopic effects, rather in the way that, according to ‘chaos theory’, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China might affect the weather in New York. (For discussion of this, see Eccles (1980), (1987), and Popper and Eccles (1977).) Still others argue that quantum indeterminacy manifests itself directly at a high level, when acts of observation collapse the wave function, suggesting that the mind may play a direct role in affecting the state of the world (Hodgson 1988; Stapp 1993).

 

3.2 Epiphenomenalism

If the reality of property dualism is not to be denied, but the problem of how the immaterial is to affect the material is to be avoided, then epiphenomenalism may seem to be the answer. According to this theory, mental events are caused by physical events, but have no causal influence on the physical. I have introduced this theory as if its point were to avoid the problem of how two different categories of thing might interact. In fact, it is, at best, an incomplete solution to this problem. If it is mysterious how the non-physical can have it in its nature to influence the physical, it ought to be equally mysterious how the physical can have it in its nature to produce something non-physical. But that this latter is what occurs is an essential claim of epiphenomenalism. (For development of this point, see Green (2003), 149–51). In fact, epiphenomenalism is more effective as a way of saving the autonomy of the physical (the world as ‘closed under physics’) than as a contribution to avoiding the need for the physical and non-physical to have causal commerce.

 

There are at least three serious problems for epiphenomenalism. First, as I indicated in section 1, it is profoundly counterintuitive. What could be more apparent than that it is the pain that I feel that makes me cry, or the visual experience of the boulder rolling towards me that makes me run away? At least one can say that epiphenomenalism is a fall-back position: it tends to be adopted because other options are held to be unacceptable.

 

The second problem is that, if mental states do nothing, there is no reason why they should have evolved. This objection ties in with the first: the intuition there was that conscious states clearly modify our behaviour in certain ways, such as avoiding danger, and it is plain that they are very useful from an evolutionary perspective.

 

Frank Jackson (1982) replies to this objection by saying that it is the brain state associated with pain that evolves for this reason: the sensation is a by-product. Evolution is full of useless or even harmful by-products. For example, polar bears have evolved thick coats to keep them warm, even though this has the damaging side effect that they are heavy to carry. Jackson’s point is true in general, but does not seem to apply very happily to the case of mind. The heaviness of the polar bear’s coat follows directly from those properties and laws which make it warm: one could not, in any simple way, have one without the other. But with mental states, dualistically conceived, the situation is quite the opposite. The laws of physical nature which, the mechanist says, make brain states cause behaviour, in no way explain why brain states should give rise to conscious ones. The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law. Why there should have been by-products of that kind seems to have no evolutionary explanation.

 

The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, via its effect on the problem of other minds. It is natural to say that I know that I have mental states because I experience them directly. But how can I justify my belief that others have them? The simple version of the ‘argument from analogy’ says that I can extrapolate from my own case. I know that certain of my mental states are correlated with certain pieces of behaviour, and so I infer that similar behaviour in others is also accompanied by similar mental states. Many hold that this is a weak argument because it is induction from one instance, namely, my own. The argument is stronger if it is not a simple induction but an ‘argument to the best explanation’. I seem to know from my own case that mental events can be the explanation of behaviour, and I know of no other candidate explanation for typical human behaviour, so I postulate the same explanation for the behaviour of others. But if epiphenomenalism is true, my mental states do not explain my behaviour and there is a physical explanation for the behaviour of others. It is explanatorily redundant to postulate such states for others. I know, by introspection, that I have them, but is it not just as likely that I alone am subject to this quirk of nature, rather than that everyone is?

 

For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.

3.3 Parallelism

The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those – like Leibniz – who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.

 

4. Arguments for Dualism

4.1 The Knowledge Argument Against Physicalism

One category of arguments for dualism is constituted by the standard objections against physicalism. Prime examples are those based on the existence of qualia, the most important of which is the so-called ‘knowledge argument’. Because this argument has its own entry (see the entry qualia: the knowledge argument), I shall deal relatively briefly with it here. One should bear in mind, however, that all arguments against physicalism are also arguments for the irreducible and hence immaterial nature of the mind and, given the existence of the material world, are thus arguments for dualism.

 

The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a future scientist who has lacked a certain sensory modality from birth, but who has acquired a perfect scientific understanding of how this modality operates in others. This scientist – call him Harpo – may have been born stone deaf, but become the world’s greatest expert on the machinery of hearing: he knows everything that there is to know within the range of the physical and behavioural sciences about hearing. Suppose that Harpo, thanks to developments in neurosurgery, has an operation which finally enables him to hear. It is suggested that he will then learn something he did not know before, which can be expressed as what it is like to hear, or the qualitative or phenomenal nature of sound. These qualitative features of experience are generally referred to as qualia. If Harpo learns something new, he did not know everything before. He knew all the physical facts before. So what he learns on coming to hear – the facts about the nature of experience or the nature of qualia – are non-physical. This establishes at least a state or property dualism. (See Jackson 1982; Robinson 1982.)

 

There are at least two lines of response to this popular but controversial argument. First is the ‘ability’ response. According to this, Harpo does not acquire any new factual knowledge, only ‘knowledge how’, in the form of the ability to respond directly to sounds, which he could not do before. This essentially behaviouristic account is exactly what the intuition behind the argument is meant to overthrow. Putting ourselves in Harpo’s position, it is meant to be obvious that what he acquires is knowledge of what something is like, not just how to do something. Such appeals to intuition are always, of course, open to denial by those who claim not to share the intuition. Some ability theorists seem to blur the distinction between knowing what something is like and knowing how to do something, by saying that the ability Harpo acquires is to imagine or remember the nature of sound. In this case, what he acquires the ability to do involves the representation to himself of what the thing is like. But this conception of representing to oneself, especially in the form of imagination, seems sufficiently close to producing in oneself something very like a sensory experience that it only defers the problem: until one has a physicalist gloss on what constitutes such representations as those involved in conscious memory and imagination, no progress has been made.

 

The other line of response is to argue that, although Harpo’s new knowledge is factual, it is not knowledge of a new fact. Rather, it is new way of grasping something that he already knew. He does not realise this, because the concepts employed to capture experience (such as ‘looks red’ or ‘sounds C-sharp’) are similar to demonstratives, and demonstrative concepts lack the kind of descriptive content that allow one to infer what they express from other pieces of information that one may already possess. A total scientific knowledge of the world would not enable you to say which time was ‘now’ or which place was ‘here’. Demonstrative concepts pick something out without saying anything extra about it. Similarly, the scientific knowledge that Harpo originally possessed did not enable him to anticipate what it would be like to re-express some parts of that knowledge using the demonstrative concepts that only experience can give one. The knowledge, therefore, appears to be genuinely new, whereas only the mode of conceiving it is novel.

 

Proponents of the epistemic argument respond that it is problematic to maintain both that the qualitative nature of experience can be genuinely novel, and that the quality itself be the same as some property already grasped scientifically: does not the experience’s phenomenal nature, which the demonstrative concepts capture, constitute a property in its own right? Another way to put this is to say that phenomenal concepts are not pure demonstratives, like ‘here’ and ‘now’, or ‘this’ and ‘that’, because they do capture a genuine qualitative content. Furthermore, experiencing does not seem to consist simply in exercising a particular kind of concept, demonstrative or not. When Harpo has his new form of experience, he does not simply exercise a new concept; he also grasps something new – the phenomenal quality – with that concept. How decisive these considerations are, remains controversial.

 

4.2 The Argument from Predicate Dualism to Property Dualism

I said above that predicate dualism might seem to have no ontological consequences, because it is concerned only with the different way things can be described within the contexts of the different sciences, not with any real difference in the things themselves. This, however, can be disputed.

 

The argument from predicate to property dualism moves in two steps, both controversial. The first claims that the irreducible special sciences, which are the sources of irreducible predicates, are not wholly objective in the way that physics is, but depend for their subject matter upon interest-relative perspectives on the world. This means that they, and the predicates special to them, depend on the existence of minds and mental states, for only minds have interest-relative perspectives. The second claim is that psychology – the science of the mental – is itself an irreducible special science, and so it, too, presupposes the existence of the mental. Mental predicates therefore presuppose the mentality that creates them: mentality cannot consist simply in the applicability of the predicates themselves.

 

First, let us consider the claim that the special sciences are not fully objective, but are interest-relative.

 

No-one would deny, of course, that the very same subject matter or ‘hunk of reality’ can be described in irreducibly different ways and it still be just that subject matter or piece of reality. A mass of matter could be characterized as a hurricane, or as a collection of chemical elements, or as mass of sub-atomic particles, and there be only the one mass of matter. But such different explanatory frameworks seem to presuppose different perspectives on that subject matter.

 

This is where basic physics, and perhaps those sciences reducible to basic physics, differ from irreducible special sciences. On a realist construal, the completed physics cuts physical reality up at its ultimate joints: any special science which is nomically strictly reducible to physics also, in virtue of this reduction, it could be argued, cuts reality at its joints, but not at its minutest ones. If scientific realism is true, a completed physics will tell one how the world is, independently of any special interest or concern: it is just how the world is. It would seem that, by contrast, a science which is not nomically reducible to physics does not take its legitimation from the underlying reality in this direct way. Rather, such a science is formed from the collaboration between, on the one hand, objective similarities in the world and, on the other, perspectives and interests of those who devise the science. The concept of hurricane is brought to bear from the perspective of creatures concerned about the weather. Creatures totally indifferent to the weather would have no reason to take the real patterns of phenomena that hurricanes share as constituting a single kind of thing. With the irreducible special sciences, there is an issue of salience , which involves a subjective component: a selection of phenomena with a certain teleology in mind is required before their structures or patterns are reified. The entities of metereology or biology are, in this respect, rather like Gestalt phenomena.

 

Even accepting this, why might it be thought that the perspectivality of the special sciences leads to a genuine property dualism in the philosophy of mind? It might seem to do so for the following reason. Having a perspective on the world, perceptual or intellectual, is a psychological state. So the irreducible special sciences presuppose the existence of mind. If one is to avoid an ontological dualism, the mind that has this perspective must be part of the physical reality on which it has its perspective. But psychology, it seems to be almost universally agreed, is one of those special sciences that is not reducible to physics, so if its subject matter is to be physical, it itself presupposes a perspective and, hence, the existence of a mind to see matter as psychological. If this mind is physical and irreducible, it presupposes mind to see it as such. We seem to be in a vicious circle or regress.

 

We can now understand the motivation for full-blown reduction. A true basic physics represents the world as it is in itself, and if the special sciences were reducible, then the existence of their ontologies would make sense as expressions of the physical, not just as ways of seeing or interpreting it. They could be understood ‘from the bottom up’, not from top down. The irreducibility of the special sciences creates no problem for the dualist, who sees the explanatory endeavor of the physical sciences as something carried on from a perspective conceptually outside of the physical world. Nor need this worry a physicalist, if he can reduce psychology, for then he could understand ‘from the bottom up’ the acts (with their internal, intentional contents) which created the irreducible ontologies of the other sciences. But psychology is one of the least likely of sciences to be reduced. If psychology cannot be reduced, this line of reasoning leads to real emergence for mental acts and hence to a real dualism for the properties those acts instantiate (Robinson 2003).

 

4.3 The Modal Argument

There is an argument, which has roots in Descartes (Meditation VI), which is a modal argument for dualism. One might put it as follows:

 

It is imaginable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.

therefore

 

It is conceivable that one’s mind might exist without one’s body.

therefore

 

It is possible one’s mind might exist without one’s body.

therefore

 

One’s mind is a different entity from one’s body.

The rationale of the argument is a move from imaginability to real possibility. I include (2) because the notion of conceivability has one foot in the psychological camp, like imaginability, and one in the camp of pure logical possibility and therefore helps in the transition from one to the other.

 

This argument should be distinguished from a similar ‘conceivability’ argument, often known as the ‘zombie hypothesis’, which claims the imaginability and possibility of my body (or, in some forms, a body physically just like it) existing without there being any conscious states associated with it. (See, for example, Chalmers (1996), 94–9.) This latter argument, if sound, would show that conscious states were something over and above physical states. It is a different argument because the hypothesis that the unaltered body could exist without the mind is not the same as the suggestion that the mind might continue to exist without the body, nor are they trivially equivalent. The zombie argument establishes only property dualism and a property dualist might think disembodied existence inconceivable – for example, if he thought the identity of a mind through time depended on its relation to a body (e.g., Penelhum 1970).

 

Before Kripke (1972/80), the first challenge to such an argument would have concerned the move from (3) to (4). When philosophers generally believed in contingent identity, that move seemed to them invalid. But nowadays that inference is generally accepted and the issue concerns the relation between imaginability and possibility. No-one would nowadays identify the two (except, perhaps, for certain quasi-realists and anti-realists), but the view that imaginability is a solid test for possibility has been strongly defended. W. D. Hart ((1994), 266), for example, argues that no clear example has been produced such that “one can imagine that p (and tell less imaginative folk a story that enables them to imagine that p) plus a good argument that it is impossible that p. No such counterexamples have been forthcoming…” This claim is at least contentious. There seem to be good arguments that time-travel is incoherent, but every episode of Star-Trek or Doctor Who shows how one can imagine what it might be like were it possible.

 

It is worth relating the appeal to possibility in this argument to that involved in the more modest, anti-physicalist, zombie argument. The possibility of this hypothesis is also challenged, but all that is necessary for a zombie to be possible is that all and only the things that the physical sciences say about the body be true of such a creature. As the concepts involved in such sciences – e.g., neuron, cell, muscle – seem to make no reference, explicit or implicit, to their association with consciousness, and are defined in purely physical terms in the relevant science texts, there is a very powerful prima facie case for thinking that something could meet the condition of being just like them and lack any connection with consciousness. There is no parallel clear, uncontroversial and regimented account of mental concepts as a whole that fails to invoke, explicitly or implicitly, physical (e.g., behavioural) states.

 

For an analytical behaviourist the appeal to imaginability made in the argument fails, not because imagination is not a reliable guide to possibility, but because we cannot imagine such a thing, as it is a priori impossible. The impossibility of disembodiment is rather like that of time travel, because it is demonstrable a priori, though only by arguments that are controversial. The argument can only get under way for those philosophers who accept that the issue cannot be settled a priori, so the possibility of the disembodiment that we can imagine is still prima facie open.

 

A major rationale of those who think that imagination is not a safe indication of possibility, even when such possibility is not eliminable a priori, is that we can imagine that a posteriori necessities might be false – for example, that Hesperus might not be identical to Phosphorus. But if Kripke is correct, that is not a real possibility. Another way of putting this point is that there are many epistemic possibilities which are imaginable because they are epistemic possibilities, but which are not real possibilities. Richard Swinburne (1997, New Appendix C), whilst accepting this argument in general, has interesting reasons for thinking that it cannot apply in the mind-body case. He argues that in cases that involve a posteriori necessities, such as those identities that need discovering, it is because we identify those entities only by their ‘stereotypes’ (that is, by their superficial features observable by the layman) that we can be wrong about their essences. In the case of our experience of ourselves this is not true.

 

Now it is true that the essence of Hesperus cannot be discovered by a mere thought experiment. That is because what makes Hesperus Hesperus is not the stereotype, but what underlies it. But it does not follow that no one can ever have access to the essence of a substance, but must always rely for identification on a fallible stereotype. One might think that for the person him or herself, while what makes that person that person underlies what is observable to others, it does not underlie what is experienceable by that person, but is given directly in their own self-awareness.

 

This is a very appealing Cartesian intuition: my identity as the thinking thing that I am is revealed to me in consciousness, it is not something beyond the veil of consciousness. Now it could be replied to this that though I do access myself as a conscious subject, so classifying myself is rather like considering myself qua cyclist. Just as I might never have been a cyclist, I might never have been conscious, if things had gone wrong in my very early life. I am the organism, the animal, which might not have developed to the point of consciousness, and that essence as animal is not revealed to me just by introspection.

 

But there are vital differences between these cases. A cyclist is explicitly presented as a human being (or creature of some other animal species) cycling: there is no temptation to think of a cyclist as a basic kind of thing in its own right. Consciousness is not presented as a property of something, but as the subject itself. Swinburne’s claim that when we refer to ourselves we are referring to something we think we are directly aware of and not to ‘something we know not what’ that underlies our experience seemingly ‘of ourselves’ has powerful intuitive appeal and could only be overthrown by very forceful arguments. Yet, even if we are not referring primarily to a substrate, but to what is revealed in consciousness, could it not still be the case that there is a necessity stronger than causal connecting this consciousness to something physical? To consider this further we must investigate what the limits are of the possible analogy between cases of the water-H2O kind, and the mind-body relation.

 

We start from the analogy between the water stereotype – how water presents itself – and how consciousness is given first-personally to the subject. It is plausible to claim that something like water could exist without being H2O, but hardly that it could exist without some underlying nature. There is, however, no reason to deny that this underlying nature could be homogenous with its manifest nature: that is, it would seem to be possible that there is a world in which the water-like stuff is an element, as the ancients thought, and is water-like all the way down. The claim of the proponents of the dualist argument is that this latter kind of situation can be known to be true a priori in the case of the mind: that is, one can tell by introspection that it is not more-than-causally dependent on something of a radically different nature, such as a brain or body. What grounds might one have for thinking that one could tell that a priori?

 

The only general argument that seem to be available for this would be the principle that, for any two levels of discourse, A and B, they are more-than-causally connected only if one entails the other a priori. And the argument for accepting this principle would be that the relatively uncontroversial cases of a posteriori necessary connections are in fact cases in which one can argue a priori from facts about the microstructure to the manifest facts. In the case of water, for example, it would be claimed that it follows a priori that if there were something with the properties attributed to H2O by chemistry on a micro level, then that thing would possess waterish properties on a macro level. What is established a posteriori is that it is in fact H2O that underlies and explains the waterish properties round here, not something else: the sufficiency of the base – were it to obtain – to explain the phenomena, can be deduced a priori from the supposed nature of the base. This is, in effect, the argument that Chalmers uses to defend the zombie hypothesis. The suggestion is that the whole category of a posteriori more-than-causally necessary connections (often identified as a separate category of metaphysical necessity) comes to no more than this. If we accept that this is the correct account of a posteriori necessities, and also deny the analytically reductionist theories that would be necessary for a priori connections between mind and body, as conceived, for example, by the behaviourist or the functionalist, does it follow that we can tell a priori that consciousness is not more-than-causally dependent on the body?

 

It is helpful in considering this question to employ a distinction like Berkeley’s between ideas and notions. Ideas are the objects of our mental acts, and they capture transparently – ‘by way of image or likeness’ (Principles, sect. 27) – that of which they are the ideas. The self and its faculties are not the objects of our mental acts, but are captured only obliquely in the performance of its acts, and of these Berkeley says we have notions, meaning by this that what we capture of the nature of the dynamic agent does not seem to have the same transparency as what we capture as the normal objects of the agent’s mental acts. It is not necessary to become involved in Berkeley’s metaphysics in general to feel the force of the claim that the contents and internal objects of our mental acts are grasped with a lucidity that exceeds that of our grasp of the agent and the acts per se. Because of this, notions of the self perhaps have a ‘thickness’ and are permanently contestable: there seems always to be room for more dispute as to what is involved in that concept. (Though we shall see later, in 5.2.2, that there is a ‘non-thick’ way of taking the Berkeleyan concept of a notion.)

 

Because ‘thickness’ always leaves room for dispute, this is one of those cases in philosophy in which one is at the mercy of the arguments philosophers happen to think up. The conceivability argument creates a prima facie case for thinking that mind has no more than causal ontological dependence on the body. Let us assume that one rejects analytical (behaviourist or functionalist) accounts of mental predicates. Then the above arguments show that any necessary dependence of mind on body does not follow the model that applies in other scientific cases. This does not show that there may not be other reasons for believing in such dependence, for so many of the concepts in the area are still contested. For example, it might be argued that identity through time requires the kind of spatial existence that only body can give: or that the causal continuity required by a stream of consciousness cannot be a property of mere phenomena. All these might be put forward as ways of filling out those aspects of our understanding of the self that are only obliquely, not transparently, presented in self-awareness. The dualist must respond to any claim as it arises: the conceivability argument does not pre-empt them.......

5.2 The Unity of the Mind

Whether one believes that the mind is a substance or just a bundle of properties, the same challenge arises, which is to explain the nature of the unity of the immaterial mind. For the Cartesian, that means explaining how he understands the notion of immaterial substance. For the Humean, the issue is to explain the nature of the relationship between the different elements in the bundle that binds them into one thing. Neither tradition has been notably successful in this latter task: indeed, Hume, in the appendix to the Treatise, declared himself wholly mystified by the problem, rejecting his own initial solution (though quite why is not clear from the text).

plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

The Postcard

 

A postally unused carte postale that was published by the Cairo Postcard Trust. The card has a divided back.

 

The Great Sphinx of Giza

 

The Great Sphinx of Giza is a limestone statue of a reclining sphinx, a mythical creature with the head of a human, and the body of a lion.

 

Facing directly from west to east, it stands on the Giza Plateau on the west bank of the Nile. The face of the Sphinx appears to represent the pharaoh Khafre.

 

The original shape of the Sphinx was cut from the bedrock, and has since been restored with layers of limestone blocks.

 

It measures 73 m (240 ft) long from paw to tail, 20 m (66 ft) high from the base to the top of the head, and 19 m (62 ft) wide at its rear haunches.

 

Its nose was broken off for unknown reasons between the 3rd. and 10th. centuries AD.

 

The Sphinx is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt, and one of the most recognisable statues in the world.

 

The archaeological evidence suggests that it was created by ancient Egyptians of the Old Kingdom during the reign of Khafre (c. 2558 - 2532 BC).

 

The Great Sphinx's Name

 

The commonly used name "Sphinx" was given to the monument in classical antiquity, about 2,000 years after the commonly accepted date of its construction by reference to a Greek mythological beast with the head of a woman, a falcon, a cat, or a sheep and the body of a lion with the wings of an eagle. (Although, like most Egyptian sphinxes, the Great Sphinx has a man's head and no wings).

 

The English word sphinx comes from the ancient Greek Σφίγξ from the verb σφίγγω (meaning to squeeze in English), after the Greek sphinx who strangled anyone who failed to answer her riddle.

 

History of the Great Sphinx

 

The Sphinx is a monolith carved from the bedrock of the plateau, which also served as the quarry for the pyramids and other monuments in the area.

 

Egyptian geologist Farouk El-Baz has suggested that the head of the Sphinx may have been carved first, out of a natural yardang, i.e. a ridge of bedrock that had been sculpted by the wind. These can sometimes achieve shapes which resemble animals.

 

El-Baz suggests that the "moat" or "ditch" around the Sphinx may have been quarried out later to allow for the creation of the full body of the sculpture.

 

The archaeological evidence suggests that the Great Sphinx was created around 2500 BC for the pharaoh Khafre, the builder of the Second Pyramid at Giza. The stones cut from around the Sphinx's body were used to construct a temple in front of it.

 

However, neither the enclosure nor the temple were ever completed, and the relative scarcity of Old Kingdom cultural material suggests that a Sphinx cult was not established at the time.

 

Selim Hassan, writing in 1949 on recent excavations of the Sphinx enclosure, made note of this circumstance:

 

"Taking all things into consideration, it seems that

we must give the credit of erecting this, the world's

most wonderful statue, to Khafre, but always with

this reservation: that there is not one single

contemporary inscription which connects the Sphinx

with Khafre, so sound as it may appear, we must treat

the evidence as circumstantial, until such time as a

lucky turn of the spade of the excavator will reveal to

the world a definite reference to the erection of the

Sphinx."

 

In order to construct the temple, the northern perimeter-wall of the Khafre Valley Temple had to be deconstructed, hence it follows that the Khafre funerary complex preceded the creation of the Sphinx and its temple.

 

Furthermore, the angle and location of the south wall of the enclosure suggests the causeway connecting Khafre's Pyramid and Valley Temple already existed before the Sphinx was planned. The lower base level of the Sphinx temple also indicates that it doesn't pre-date the Valley Temple.

 

The Great Sphinx in the New Kingdom

 

Some time around the First Intermediate Period, the Giza Necropolis was abandoned, and drifting sand eventually buried the Sphinx up to its shoulders.

 

The first documented attempt at an excavation dates to c. 1400 BC, when the young Thutmose IV gathered a team and, after much effort, managed to dig out the front paws. Between them he erected a shrine that housed the Dream Stele, an inscribed granite slab (possibly a re-purposed door lintel from one of Khafre's temples).

 

When the stele was discovered, its lines of text were already damaged and incomplete. An excerpt reads:

 

"... the royal son, Thothmos, being arrived, while

walking at midday and seating himself under the

shadow of this mighty god, was overcome by

slumber and slept at the very moment when Ra is

at the summit of heaven.

He found that the Majesty of this august god spoke

to him with his own mouth, as a father speaks to his

son, saying:

'Look upon me, contemplate me, O my son Thothmos;

I am thy father, Harmakhis-Khopri-Ra-Tum; I bestow

upon thee the sovereignty over my domain, the

supremacy over the living ... Behold my actual condition

that thou mayest protect all my perfect limbs. The sand

of the desert whereon I am laid has covered me. Save

me, causing all that is in my heart to be executed.'"

 

The Dream Stele associates the Sphinx with Khafre, however this part of the text is not entirely intact:

 

"... which we bring for him: oxen ... and all the young

vegetables; and we shall give praise to Wenofer ...

Khaf ... the statue made for Atum-Hor-em-Akhet."

 

Egyptologist Thomas Young, finding the Khaf hieroglyphs in a damaged cartouche used to surround a royal name, inserted the glyph ra to complete Khafre's name. However when the Stele was re-excavated in 1925, the lines of text referring to Khaf flaked off and were destroyed.

 

In the New Kingdom, the Sphinx became more specifically associated with the sun god Hor-em-akhet. Pharaoh Amenhotep II built a temple to the northeast of the Sphinx nearly 1000 years after its construction, and dedicated it to the cult of Hor-em-akhet.

 

The Great Sphinx in the Graeco-Roman Period

 

By Graeco-Roman times, Giza had become a tourist destination - the monuments were regarded as antiquities. Some Roman Emperors visited the Sphinx out of curiosity, and for political reasons.

 

The Sphinx was cleared of sand again in the first century AD in honour of Emperor Nero and the Governor of Egypt, Tiberius Claudius Balbilus.

 

A monumental stairway more than 12 metres (39 ft) wide was erected, leading to a pavement in front of the paws of the Sphinx. At the top of the stairs, a podium was positioned that allowed view into the Sphinx sanctuary.

 

Further back, another podium neighboured several more steps. The stairway was dismantled during the 1931–32 excavations by Émile Baraize.

 

Pliny the Elder described the face of the Sphinx being coloured red and gave measurements for the statue:

 

"In front of these pyramids is the Sphinx, a still more

wondrous object of art, but one upon which silence

has been observed, as it is looked upon as a divinity

by the people of the neighbourhood.

It is their belief that King Harmaïs was buried in it, and

they will have it that it was brought there from a distance.

The truth is, however, that it was hewn from the solid

rock; and, from a feeling of veneration, the face of the

monster is coloured red.

The circumference of the head, measured round the

forehead, is one hundred and two feet, the length of the

feet being one hundred and forty-three, and the height,

from the belly to the summit of the asp on the head,

sixty-two."

 

A stela dated to 166 AD commemorates the restoration of the retaining walls surrounding the Sphinx.

 

The last Emperor connected with the monument was Septimius Severus, around 200 AD. With the downfall of Roman power, the Sphinx was once more engulfed by the sands.

 

The Great Sphinx in the Middle Ages

 

Some ancient non-Egyptians saw the Sphinx as a likeness of the god Horon. The cult of the Sphinx continued into medieval times. The Sabians of Harran saw it as the burial place of Hermes Trismegistus.

 

Arab authors described the Sphinx as a talisman which guarded the area from the desert. Al-Maqrizi describes it as "The Talisman of the Nile" on which the locals believed the flood cycle depended.

 

Muhammad al-Idrisi stated that those wishing to obtain bureaucratic positions in the Egyptian government should give an incense offering to the monument.

 

Over the centuries, writers and scholars have recorded their impressions and reactions upon seeing the Sphinx. The vast majority were concerned with a general description, often including a mixture of science, romance and mystique. A typical description of the Sphinx by tourists and leisure travelers throughout the 19th. and 20th. century was made by John Lawson Stoddard:

 

"It is the antiquity of the Sphinx which thrills us as

we look upon it, for in itself it has no charms. The

desert's waves have risen to its breast, as if to

wrap the monster in a winding-sheet of gold. The

face and head have been mutilated by Moslem

fanatics. The mouth, the beauty of whose lips was

once admired, is now expressionless. Yet grand in

its loneliness, - veiled in the mystery of unnamed

ages, - the relic of Egyptian antiquity stands solemn

and silent in the presence of the awful desert -

symbol of eternity. Here it disputes with Time the

empire of the past; forever gazing on and on into

a future which will still be distant when we, like all

who have preceded us and looked upon its face,

have lived our little lives and disappeared."

 

From the 16th. century, European observers described the Sphinx having the face, neck and breast of a woman.

 

Most early Western images were book illustrations in print form, elaborated by a professional engraver from either previous images available, or some original drawing or sketch supplied by an author, and usually now lost.

 

Seven years after visiting Giza, André Thévet (Cosmographie de Levant, 1556) described the Sphinx as:

 

"The head of a colossus, caused to be

made by Isis, daughter of Inachus, then

so beloved of Jupiter".

 

He, or his artist and engraver, pictured it as a curly-haired monster with a grassy dog collar.

 

Athanasius Kircher (who never visited Egypt) depicted the Sphinx as a Roman statue (Turris Babel, 1679).

 

Johannes Helferich's (1579) Sphinx is a pinched-face, round-breasted woman with a straight-haired wig.

 

George Sandys stated in 1615 that the Sphinx was a harlot; Balthasar de Monconys interpreted the headdress as a kind of hairnet, while François de La Boullaye-Le Gouz's Sphinx had a rounded hairdo with bulky collar.

 

Richard Pococke's Sphinx was an adoption of Cornelis de Bruijn's drawing of 1698, featuring only minor changes, but is closer to the actual appearance of the Sphinx than anything previously drawn.

 

The print versions of Norden's drawings for his Voyage d'Egypte et de Nubie (1755) clearly show that the nose was missing.

 

Later Excavations

 

In 1817, the first modern archaeological dig, supervised by the Italian Giovanni Battista Caviglia, uncovered the Sphinx's chest completely.

 

In 1887, the chest, paws, the altar, and the plateau were all made visible. Flights of steps were unearthed, and finally accurate measurements were taken of the great figures.

 

The height from the lowest of the steps was found to be one hundred feet, and the space between the paws was found to be thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide. Here there was formerly an altar; and a stele of Thûtmosis IV was discovered, recording a dream in which he was ordered to clear away the sand that even then was gathering round the site of the Sphinx.

 

One of the people working on clearing the sands from around the Great Sphinx was Eugène Grébaut, a French Director of the Antiquities Service.

 

Opinions of Early Egyptologists

 

Early Egyptologists and excavators were divided regarding the age of the Sphinx and its associated temples.

 

In 1857, Auguste Mariette, founder of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, unearthed the much later Inventory Stela (estimated to be from the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, c. 664 - 525 BC), which tells how Khufu came upon the Sphinx, already buried in sand.

 

Although certain tracts on the Stela are likely accurate, this passage is contradicted by archaeological evidence, thus considered to be Late Period historical revisionism, a purposeful fake, created by the local priests as an attempt to imbue the contemporary Isis temple with an ancient history it never had.

 

Such acts became common when religious institutions such as temples, shrines and priests' domains were fighting for political attention and for financial and economic donations.

 

Flinders Petrie wrote in 1883 regarding the state of opinion of the age of the Khafre Valley Temple, and by extension the Sphinx:

 

"The date of the Granite Temple has been so

positively asserted to be earlier than the fourth

dynasty, that it may seem rash to dispute the

point.

Recent discoveries, however, strongly show that

it was really not built before the reign of Khafre,

in the fourth dynasty."

 

Gaston Maspero, the French Egyptologist and second director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, conducted a survey of the Sphinx in 1886. He concluded that because the Dream Stela showed the cartouche of Khafre in line 13, it was he who was responsible for the excavation, and therefore the Sphinx must predate Khafre and his predecessors - possibly Fourth Dynasty, c. 2575 - 2467 BC. Maspero believed the Sphinx to be "the most ancient monument in Egypt".

 

Ludwig Borchardt attributed the Sphinx to the Middle Kingdom, arguing that the particular features seen on the Sphinx are unique to the 12th. dynasty, and that the Sphinx resembles Amenemhat III.

 

E. A. Wallis Budge agreed that the Sphinx predated Khafre's reign, writing in The Gods of the Egyptians (1904):

 

"This marvellous object was in existence in the

days of Khafre, or Khephren, and it is probable

that it is a very great deal older than his reign,

and that it dates from the end of the archaic

period [c. 2686 BC]."

 

Modern Dissenting Hypotheses

 

Rainer Stadelmann, former director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, examined the distinct iconography of the nemes (headdress) and the now-detached beard of the Sphinx, and concluded that the style is more indicative of the pharaoh Khufu (2589–2566 BC).

 

He was known to the Greeks as Cheops, builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza and Khafre's father. Rainer supports this by suggesting Khafre's Causeway was built to conform to a pre-existing structure, which, he concludes, given its location, could only have been the Sphinx.

 

In 2004, Vassil Dobrev of the Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale in Cairo announced that he had uncovered new evidence that the Great Sphinx may have been the work of the little-known pharaoh Djedefre (2528–2520 BC).

 

Djedefre was Khafra's half brother, and a son of Khufu. Dobrev suggests Djedefre built the Sphinx in the image of his father Khufu, identifying him with the sun god Ra in order to restore respect for their dynasty.

 

Dobrev also says that the causeway connecting Khafre's pyramid to the temples was built around the Sphinx, suggesting that it was already in existence at the time.

 

Egyptologist Nigel Strudwick responded to Dobrev by saying that:

 

"It is not implausible. But I would need more explanation,

such as why he thinks the pyramid at Abu Roash is a sun temple, something I'm sceptical about.

I have never heard anyone suggest that the name in the graffiti at Zawiyet el-Aryan mentions Djedefre.

I remain more convinced by the traditional argument of it being Khafre or the more recent theory of it being Khufu."

 

Recent Restorations of the Great Sphinx

 

In 1931, engineers of the Egyptian government repaired the head of the Sphinx. Part of its headdress had fallen off in 1926 due to erosion, which had also cut deeply into its neck. This questionable repair was by the addition of a concrete collar between the headdress and the neck, creating an altered profile.

 

Many renovations to the stone base and raw rock body were done in the 1980's, and then redone in the 1990's.

 

Natural and Deliberate Damage to the Great Sphinx

 

The limestone of the area consists of layers which offer differing resistance to erosion (mostly caused by wind and windblown sand), leading to the uneven degradation apparent in the Sphinx's body.

 

The lowest part of the body, including the legs, is solid rock. The body of the animal up to its neck is fashioned from softer layers that have suffered considerable disintegration. The layer from which the head was sculpted is much harder.

 

A number of "dead-end" shafts are known to exist within and below the body of the Great Sphinx, most likely dug by treasure hunters and tomb robbers.

 

The Great Sphinx's Missing Nose

 

Examination of the Sphinx's face shows that long rods or chisels were hammered into the nose area, one down from the bridge and another beneath the nostril, then used to pry the nose off towards the south, resulting in the one-metre wide nose still being lost to date.

 

Drawings of the Sphinx by Frederic Louis Norden in 1737 show the nose missing. Many folk tales exist regarding the destruction of its nose, aiming to provide an answer as to where it went or what happened to it.

 

One tale erroneously attributes it to cannonballs fired by the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. Other tales ascribe it to being the work of Mamluks. Since the 10th. century, some Arab authors have claimed it to be a result of iconoclastic attacks.

 

The Arab historian al-Maqrīzī, writing in the 15th. century, attributes the loss of the nose to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim who in 1378 found the local peasants making offerings to the Sphinx in the hope of increasing their harvest; he therefore defaced the Sphinx in an act of iconoclasm.

 

According to al-Maqrīzī, many people living in the area believed that the increased sand covering the Giza Plateau was retribution for al-Dahr's act of defacement.

 

Al-Minufi stated that the Alexandrian Crusade in 1365 was divine punishment for a Sufi sheikh breaking off the nose.

 

The Great Sphinx's Beard

 

In addition to the lost nose, a ceremonial pharaonic beard is thought to have been attached, although this may have been added in later periods after the original construction.

 

Egyptologist Vassil Dobrev has suggested that had the beard been an original part of the Sphinx, it would have damaged the chin of the statue upon falling. However the lack of visible damage supports his theory that the beard was a later addition.

 

The British Museum has limestone fragments which are thought to be from the Sphinx's beard.

 

Residues of red pigment are visible on areas of the Sphinx's face, and traces of yellow and blue pigment have also been found elsewhere on the Sphinx, leading Mark Lehner to suggest that:

 

"The monument was once decked

out in gaudy comic book colours".

 

However, as with the case of many ancient monuments, the pigments and colours have virtually disappeared, resulting in the yellow/beige appearance that the Sphinx has today.

 

Holes and Tunnels in the Great Sphinx

 

-- The Hole in the Sphinx's Head

 

Johann Helffrich visited the Sphinx during his travels in 1565 - 1566. He reports that a priest went into the head of the Sphinx, and when he spoke it was as if the Sphinx itself was speaking.

 

Many New Kingdom stelae depict the Sphinx wearing a crown. If it in fact existed, the hole could have been the anchoring point for it.

 

Émile Baraize closed the hole with a metal hatch in 1926.

 

-- Perring's Hole

 

Howard Vyse directed Perring in 1837 to drill a tunnel into the back of the Sphinx, just behind the head. The boring rods became stuck at a depth of 27 feet (8.2 m).

 

Attempts to blast the rods free caused further damage. The hole was cleared in 1978, and among the rubble was a fragment of the Sphinx's nemes headdress.

 

-- The Major Fissure

 

A major natural fissure in the bedrock cuts through the waist of the Sphinx. This was first excavated by Auguste Mariette in 1853.

 

The fissure measures up to 2 metres (6.6 ft) in width. In 1926 Baraize sealed the sides and roofed it with iron bars, limestone and cement. He then installed an iron trap door at the top. The sides of the fissure might have been artificially squared; however, the bottom is irregular bedrock, about 1 metre (3.3 ft) above the outside floor. A very narrow crack continues deeper.

 

-- The Rump Passage

 

When the Sphinx was cleared of sand in 1926 under direction of Baraize, it revealed an opening to a tunnel at floor-level on the north side of the rump. It was subsequently closed by masonry and nearly forgotten.

 

More than fifty years later, the existence of the passage was recalled by three elderly men who had worked during the sand clearing as basket carriers. This led to the rediscovery and excavation of the rump passage in 1980.

 

The passage consists of an upper and a lower section, which are angled roughly 90 degrees to each other. The upper part ascends to a height of 4 metres (13 ft) above the ground-floor at a northwest direction. It runs between masonry veneer and the core body of the Sphinx, and ends in a niche 1 metre (3.3 ft) wide and 1.8 metres (5.9 ft) high.

 

The ceiling of the niche consists of modern cement, which likely spilled down from the filling of the gap between masonry and core bedrock, some 3 metres (9.8 ft) above.

 

The lower part descends steeply into the bedrock towards the northeast, for a distance of approximately 4 metres (13 ft) and a depth of 5 metres (16 ft). It terminates in a pit at groundwater level.

 

At the entrance it is 1.3 metres (4.3 ft) wide, narrowing to about 1.07 metres (3.5 ft) towards the end. Among the sand and stone fragments, a piece of tin foil and the base of a modern ceramic water jar was found.

 

The clogged bottom of the pit contained modern fill. Among it, more tin foil, modern cement and a pair of shoes.

 

It is possible that the entire passage was cut top down, beginning high up on the rump, and that the current access point at floor-level was made at a later date.

 

Vyse noted in his diary in 1837 that he was "boring" near the tail, which indicates him as the creator of the passage, as no other tunnel has been identified at this location. Another interpretation is that the shaft is of ancient origin, perhaps an exploratory tunnel or an unfinished tomb shaft.

 

-- The Niche in the Northern Flank

 

There is a niche in the Sphinx's core body. It was closed during the 1925-6 restorations.

 

-- The Space Behind the Dream Stele

 

The space behind the Dream Stele, between the paws of the Sphinx, was covered by an iron beam and cement roof and then fitted with an iron trap door.

 

-- The Keyhole Shaft

 

At the ledge of the Sphinx enclosure there is a square shaft opposite the northern hind paw. It was cleared during excavation in 1978 and measures 1.42 by 1.06 metres (4.7 by 3.5 ft) and about 2 metres (6.6 ft) deep.

 

Lehner interpreted the shaft to be an unfinished tomb, and named it the "Keyhole Shaft", because a cutting in the ledge above the shaft is shaped like the lower part of a keyhole, upside down.

 

The Great Pyramid of Giza

 

The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest Egyptian pyramid, and the tomb of the Fourth Dynasty pharaoh Khufu. Built in the 26th. century BC during a period of around 27 years, it is the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the only one to remain largely intact.

 

Initially standing at 146.6 metres (481 feet), the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years. Over time, most of the smooth white limestone casing was removed, which lowered the pyramid's height to the present 138.5 metres (454.4 ft).

 

What is seen today is the underlying core structure. The base was measured to be 230.3 metres (755.6 ft) square, giving a volume of roughly 2.6 million cubic metres (92 million cubic feet).

 

The Great Pyramid was built by quarrying an estimated 2.3 million large blocks weighing 6 million tonnes in total. The majority of stones are not uniform in size or shape, and are only roughly dressed.

 

The outside layers were bound together by mortar. Primarily local limestone from the Giza Plateau was used. Other blocks were imported by boat down the Nile: white limestone from Tura for the casing, and granite blocks from Aswan, weighing up to 80 tonnes, for the King's Chamber.

 

There are three known chambers inside the Great Pyramid. The lowest was cut into the bedrock, but it remained unfinished. The Queen's Chamber and the King's Chamber, that contains a granite sarcophagus, are higher up, within the pyramid structure.

 

Khufu's vizier, Hemiunu, is believed to be the architect of the Great Pyramid. Many varying scientific and alternative hypotheses attempt to explain the exact construction techniques.

 

Attribution to Khufu

 

Historically the Great Pyramid has been attributed to Khufu based on the words of authors of classical antiquity, first and foremost Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus.

 

However, during the middle ages a number of other people were credited with the construction of the pyramid, for example Joseph, Nimrod or King Saurid.

 

In 1837 four additional Relieving Chambers were found above the King's Chamber after tunneling to them. The chambers, previously inaccessible, were covered in hieroglyphs of red paint.

 

The workers who were building the pyramid had marked the blocks with the names of their gangs, which included the pharaoh's name (e.g.: “The gang, The white crown of Khnum-Khufu is powerful”).

 

The names of Khufu were spelled out on the walls over a dozen times. Another of these graffiti was found by Goyon on an exterior block of the 4th layer of the pyramid.

 

Throughout the 20th. century the cemeteries next to the pyramid were excavated. Family members and high officials of Khufu were buried there. Most notably the wives, children and grandchildren of Khufu, along with the funerary cache of Hetepheres I, mother of Khufu.

 

As Hassan puts it:

 

"From the early dynastic times, it was always the

custom for the relatives, friends and courtiers to

be buried in the vicinity of the king they had served

during life. This was quite in accordance with the

Egyptian idea of the Hereafter."

 

The cemeteries were actively expanded until the 6th. dynasty, but used less frequently afterwards. The earliest pharaonic name of seal impressions is that of Khufu, the latest of Pepi II.

 

Worker graffiti was written on some of the stones of the tombs as well; for instance, "Mddw" (Horus name of Khufu) on the mastaba of Chufunacht, probably a grandson of Khufu.

 

In 1954 two boat pits, one containing the Khufu ship, were discovered buried at the south foot of the pyramid. The cartouche of Djedefre was found on many of the blocks that covered the boat pits. As the successor and eldest son he would have presumably been responsible for the burial of Khufu.

 

The second boat pit was examined in 1987; excavation work started in 2010. Graffiti on the stones included 4 instances of the name "Khufu", 11 instances of "Djedefre", a year (in reign, season, month and day), measurements of the stone, various signs and marks, and a reference line used in construction, all done in red or black ink.

 

During excavations in 2013 the Diary of Merer in the form of rolls of papyrus was found at Wadi al-Jarf. It documents the transportation of white limestone blocks from Tura to the Great Pyramid, which is mentioned by its original name Akhet Khufu dozens of times.

 

The diary records that the stones were accepted at She Akhet-Khufu ("The pool of the pyramid Horizon of Khufu") and Ro-She Khufu (“The entrance to the pool of Khufu”) which were under supervision of Ankhhaf, half brother and vizier of Khufu, as well as owner of the largest mastaba of the Giza East Field.

 

The Age of the Great Pyramid

 

The age of the Great Pyramid has been determined by two principal approaches:

 

-- Indirectly, through its attribution to Khufu and his chronological age, based on archaeological and textual evidence.

 

-- Directly, via radiocarbon dating of organic material found in the pyramid and included in its mortar. Mortar was used generously in the Great Pyramid's construction. In the mixing process, ashes from fires were added to the mortar, organic material that could be extracted and radiocarbon dated.

 

A total of 46 samples of the mortar were taken in 1984 and 1995, making sure they were clearly inherent to the original structure and could not have been incorporated at a later date.

 

The results were calibrated to 2871–2604 BC. A reanalysis of the data gave a completion date for the pyramid between 2620 and 2484 BC.

 

In 1872 Waynman Dixon opened the lower pair of air-shafts that were previously closed at both ends by chiseling holes into the walls of the Queen's Chamber.

 

One of the objects found within was a cedar plank, which came into possession of James Grant, a friend of Dixon. After inheritance it was donated to the Museum of Aberdeen in 1946. However it had broken into pieces, and was filed incorrectly.

 

Lost in the vast museum collection, it was only rediscovered in 2020, when it was radiocarbon dated to 3341–3094 BC. Being over 500 years older than Khufu's chronological age, Abeer Eladany suggests that the wood originated from the center of a long-lived tree, or had been recycled for many years prior to being deposited in the pyramid.

 

Construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza

 

-- Preparation of the Site

 

A hillock forms the base on which the pyramid stands. It was cut back into steps, and only a strip around the perimeter was leveled. Using modern equipment, this has been measured to be horizontal and flat to within 21 millimetres (0.8 in).

 

The bedrock reaches a height of almost 6 metres (20 ft) above the pyramid base at the location of the Grotto.

 

Along the sides of the base platform a series of holes are cut in the bedrock. Lehner hypothesizes that they held wooden posts used for alignment.

 

Edwards, among others, has suggested that water was used in order to level the base, although it is unclear how workable such a system would be.

 

-- Materials

 

The Great Pyramid consists of an estimated 2.3 million blocks. Approximately 5.5 million tonnes of limestone, 8,000 tonnes of granite, and 500,000 tonnes of mortar were used in the construction.

 

Most of the blocks were quarried at Giza just south of the pyramid, an area now known as the Central Field.

 

The white limestone used for the casing originated from Tura 10 km (6.2 mi) south of Giza), and was transported by boat down the Nile.

 

The granite stones in the pyramid were transported from Aswan, more than 900 km (560 mi) away. The largest, weighing up to 80 tonnes, forms the roofs of the King's Chamber.

 

Ancient Egyptians cut stone into rough blocks by hammering grooves into natural stone faces, inserting wooden wedges, then soaking these with water. As the water was absorbed, the wedges expanded, breaking off workable chunks. Once the blocks were cut, they were carried by boat either up or down the Nile River to the pyramid.

 

-- The Workforce

 

The Greeks believed that slave labour was used, but modern discoveries made at nearby workers' camps associated with construction at Giza suggest that it was built instead by thousands of conscript laborers.

 

Worker graffiti found at Giza suggest haulers were divided into groups of 40 men, consisting of four sub-units that each had an "Overseer of Ten".

 

As to the question of how over two million blocks could have been cut within Khufu's lifetime, stonemason Franck Burgos conducted an archaeological experiment based on an abandoned quarry of Khufu discovered in 2017.

 

Within it, an almost completed block and the tools used for cutting it had been uncovered: hardened arsenic copper chisels, wooden mallets, ropes and stone tools. In the experiment, replicas of these were used to cut a block weighing about 2.5 tonnes (the average block size used for the Great Pyramid).

 

It took 4 workers 4 days (with each working 6 hours a day) to excavate it. The initially slow progress sped up six times when the stone was wetted with water.

 

Based on the data, Burgos extrapolates that about 3,500 quarry-men could have produced the 250 blocks per day needed to complete the Great Pyramid within 27 years.

 

A construction management study conducted in 1999, in association with Mark Lehner and other Egyptologists, has estimated that the total project required an average workforce of about 13,200 individuals, with a peak workforce of roughly 40,000.

 

Surveys and Design of the Great Pyramid

 

The first precise measurements of the pyramid were made by Egyptologist Flinders Petrie in 1880–1882, published as The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh.

 

Many of the casing-stones and inner chamber blocks of the Great Pyramid fit together with high precision, with joints, on average, only 0.5 millimetres (0.020 in) wide. On the contrary, core blocks were only roughly shaped, with rubble inserted between larger gaps. Mortar was used to bind the outer layers together and to fill gaps and joints.

 

The block height and weight tends to get progressively smaller towards the top. Petrie measured the lowest layer to be 148 centimetres (4.86 ft) high, whereas the layers towards the summit barely exceed 50 centimetres (1.6 ft).

 

The accuracy of the pyramid's perimeter is such that the four sides of the base have an average error of only 58 millimetres (2.3 inches) in length, and the finished base was squared to a mean corner error of only 12 seconds of arc.

 

Ancient Egyptians used seked - how much length for one cubit of rise - to describe slopes. For the Great Pyramid a seked of 5+ palms was chosen, a ratio of 14 up to 11 in.

 

Some Egyptologists suggest this slope was chosen because the ratio of perimeter to height (1760/280 cubits) equals 2π to an accuracy of better than 0.05 percent (corresponding to the well-known approximation of π as 22/7).

 

Verner wrote:

 

"We can conclude that although the ancient

Egyptians could not precisely define the value

of π, in practice they used it.

"These relations of areas and of circular ratio

are so systematic that we should grant that

they were in the builder's design".

 

Alignment to the Cardinal Directions

 

The sides of the Great Pyramid's base are closely aligned to the four geographic (not magnetic) cardinal directions, deviating on average 3 minutes and 38 seconds of arc. Several methods have been proposed for how the ancient Egyptians achieved this level of accuracy:

 

-- The Solar Gnomon Method: the shadow of a vertical rod is tracked throughout a day. The shadow line is intersected by a circle drawn around the base of the rod. Connecting the intersecting points produces an east-west line.

 

An experiment using this method resulted in lines being, on average, 2 minutes, 9 seconds off due east–west. Employing a pinhole produced much more accurate results (19 arc seconds off), whereas using an angled block as a shadow definer was less accurate (3′ 47″ off).

 

-- The Pole Star Method: the polar star is tracked using a movable sight and fixed plumb line. Halfway between the maximum eastern and western elongations is true north.

 

Thuban, the polar star during the Old Kingdom, was about two degrees removed from the celestial pole at the time.

 

-- The Simultaneous Transit Method: the stars Mizar and Kochab appear on a vertical line on the horizon, close to true north around 2500 BC. They slowly and simultaneously shift east over time, which is used to explain the relative misalignment of the pyramids.

 

Construction Theories

 

Many alternative, often contradictory, theories have been proposed regarding the pyramid's construction. One mystery of the pyramid's construction is its planning. John Romer suggests that they used the same method that had been used for earlier and later constructions, i.e. laying out parts of the plan on the ground at a 1-to-1 scale.

 

He writes that:

 

"Such a working diagram would also serve to

generate the architecture of the pyramid with

precision unmatched by any other means".

 

The basalt blocks of the pyramid temple show clear evidence of having been cut with some kind of saw with an estimated cutting blade of 15 feet (4.6 m) in length. Romer suggests that this "super saw" may have had copper teeth and weighed up to 140 kilograms (310 lb).

 

He theorizes that such a saw could have been attached to a wooden trestle support, and possibly used in conjunction with vegetable oil, cutting sand, emery or pounded quartz to cut the blocks, which would have required the labour of at least a dozen men to operate it.

 

The Exterior Casing

  

[105]

At completion, the Great Pyramid was cased entirely in white limestone. There is a casing stone from the Great Pyramid in the British Museum.

 

Precisely worked blocks were placed in horizontal layers and carefully fitted together with mortar, their outward faces cut at a slope and smoothed to a high degree. Together they created four uniform surfaces, angled at 51°50'40.

 

Unfinished casing blocks of the pyramids of Menkaure and Henutsen at Giza suggest that the front faces were smoothed only after the stones were laid, with chiseled seams marking correct positioning, and where the superfluous rock would have to be trimmed off.

 

An irregular pattern is noticeable when looking at the pyramid's layers in sequence, where layer height declines steadily only to rise sharply again.

 

"Backing stones" supported the casing which were (unlike the core blocks) precisely dressed, and bound to the casing with mortar. These stones give the structure its visible appearance, following the dismantling of the pyramid in the middle ages.

 

In 1303 AD, a massive earthquake loosened many of the outer casing stones, which were said to have been carted away by Bahri Sultan An-Nasir Nasir-ad-Din al-Hasan in 1356 for use in nearby Cairo.

 

Many more casing stones were removed from the site by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the early 19th. century to build the upper portion of his Alabaster Mosque in Cairo.

 

Later explorers reported massive piles of rubble at the base of the pyramid left over from the continuing collapse of the casing stones, which were subsequently cleared away during continuing excavations of the site.

 

Today a few of the casing stones from the lowest course can be seen in situ on each side, with the best preserved on the north below the entrances, excavated by Vyse in 1837.

 

The mortar was chemically analyzed and contains organic inclusions (mostly charcoal), samples of which were radiocarbon dated to 2871–2604 BC. It has been theorized that the mortar enabled the masons to set the stones exactly by providing a level bed.

 

The Missing Pyramidion

 

The pyramid was once topped by a capstone known as a pyramidion. The material it was made from is subject to much speculation; limestone, granite or basalt are commonly proposed, while in popular culture it is often said to be solid gold or gilded.

 

All known 4th. dynasty pyramidia (of the Red Pyramid, the Satellite Pyramid of Khufu and the Queen's Pyramid of Menkaure are of white limestone, and were not gilded.

 

Only from the 5th. dynasty onward is there evidence of gilded capstones.

 

The Great Pyramid's pyramidion was already lost in antiquity, as Pliny the Elder and later authors report of a platform on its summit. Nowadays the pyramid is about 8 metres (26 ft) shorter than it was when intact, with about 1,000 tonnes of material missing from the top.

 

In 1874 a mast was installed on the top of the pyramid by the Scottish astronomer Sir David Gill who, whilst returning from work involving observing a rare Venus transit, was invited to survey Egypt. He began by surveying the Great Pyramid.

 

His measurements of the pyramid were accurate to within 1mm, and the survey mast is still in place to this day.

 

Interior of the Great Pyramid

 

The internal structure consists of three main chambers (the King's-, Queen's- and Subterranean Chamber), the Grand Gallery and various corridors and shafts.

 

There are two entrances into the pyramid; the original and a forced passage, which meet at a junction. From there, one passage descends into the Subterranean Chamber, while the other ascends to the Grand Gallery. From the beginning of the gallery three paths can be taken:

 

(a) A vertical shaft that leads down, past a grotto, to meet the descending passage.

 

(b) A horizontal corridor leading to the Queen's Chamber.

 

(c) A path up the gallery itself to the King's Chamber that contains the sarcophagus.

 

Both the King's and Queen's Chamber have a pair of small "air-shafts". Above the King's Chamber are a series of five Relieving Chambers.

 

--The Original Entrance

 

The original entrance is located on the north side, 15 royal cubits (7.9 m; 25.8 ft) east of the center-line of the pyramid. Before the removal of the casing in the middle ages, the pyramid was entered through a hole in the 19th. layer of masonry, approximately 17 metres (56 ft) above the pyramid's base level.

 

The height of that layer – 96 centimetres (3.15 ft) – corresponds to the size of the entrance tunnel which is commonly called the Descending Passage. According to Strabo (64–24 BC) a movable stone could be raised to enter this sloping corridor, however it is not known if it was a later addition or original.

 

A row of double chevrons diverts weight away from the entrance. Several of these chevron blocks are now missing, as the slanted faces they used to rest on indicate.

 

Numerous, mostly modern, graffiti is cut into the stones around the entrance. Most notable is a large, square text of hieroglyphs carved in honor of Frederick William IV, by Karl Richard Lepsius's Prussian expedition to Egypt in 1842.

 

-- The North Face Corridor

 

In 2016 the ScanPyramids team detected a cavity behind the entrance chevrons using muography, which was confirmed in 2019 to be a corridor at least 5 metres (16 ft) long, running horizontal or sloping upwards. Whether or not it connects to the Big Void above the Grand Gallery remains to be seen.

 

-- The Robbers' Tunnel

 

Today tourists enter the Great Pyramid via the Robbers' Tunnel, which was long ago cut straight through the masonry of the pyramid. The entrance was forced into the 6th. and 7th. layer of the casing, about 7 metres (23 ft) above the base.

 

After running more-or-less straight and horizontal for 27 metres (89 ft) it turns sharply left to encounter the blocking stones in the Ascending Passage. It is possible to enter the Descending Passage from this point, but access is usually forbidden.

 

The origin of this Robbers' Tunnel is the subject of much discussion. According to tradition, the tunnel was excavated around 820 AD by Caliph al-Ma'mun's workmen with a battering ram.

 

The digging dislodged the stone in the ceiling of the Descending Passage which hid the entrance to the Ascending Passage, and the noise of that stone falling then sliding down the Descending Passage alerted them to the need to turn left.

 

Unable to remove these stones, the workmen tunneled up beside them through the softer limestone of the Pyramid until they reached the Ascending Passage.

 

Due to a number of historical and archaeological discrepancies, many scholars contend that this story is apocryphal. They argue that it is much more likely that the tunnel had been carved shortly after the pyramid was initially sealed.

 

This tunnel, the scholars argue, was then resealed (likely during the Ramesside Restoration), and it was this plug that al-Ma'mun's ninth-century expedition cleared away. This theory is furthered by the report of patriarch Dionysius I Telmaharoyo, who claimed that before al-Ma'mun's expedition, there already existed a breach in the pyramid's north face that extended into the structure 33 metres (108 ft) before hitting a dead end.

 

This suggests that some sort of robber's tunnel predated al-Ma'mun, and that the caliph simply enlarged it and cleared it of debris.

 

-- The Descending Passage

 

From the original entrance, a passage descends through the masonry of the pyramid and then into the bedrock beneath it, ultimately leading to the Subterranean Chamber.

 

It has a slanted height of 4 Egyptian feet (1.20 m; 3.9 ft) and a width of 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft). Its angle of 26°26'46" corresponds to a ratio of 1 to 2 (rise over run).

 

After 28 metres (92 ft), the lower end of the Ascending Passage is reached; a square hole in the ceiling, which is blocked by granite stones and might have originally been concealed.

 

To circumvent these hard stones, a short tunnel was excavated that meets the end of the Robbers' Tunnel. This was expanded over time and fitted with stairs.

 

The passage continues to descend for another 72 metres (236 ft), now through bedrock instead of the pyramid superstructure.

 

Lazy guides used to block off this part with rubble in order to avoid having to lead people down and back up the long shaft, until around 1902 when Covington installed a padlocked iron grill-door to stop this practice.

 

Near the end of this section, on the west wall, is the connection to the vertical shaft that leads up to the Grand Gallery.

 

A horizontal shaft connects the end of the Descending Passage to the Subterranean Chamber, It has a length of 8.84 m (29.0 ft), width of 85 cm (2.79 ft) and height of 91–95 cm (2.99–3.12 ft).

 

-- The Subterranean Chamber

 

The Subterranean Chamber, or "Pit", is the lowest of the three main chambers, and the only one dug into the bedrock beneath the pyramid.

 

Located about 27 m (89 ft) below base level, it measures roughly 16 cubits (8.4 m; 27.5 ft) north-south by 27 cubits (14.1 m; 46.4 ft) east-west, with an approximate height of 4 m (13 ft).

 

The western half of the room, apart from the ceiling, is unfinished, with trenches left behind by the quarry-men running east to west. The only access, through the Descending Passage, lies on the eastern end of the north wall.

 

Although seemingly known in antiquity, according to Herodotus and later authors, its existence had been forgotten in the middle ages until rediscovery in 1817, when Giovanni Caviglia cleared the rubble blocking the Descending Passage.

 

Opposite the entrance, a blind corridor runs straight south for 11 m (36 ft) and continues at a slight angle for another 5.4 m (18 ft), measuring about 0.75 m (2.5 ft) squared. A Greek or Roman character was found on its ceiling, suggesting that the chamber had indeed been accessible during Classical antiquity.

 

In the middle of the eastern half, there is a large hole called Pit Shaft or Perring's Shaft. The upmost part may have ancient origins, about 2 m (6.6 ft) squared in width, and 1.5 m (4.9 ft) in depth. Caviglia and Salt enlarged it to the depth of about 3 m (9.8 ft).

 

In 1837 Vyse directed the shaft to be sunk to a depth of 50 ft (15 m), in hopes of discovering the chamber encompassed by water that Herodotus alludes to. However no chamber was discovered after Perring and his workers had spent one and a half years penetrating the bedrock to the then water level of the Nile, some 12 m (39 ft) further down.

 

The rubble produced during this operation was deposited throughout the chamber. Petrie, visiting in 1880, found the shaft to be partially filled with rainwater that had rushed down the Descending Passage. In 1909, when the Edgar brothers' surveying activities were encumbered by the material, they moved the sand and smaller stones back into the shaft. The deep, modern shaft is sometimes mistaken to be part of the original design.

 

-- The Ascending Passage

 

The Ascending Passage connects the Descending Passage to the Grand Gallery. It is 75 cubits (39.3 m; 128.9 ft) long, and of the same width and height as the shaft it originates from, although its angle is slightly lower at 26°6'.

 

The lower end of the shaft is plugged by three granite stones, which were slid down from the Grand Gallery to seal the tunnel. The uppermost stone is heavily damaged.

 

The end of the Robbers' Tunnel concludes slightly below the stones, so a short tunnel was dug around them to gain access to the Descending Passage.

 

-- The Well Shaft and Grotto

 

The Well Shaft (also known as the Service Shaft or Vertical Shaft) links the lower end of the Grand Gallery to the bottom of the Descending Passage, about 50 metres (160 ft) further down.

 

It takes a winding and indirect course. The upper half goes through the nucleus masonry of the pyramid. It runs vertical at first for 8 metres (26 ft), then slightly angled southwards for about the same distance, until it hits bedrock approximately 5.7 metres (19 ft) above the pyramid's base level.

 

Another vertical section descends further, which is partially lined with masonry that has been broken through to a cavity known as the Grotto. The lower half of the Well Shaft goes through the bedrock at an angle of about 45° for 26.5 metres (87 ft) before a steeper section, 9.5 metres (31 ft) long, leads to its lowest point. The final section of 2.6 metres (8.5 ft) connects it to the Descending Passage, running almost horizontal. The builders evidently had trouble aligning the lower exit.

 

The purpose of the shaft is commonly explained as a ventilation shaft for the Subterranean Chamber, and as an escape shaft for the workers who slid the blocking stones of the Ascending Passage into place.

 

The Grotto is a natural limestone cave that was likely filled with sand and gravel before construction, before being hollowed out by looters. A granite block rests in it that probably originated from the portcullis that once sealed the King's Chamber.

 

-- The Queen's Chamber

 

The Horizontal Passage links the Grand Gallery to the Queen's Chamber. Five pairs of holes at the start suggest the tunnel was once concealed with slabs that laid flush with the gallery floor. The passage is 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft) wide and 1.17 m (3.8 ft) high for most of its length, but near the chamber there is a step in the floor, after which the passage increases to 1.68 m (5.5 ft) high.

 

The Queen's Chamber is exactly halfway between the north and south faces of the pyramid. It measures 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south, 11 cubits (5.8 m; 18.9 ft) east-west,[146] and has a pointed roof that apexes at 12 cubits (6.3 m; 20.6 ft) tall.

 

At the eastern end of the chamber there is a niche 9 cubits (4.7 m; 15.5 ft) high. The original depth of the niche was 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft), but it has since been deepened by treasure hunters.

 

Shafts were discovered in the north and south walls of the Queen's Chamber in 1872 by British engineer Waynman Dixon, who believed shafts similar to those in the King's Chamber must also exist. The shafts were not connected to the outer faces of the pyramid, and their purpose is unknown.

 

In one shaft Dixon discovered a ball of diorite, a bronze hook of unknown purpose and a piece of cedar wood. The first two objects are currently in the British Museum. The latter was lost until recently when it was found at the University of Aberdeen.

 

The northern shaft's angle of ascent fluctuates, and at one point turns 45 degrees to avoid the Great Gallery. The southern shaft is perpendicular to the pyramid's slope.

 

The shafts in the Queen's Chamber were explored in 1993 by the German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink using a crawler robot he designed, called Upuaut 2.

 

After a climb of 65 m (213 ft), he discovered that one of the shafts was blocked by a limestone "door" with two eroded copper "handles".

 

The National Geographic Society created a similar robot which, in September 2002, drilled a small hole in the southern door, only to find another stone slab behind it. The northern passage, which was difficult to navigate because of its twists and turns, was also found to be blocked by a slab.

 

Research continued in 2011 with the Djedi Project which used a fibre-optic "micro snake camera" that could see around corners. With this, they were able to penetrate the first door of the southern shaft through the hole drilled in 2002, and view all the sides of the small chamber behind it.

 

They discovered hieroglyphics written in red paint. Egyptian mathematics researcher Luca Miatello stated that the markings read "121" – the length of the shaft in cubits.

 

The Djedi team were also able to scrutinize the inside of the two copper "handles" embedded in the door, which they now believe to be for decorative purposes. They additionally found the reverse side of the "door" to be finished and polished, which suggests that it was not put there just to block the shaft from debris, but rather for a more specific reason.

 

-- The Grand Gallery

 

The Grand Gallery continues the slope of the Ascending Passage towards the King's Chamber, extending from the 23rd. to the 48th. course, a rise of 21 metres (69 ft). It has been praised as a truly spectacular example of stonemasonry.

 

It is 8.6 metres (28 ft) high and 46.68 metres (153.1 ft) long. The base is 4 cubits (2.1 m; 6.9 ft) wide, but after two courses - at a height of 2.29 metres (7.5 ft) - the blocks of stone in the walls are corbelled inwards by 6–10 centimetres (2.4–3.9 in) on each side.

 

There are seven of these steps, so, at the top, the Grand Gallery is only 2 cubits (1.0 m; 3.4 ft) wide. It is roofed by slabs of stone laid at a slightly steeper angle than the floor so that each stone fits into a slot cut into the top of the gallery, like the teeth of a ratchet.

 

The purpose was to have each block supported by the wall of the Gallery, rather than resting on the block beneath it, in order to prevent cumulative pressure.

 

At the upper end of the Gallery, on the eastern wall, there is a hole near the roof that opens into a short tunnel by which access can be gained to the lowest of the Relieving Chambers.

 

At the top of the gallery, there is a step onto a small horizontal platform where a tunnel leads through the Antechamber, once blocked by portcullis stones, into the King's Chamber.

 

The Big Void

 

In 2017, scientists from the ScanPyramids project discovered a large cavity above the Grand Gallery using muon radiography, which they called the "ScanPyramids Big Void". Its length is at least 30 metres (98 ft) and its cross-section is similar to that of the Grand Gallery.

 

The purpose of the cavity is unknown, and it is not accessible. Zahi Hawass speculates that it may have been a gap used in the construction of the Grand Gallery, but the research team state that the void is completely different to previously identified construction spaces.

 

The Antechamber

 

The last line of defense against intrusion was a small chamber specially designed to house portcullis blocking stones, called the Antechamber. It is cased almost entirely in granite, and is situated between the upper end of the Grand Gallery and the King's Chamber.

 

Three slots for portcullis stones line the east and west wall of the chamber. Each of them is topped with a semi-circular groove for a log, around which ropes could be spanned.

 

The granite portcullis stones were approximately 1 cubit (52.4 cm; 20.6 in) thick and were lowered into position by the aforementioned ropes which were tied through a series of four holes at the top of the blocks. A corresponding set of four vertical grooves are on the south wall of the chamber, recesses that make space for the ropes.

 

The Antechamber has a design flaw: the space above them can be accessed, thus all but the last block can be circumvented. This was exploited by looters who punched a hole through the ceiling of the tunnel behind, gaining access to the King's Chamber.

 

Later on, all three portcullis stones were broken and removed. Fragments of these blocks can be found in various locations in the pyramid.

 

The King's Chamber

 

The King's Chamber is the uppermost of the three main chambers of the pyramid. It is faced entirely with granite, and measures 20 cubits (10.5 m; 34.4 ft) east-west by 10 cubits (5.2 m; 17.2 ft) north-south.

 

Its flat ceiling is about 11 cubits and 5 digits (5.8 m;19.0 ft) above the floor, formed by nine slabs of stone weighing in total about 400 tons. All the roof beams show cracks due to the chamber having settled 2.5–5 cm (0.98–1.97 in).

 

The walls consist of five courses of blocks that are uninscribed, as was the norm for burial chambers of the 4th dynasty. The stones are precisely fitted together. The facing surfaces are dressed to varying degrees, with some displaying remains of bosses not entirely cut away.

 

The back sides of the blocks were only roughly hewn to shape, as was usual with Egyptian hard-stone facade blocks, presumably to save work.

 

The Sarcophagus

 

The only object in the King's Chamber is a sarcophagus made out of a single, hollowed-out granite block. When it was rediscovered in the early middle ages, it was found broken open and any contents had already been removed.

 

It is of the form common for early Egyptian sarcophagi; rectangular in shape with grooves to slide the now missing lid into place with three small holes for pegs to fixate it. The coffer was not perfectly smoothed, displaying various tool marks matching those of copper saws and tubular hand-drills.

 

The internal dimensions are roughly 198 cm (6.50 ft) by 68 cm (2.23 feet), the external 228 cm (7.48 ft) by 98 cm (3.22 ft), with a height of 105 cm (3.44 ft). The walls have a thickness of about 15 cm (0.49 ft). The sarcophagus is too large to fit around the corner between the Ascending and Descending Passages, which indicates that it must have been placed in the chamber before the roof was put in place.

 

Air Shafts

 

In the north and south walls of the King's Chamber are two narrow shafts, commonly known as "air shafts". They face each other, and are located approximately 0.91 m (3.0 ft) above the floor, with a width of 18 and 21 cm (7.1 and 8.3 in) and a height of 14 cm (5.5 in).

 

Both start out horizontally for the length of the granite blocks they go through before changing to an upwards direction. The southern shaft ascends at an angle of 45° with a slight curve westwards. One ceiling stone was found to be distinctly unfinished which Gantenbrink called a "Monday morning block".

 

The northern shaft changes angle several times, shifting the path to the west, perhaps to avoid the Big Void. The builders had trouble calculating the right angles, resulting in parts of the shaft being narrower. Nowadays they both lead to the exterior. If they originally penetrated the outer casing is unknown.

 

The purpose of these shafts is not clear: They were long believed by Egyptologists to be shafts for ventilation, but this idea has now been widely abandoned in favour of the shafts serving a ritualistic purpose associated with the ascension of the king's spirit to the heavens. Ironically, both shafts were fitted with ventilators in 1992 to reduce the humidity in the pyramid.

 

The idea that the shafts point towards stars has been largely dismissed as the northern shaft follows a dog-leg course through the masonry and the southern shaft has a bend of approximately 20 centimetres (7.9 in), indicating no intention to have them point to any celestial objects.

 

The Relieving Chambers

 

Above the roof of the King's Chamber are five compartments, named (from lowest upwards) "Davison's Chamber", "Wellington's Chamber", "Nelson's Chamber", "Lady Arbuthnot's Chamber", and "Campbell's Chamber".

 

They were presumably intended to safeguard the King's Chamber from the possibility of the roof collapsing under the weight of stone above, hence they are referred to as "Relieving Chambers".

 

The granite blocks that divide the chambers have flat bottom sides but roughly shaped top sides, giving all five chambers an irregular floor, but a flat ceiling, with the exception of the uppermost chamber which has a pointed limestone roof.

 

Nathaniel Davison is credited with the discovery of the lowest of these chambers in 1763, although a French merchant named Maynard informed him of its existence. It can be reached through an ancient passage that originates from the top of the south wall of the Grand Gallery.

 

The upper four chambers were discovered in 1837 by Howard Vyse after discovering a crack in the ceiling of the first chamber. This allowed the insertion of a long reed, which, with the employment of gunpowder and boring rods, forced a tunnel upwards through the masonry. As no access shafts existed for the upper four chambers they were completely inaccessible until this point.

 

Numerous graffiti of red ochre paint were found to cover the limestone walls of all four newly discovered chambers. Apart from leveling lines and indication marks for masons, multiple hieroglyphic inscriptions spell out the names of work-gangs.

 

Those names, which were also found in other Egyptian pyramids like that of Menkaure and Sahure, usually included the name of the pharaoh they were working for. The blocks must have received the inscriptions before the chambers became inaccessible during construction.

 

Their orientation, often side-ways or upside down, and their sometimes being partially covered by blocks, indicates that the stones were inscribed before being laid.

A rarely seen ca. 1969/70 Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation (GAEC) artist’s concept of a rotating space station concept. This, the following linked designs & my other linked Flickr photos of GAEC designs below - based on the photo identification number - look to have been part of the same family/series of contractor concepts, proposals, etc., solicited/entertained by NASA ca. 1969:

 

www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2...

 

www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2...

Both above credit: the excellent Aerospace Projects Review website

 

In confirmation…IMHO…of such; in January - February 1969, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine oversaw the creation of a Space Station Task Force, a Space Station Steering Group, and an independent Space Station Review Group. These bodies prepared a Phase B Space Station Study Statement of Work (SOW), which NASA released to industry on 19 April 1969. So, I'm pretty sure these works are some of the responses/submittals to that SOW.

 

"The SOW solicited proposals to study a 12-man Space Station, the design of which would eventually serve as a building block for a 100-man Earth-orbital Space Base. The 12-man Station was to reach orbit on a Saturn V rocket in 1975 and to remain in operation for 10 years...

Grumman, North American Rockwell (NAR), and McDonnell Douglas Aerospace Company (MDAC) submitted proposals in response to the SOW."

 

The above is a combination of paraphrasing & cut/paste from David S. F. Portree's superlative (as always) article at his wonderful "No Shortage of Dreams" blog. The entire wonderfully informative content at:

 

spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2015/03/outpost-in-leo-mc...

 

Further, particularly regarding the space station depiction itself, thanks to a posting on this image hosting ‘service’ by James Vaughan (also linked to below) of a GAEC ad, it’s source, along with the other linked ‘iconic’ concept was identified. Additionally, the ad contained some descriptive information and a wonderful, although slightly confusing diagram. The text from which follows:

 

“What form will the nation’s first earth orbiting space station take?

 

Experienced Grumman design and development engineers continue to investigate all types of space station concepts—from Zero G nonrotating to rotating types. All this design effort results from the basic study of the many uses that space stations might have. As an example, earth orbiting space stations might conceivably be a twin-bladed configuration as shown above [the more ‘iconic’ image], or a multiple canister type, shown below [this posted image]. Whatever the final design may be, the mechanical and human problems involved are enormous, demanding unique capabilities for integrating the most complex components. At Grumman, this capacity for integration is in the hands of an experienced hard core of engineers who, with free exchange of ideas in design and development, provide total systems in space technology.”

 

As if all of the above weren’t enough, confirmation that this work is by none other than Craig Kavafes, and by extrapolation/comparison, the other ‘iconic’ design. Oddly/interestingly though, is his use of a lower-case block letter signature, something I’d associate with an earlier work. Regardless, a multifaceted “WIN”!

 

But now…get this, the ad (along with a bunch of other cool ones) was featured in the September 1963 issue of “AIR FORCE/SPACE DIGEST” magazine, page 109. At:

 

books.google.com/books?id=zz0PAAAAIAAJ&printsec=front...

Credit: Google Books website

 

That certainly explains Mr. Kavafes’ signature style. Does that mean GAEC just pulled these off the shelf, dusted them off & submitted them (maybe again?) In 1969?

The Conversion.

 

Ruin: so, tell me about the day you got the 'news'. Did you go there alone? I went with Adrian, but we got the news separately.

 

Rack: I will, but zero energy today and this will require some gusto. I was alone, half expecting it. I’ve never fully described it to myself or anyone else. Going to think on it. If it goes in our book, it will have to be largely fictionalized as I remember very little. Not surprisingly. Send me yours and I’ll send you mine. xo

 

Ruin: Mine is similar, remember very little, though I did write around it, both to you and to one or two others. I was working in the Civil Service at the time. I had just finished my Doctorate. I will re-build it around those messages, will find it out, write about not remembering it, even. I can't even remember if I was sitting opposite a male or female doctor. I do remember the shock though, and coming out to discover that Adrian was in with another doctor. I had gone in first, so I had to wait for him. My head was racing, but then, when is it not?

 

Amanda Knox writes quite well, relative to that link you sent me, about her ‘Red Letter Day’.

 

There’s a similar feeling in it, that prison sentence, the air being drawn out of the room.

 

Yes, I will write it, we can also find it in our exchange, and yes, it can include fiction, of course. But then what is fiction? Perhaps it’s the story we tell ourselves convincing ourselves that it’s true, those self-justifications we invent to make moving forward possible, that greasing of those wheels.

 

I also have the writing about when we first got our t-cell count back, and mine being higher than his, and there being some guilt. It's near the end of those emails I sent you, but I will contrive to pull it all together.

 

Rack: God yes, the T-cell counts. Mine were not terrible. Peter tested after me and his were terrible. That’s how he found out. I feel like I might have to resort to science fiction, a genre I’m not fond of. Not that I know anything about it. Anyway, will stop writing about writing about it and will write it.

 

Ruin:

Sent : Sun Apr 22, 2001, 9:17 am.

Cries and Whimpers. (On discovering new HIV status Sent : Sun Apr 22, 2001, 9:17 am.

 

“I feel like I have dropped out of the world. You know the feeling, that in it but not of it, sort of thing. This acknowledgement of a new but inevitable state of being waxes and wanes, sometimes seeming unbearable and sometimes seeming very ordinary. That we both want or need to deal with it in totally different ways causes problems intermittently as we knock off each other (relative to Adrian). Meanwhile the world seems even more inaccessible than ever, the art world in particular. As usual I cringe at youth and beauty, but now in a more bitter and twisted way. When I see what is acceptable and celebrated in the Art world it becomes immediately clear why I would not be. Who needs the ravings of an aberrational cock and cum obsessed dysfunctional unit? The world is about going forth and multiplying, about buying and selling. It’s all about possessions and looking good. Having got to the ripe old age of 47, I haven't even managed to develop the acquisitional gene and imagine that will be a lack until the final shuffling off of this tired old coil.”

 

That's the day I found out, after a little search, but I will make it into a story. But no, on re-reading, I see it isn’t the day I found out, it’s 12 days later. I have no idea what happened in those intervening days.

 

I sort of discovered that in the act of writing, you start to remember even, to recapture memories. It's an interesting process.

 

Rack: Yes, I hope that happens. I am thinking I might make the perspective that of the doctor’s, to some degree, not entirely. I do remember him. Better than I remember myself that day. Telling.

 

Ruin: I remember reactions over that time, telling people, and getting that "well you were bloody looking for it" reaction.

 

I think before that day I thought that I might have been immune.

 

There was a rumour that some people were, and I had been such a slattern to that point, and always stayed negative, so I sort of allowed myself delude myself.

 

But I think that I might have wanted it too.

 

Rack: I mostly knew. I had fevers, swollen lymph nodes and one night a pain in the left side of my neck like a piece of rebar had been jammed up from my clavicle.

 

Yes, regarding wanting it, me too. It was connected to my loss of Conor. Complicated. It was a way for me to have an identity.

 

Ruin: But it was so much not your demographic, that must have been bewildering somewhat.

 

I think I was a semi-conscious bug-chaser, but also blindingly honest. As soon as I converted I told everyone.

 

Rack: Oh, it did. It was my calling card. The 25-year-old Irish woman with AIDS (no distinctions were made back then really).

 

Ruin: It was how I sorted out that wheat from the chaff, frighten the fuckers away.

 

Rack: It was a fantastic litmus test. That’s certain.

 

Ruin: I told you before, that demographically in London, the Irish and those from the Caribbean have the greatest percentage of HIV positive amongst their cohorts. They both have a disproportionate number for the size of their populations. It's the old ‘Cuckoo’, ‘Wild Goose’ thing. There was a survey done, and it was reported. I wish I had kept it.

 

Rack: Not surprising. The disenfranchised. Same could be said of Covid deaths.

 

Ruin: Lost, wandering, souls, untethered.

 

Rack: Yup. Less to lose.

 

Ruin: It's interesting now here to be in that demographic again relative to Covid, the disposables, the old.

 

Rack: But there was also the sense that it could get anyone. Liberace. Rock Hudson. Magic Johnson.

 

Ruin: Straight from one to the other, straight from seeing our parents out to preparing to see ourselves out. But that is universally the way of the world too.

 

Rack: I’d like to see myself in first.

 

Ruin: Yes, absolutely, but the untethered are more vulnerable, more likely to head for it, almost daringly.

 

Rack: I’m beginning to understand the reason for my writerly reticence. It ain’t pretty.

 

Ruin: Great, meaning ‘yes’ to the seeing of yourself in, but also describe it, it works at perhaps even bringing that about, of disenfranchising it.

 

Rack: I will. Not now though. I need to clarify it to myself. It’s terrifying.

 

Ruin: That self-loathing, it's great, and liberating, when you at last begin to call it out.

 

I am listening to Sapolsky again today about childhood abuse and PTSD. Take your time.

 

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcBgsmJFHDY&t=3s

 

Baboons in the wild, that's us, his subject, extrapolated to us.

 

Rack: Waving our purple arses. xoxooxoxox

 

Ruin: Kiss it, bitch!!!! XXX

 

It's bedtime here. I have been thinking about this, I will write it tomorrow, or start, it will include this, grow out of this. This will be the immediate aspect. The rest will happen, from notes made around the time and retrieved memories. It might take the rest of the week to pull it out, but I will.

 

When I think of it, it must have been a female doctor. At the same time, it might not have even been a doctor, perhaps a social worker, or a nurse, or one of the gay men manning the ‘Tavistock Clinic’. It was all nicely normalised for us sexual renegades, so that we could talk about anything, just as if we too were actually ‘normal’. My memory of the clinic in Dublin was not like that. There, we were well and truly outsiders, beyond that pale, next to the shackled prisoners from the local jail (I kid you not). This was indicative of the shame we might have dragged with us unknowingly, that friendly self-targeting fire. There is an aspect of that there in Nuala O’ Faolain’s autobiography, around abortion and birth control, and lesbianism. In fact, it’s more or less there in the writings of all our compatriots from Joyce wandering off to forge the conscience of his race, to the Magdalene Laundry atrocities in Claire Keegan. It is our wandering lot. I guess it’s that I seethe against in everything I make or do. That stranglehold of religion, for generations, casting sex as shameful. But there’s no real blame there either, or if there is, it is directable somewhere else. It perhaps could be laid squarely at the feet of the colonisation, and devastatingly cruel treatment, of our forebears, driving them into the maws of religion, that all-devouring solace.

 

I am not surprised we went crazy, you and me. I guess it’s also why I hold onto the discussion around Joyce relative to syphilis. There is much Irish objection to the theory amongst literature scholars, that ‘not our Saint James’ sort of thing, not now that we have taken him back into our collective, all enveloping, chaste bosoms. But we know he is one of us, shameless, you just have to read his letters, and look at the treatments he was receiving (That mercury and Neo-Salvarsan). We are shameless, and this is good. This needs both embracing and celebrating, wantonly, lusciously, and hilariously.

 

So back to the ‘Tavistock Clinic’, nestled there just off the Tottenham Court Road, succour for sinners, offered now by our nation’s tormentors. Going there to confess repeated improprieties, which inevitably did, at last, trip one up, was always a bit of a laugh, until it wasn’t.

 

The thing I think I remember most is hard to describe. It wasn’t a sharp intake of breath, not exactly that. It was more like a rush of cold air into the lungs, like it feels just before a panic attack. But this was years before those panic attacks, but I still remember that ‘cold air’ second. It was like, suddenly from nowhere, air from a deep freeze had entered your lungs. Just the once, it wasn’t ongoing, but it took quite a few more breaths to warm it back up. The heart felt it, and responded, speeding up. Again, Sapolsky describes this wonderfully, that flight or fight response to danger, that speeding up when there was nowhere to run to. He links it to abuse and neglect in childhood. Like a baboon sitting directly opposite a man-eating tiger. The thing is that we are so used to running away from our own personal ‘bête noire’, mine being my mother selling me for sex to her brother when I was a child. That she did this ‘innocently’ is no succour, no release at all. Running had to happen. Running until you dropped, and you, apparently, had just dropped in front of this ferocious caregiver. Luckily the tiger opposite you was just there to make a follow up appointment to have your bloodwork done, to see the extent of the damage already coalesced. I didn’t realise at the time that there would be still a lot of time to conjure a seemingly infinite amount of even more damage. I was always very good at generating self-damage, a past master, even. But then this was inherited, something passed on from abused parents to their litter (or their farrow, as Mr. Joyce termed it). I still love this stuff we carry forward, until we work out that reproduction is probably not a good idea at all; so we stop.

 

We were very clever in that regard, or at least our DNA was.

 

Rack, I think that this is how it is done, or a lot of it anyway. This immediacy of these SMS messages between us, this explaining it to each other. You pointed out that this was your favourite part of the 50 pages I sent you, that 'nowness'. Yes, I agree with you there, it is the 'bones', like an extended diary really, a day by day thing, grabbing what ever understanding happens as you wake up. That's when it’s best for me anyway. It also means you don't actually have to sit down and write, in that traditional way of putting hours aside for the 'muse'. Anyway, you both muse and amuse me, enough to make me respond.

 

I am searching in the stuff I have here from around that time. There is not a lot, I think I sort of temporarily shut down. There are some breadcrumbs scattered. The next part seems to be about results, t-cell counts and the like. I can certainly fill in the gaps somewhat. I remember distinctly telling a few people, and their inappropriate reactions, which made me angry. Some fed me some 'choices' shit, as in "you made bad choices" sort of way. I knew that I had been true. I also knew already that there was no such thing as ‘freedom of choice’, no such chimera as ‘free Will’. Those ghosts were the terrors of childhood, they were over, as dead as ‘God’.

 

I thought their reactions were shaming, and I was having none of that.

 

Anyway there is solace. I love the tenderness between us as we work this out.

 

Ruin: Anyway, dear Rack, here's a start. Good morning!

 

I was surprised to hear that you knew before Peter, and then he went and got tested. I always presumed that it was the other way around. I remember those people in New York, those gay men that didn't want to know. I had myself tested more or less every three months, more so after I had resumed barebacking. That happened quite late for me, it was really after I had left New York, that point where I had become so tired of all that self-preservation of someone I loathed, myself. You see, I had come from a long line of barebackers. My parents were, it was mandated by their religion (as you know condoms were not available), and my grandfather and grandmother, with their 17 children, were definitely barebackers too, and so on through countless generations. What can I say? It was ingrained in my DNA.

 

In fact, almost every heterosexual I ever met was a barebacker. They were forever falling pregnant, or going on the pill, or looking to get an abortion, or whatever. It was from that bastion of privilege that most of the shaming was coming from, as it would happen, and this always managed to irritate the bejaysus out of me. This might have been at the root of the art I was beginning to make, that adoption of those indicators of their divinity, that gold and silver they chose to honour their beatified, that idealised self they had inherited. Fuck them all Rack, I would give that to us.

 

Rack: Great stuff Billy. I love the idea of barebacking, for whatever reason being hereditary. Brilliant. And yes, the immediacy and the “I’m not really writing” are the genius of the back and forth.

 

It seems I need this. Or an assignment like this. Working on mine. I’ve got to the office, but no further.

 

ONWARD

 

08:20, 15/03/2023

  

Ruin: Yes, I do and don’t see it as writing. It’s really just a correspondence between friends, and we both write as we write. That, of course, comes with a sense of immediacy, that not writing really towards an end, the picking apart (that knot) being the ongoing driver. This is what we have been doing for years, though I did start by saying that I wanted to keep a record of us dealing with what was happening, and that I had this ‘Laclos’ fantasy. Yes, it has developed, but it is also still the same. I never set out to be a writer, you know that; I am, and was, an image maker, it was and is how I explain the world to myself. I still don’t want to be what is called a writer, that career involving whatever it involves. It’s still writing until I feel this is sorted out, whether that be completed in those fabled 4 years I say I hope for, or whether it goes on until Max Van Sydow arrives with his scythe. The writing is primarily the unravelling of what I have wrought, that Gordian knot thingy, my very own one, in tandem, and parallel with your picking apart of your very own variant of the same. I sense similarities there in both our fumblings. Though it isn’t all fumbling, sometimes we seem to have breakthroughs, seem even to be getting somewhere. This might be delusional on my part. I often look back as things I make, places where I thought I was being ‘true’, some of those ‘eureka’ moments and wonder what I thought I was up to.

 

Maybe my trying to fashion it into a type of ‘book’ is too much pressure, maybe it is even dishonest, though I see there is ‘worth’ there. I think we can communicate something valuable about the human condition, or at least our own ‘perverted’ version of the same (which is equal to all other versions) especially relative to sex, shame, and abuse. The struggle with whatever, in the moment it was happening, is what the messages back and forth between each other manifests. It wasn’t some narrative contrivance we manufactured to create something called a story or plot. It was the ‘there and then’ of the continuous ‘now’. We are lucky to have that record, and I don’t really care if it is ‘literature’ or even ‘good writing’. I have no problem with correcting it where necessary, grammar or spelling-wise, but that’s only to make it clearer for myself initially. After myself, I want to make it clearer for you. I have no idea what follows after that, or if anything needs to.

 

I am saying this to take the pressure off of you, the head of steam you seem to build up, fit to burst. I see it can cause a type of panic for you. I am talking about your fear of writing. Don’t write then, just respond if you want to. That’s enough. It builds of its own volition.

 

Strangely, I could hardly read the O’Faolain book. I got to about 150 pages in and had to stop. I kept waiting for it to start, and kept getting irritated when it didn’t, and had to stop. Anyway, I am not going to attack it, the writing I mean, I am hardly an expert, but it didn’t win me over at all. I don’t know why, maybe it was that generational thing, that Dublin one just before me, before I found myself on Kildare Street, with your mother, and had somewhat of a sampling of what Dublin had to offer (for the first time), before deciding that I had to escape from that too. Then there was that usual doo-doo. That “you had books growing up, you were lucky”, all that crazy comparative abuse stuff, that “mine was worse than yours” stuff. Then she went to Oxford. I would have killed all Jude the obscure’s children to have been aware then that Oxford even existed as a possibility. It’s all very much about what you were born into, and the sort of privilege that is taken for granted, even if her father was a complete negligent asshole.

 

So, there you have it, another good book ruined through seething jealousy.

 

Well, at least I now know it, and knowledge being power, and all that palaver, let’s see where that takes us. Anyway, jealousy often comes up around memoirs I read, primarily that Monty Pythonesque “You were lucky, you had books”. I must have always really wanted them, those ‘unobtainables’. This suggests that I might have wanted to write. I remember loving writing in school, and always getting top marks for the same. I think it had something to do with not being able to speak, that damned stutter, so that the writing was the only way I could manage to say what I was thinking. The progenitors worked according to the rule that “children should be seen and not heard”, a relentlessly repeated maxim. So, most of the time was spent making cheap jigsaws. I got one every Christmas, each one more complicated than the last in the hopes of keeping the stammering child quiet. But there was drawing too. I preferred that.

 

Then I pulled Rack, sorry Kim, through that scratchy hedge hole, your doggy alter-ego, and the world changed. That all sounds a bit like what happened in the Moondance Diner, on that day we first met and simultaneously told me that you had just found out you were HIV-positive.

 

Ruin: Next step for me is first bloodwork, as you know my veins and arteries are sewers so that should make for fun reading. Can you remember your first? Each seems like a tentative step at the beginnings of a journey. First sex after conversion, first time stoned, pissed, first bloodwork, first confession of new status, first time you snapped at someone who complained about something trivial when you were carrying life and death, and mostly the latter, on your shoulders, first film you managed to sit through. There have been no first tears yet. You know all of this......wanna be my Beatrice?

 

Edge-dwelling, one of our favourite subjects.

 

It does seem strange not to have your madness here at the moment. It probably wouldn't help but it might. I may need to visit NYC at some stage for a fix and a change of perspective and just to prove that I can and that all is not over. This is a stupid infuriating stage, and it can be over as soon as it wants. Sorry if I remind you of a past self. Going to the Irish Club in Eaton Square for lunch for some posh comfort food. The sort of food which was eaten on the Hill of Howth but never made it to Clondalkin. With Wine (for some reason my spellcheck wants to change this to Whine).

 

Rack: You know what is really odd. I get bad news and my whole being reacts as if it's good news. This is a strange thing. I get all fired up, determined, focused, confident, strong and ballsy. It's the perversion of our predicament. Of course, the bloodwork sucked the big hairy moosedick. This I think I knew without having to charge my health insurance company 2,000 dollars. I'll deal with it, as I always do. I'll go back in. I'll play more drug-chess, I'll grow to love compromise as much as a miracle and I'll be around for a little longer.

 

This is not easy.

 

I think I am going back on the interferon. This is hard for me, but it's a gamble. Maybe I can keep my liver in working order for another two years and by then the drugs in the pipeline now will be available to me. It's always been thus, and I have to say that I have

had great fortune in being on the right side of time.

 

Ruin, Ruin, Ruin. You know I'd say a prayer if I could. There must be real comfort in that stuff. However, we persist...

 

I'm happy to have you as my dear friend.

 

Ruin: I should have written earlier to you to let you know of the results of our bloodwork. I was somewhat shocked and dismayed to discover that mine are actually much better than him indoors. Mine are 800 with a low viral load of 9,000. His are around 500 with a viral load of 60,000. I know these are all just figures and can change over a short period; I remember that film ‘Silverlake Life’. This comparison thing is odious and the main overpowering feeling I had was one of guilt at being overly endowed in the T-cell department, as opposed to the trouser department which is my usual problem! We are both being treated at the moment for an amoebic infection in the gut and hopefully this will up his numbers (and mine to superhuman levels), as he has been quite sick and squitty.

 

They are probably a leftover from my time in New York as I had bad stomach bug problems there (Giardia etc.) from my propensity for eating nether regions. When I went to have them checked here, I was told I had nervous stomach and sent home by my GP, and it is only now that I have the lurgy that the National Health bothers to check and finds the little buggers. At last, we will get comprehensive healthcare, but it had to get to this point (where they check out every little problem). Can you imagine how the rest of the clean population (henceforth to be known as the cleanies) gets treated? Cancer patients getting sent home with ‘Imodium’. It happens.

 

We are now, of course, utterly disposable. All the rules of survival of the fittest would support this. How do we turn this around? This has been your struggle for years. I don't mean it in a bad way but is it somewhat of a support to have me there with you in the same boat? It is a support for me that you are such an old hand and inspiration in your ability to move on with this. I am telling my friends but the present climate dictates that they absorb the news, express concern and then disappear (my NY friends excluded), almost like an ‘Oh well, too bad, now get over it’ sort of shrug. So that is what I am doing. I am not averse to milking it, but the udder of human kindness seems to have deserted the pap. Anyway, I am more likely to laugh than cry and my inclination is to shout 'fuck you and your sympathy.' At the same time, I don't want to hide it. I don't want to become some HIV activist, but I do want to talk about being mortal. I still want TOO MUCH, but now I want it immediately. NOTE TO SELF: Self, you must get some credit cards or at least a credit rating.

 

So, I am sure you will be glad to see that my unhealthy Ego is still very much intact and beginning to re-emerge from the wettest winter on record. I am torn as to how to approach bodies for art funding. Should I do the “I am profoundly mortal and in touch with the moment of extinction” spiel, hoping they will think, “oops better fund him because he won't be around for much longer” or avoid all that in case they think, “oops another AIDS artist who has nothing to say to us cleanies?” It's all in the work anyway......but which is the best way to exploit the situation, given that Brit Art is dominated by Laddism and that even the girls are beer drinking heterosexual womanisers (who can spit great distances).

 

Brit art has had no response to this Fin De Siecle malaise, there is no Gober, or Gonzales Torres or Wojnarowicz, or even a Goldin......I don't think they should get away with this. Similarly, Brits don't know how to respond when you tell them of your lurgyness, as they know no one else with this condition, or at least act as if they don’t. I miss my mates in New York, who have absorbed the whole shebang and know how to respond. Let's hear it for the ‘Healing Circle’ and ‘Act-Up’ meetings.

 

They were good, if slightly hysterical, times. I hate normalisation, it really does you in.

 

I am not what might be considered 'normal', I worship at the back passage and no amount of interior design flair will change that. I love being an aberration.

 

I still have the bitter and twisted fantasy I would like to write as a story. Set in the future it would involve a new virus that would kill you within a month. The idea would be that anyone who was already HIV positive would be immune to the virus. So, reverse everything. Those who were Poz would no longer be Pariahs. Cleanies would be begging for positive loads, it would be on sale on the net. The most efficient way to contact it would be anal sex (as if) so that every straight jock in Christendom would be begging for it and we would be very busy and multi-squillionaires in no time. So I am a sicko....but you always knew that.

 

Anyway now you have the latest earth-shattering facts and fantasies of my so-called life. Civil servitude continues and the days drag on. I have some feelers out for vague connections to generate art and space and support. We now have a power shower and the new cooker and washing machine and tumble dryer are paid for and awaiting delivery. We will never go short of a clean diaper when the time comes. Debts mount for same.

 

Attached please find pic for cover of aforementioned book,

Infected kisses,

 

Billzebum

 

Rack: Will reply. I don’t see the cover attachment. Xo

  

Ruin: Nope, that's an old email, that last part. It was just as far as I got this morning.

 

This is exactly what I am talking about, this immediacy, this interweaving. It is an exchange between two people, in that moment of that exchange, that perpetual now. Perpetual, another catholic word, that idea of perpetual succour, and that giving and receiving of same to each other.

 

I sent you more, as email, which I think is a better place to communicate. Except there is also that added immediacy of this organ (WhatsApp) here....that complete 'in the moment'. Let's not lose this either.

 

"I suspect you saw that 'cleanies' reference I put up. I know it seems offensive. It came from a time when I would go out to bars, or wherever, and someone would try to pick me up. We would chat away, the usual inanities, until the person flirting with me would ask was I clean. I would play along and say I washed regularly, or whatever, but they would insist. So, I would get them to ask me if I was positive or not. I was asked was I clean so many times. They would get angry too, when I said I was positive, as in why I had wasted their time. I was told a few times that I shouldn't be in a bar, because I was spoiling it for 'clean' people."

 

I am looking at stigma and shame, though the email I sent you is not about that. It's a continuation on the last one.

 

Rack: I had this boyfriend who said to me after I tested positive (as I was soliciting him for sex), “I didn’t think you could have sex now.” As if my vagina had grown a metal hymen. I think of him sometimes, now 35 years later, and wonder if he wonders what happened to me.

 

Ruin: I remember a friend in NYC used to cover his glass with his hand when he was drinking with me, just in case. I wasn't even positive then, but I was a wooftah. That was enough.

 

That was the same guy I went to work with in Palm Beach around 9/11. That story is, of course, here too.

 

It appears I have forsworn even trying to be a sympathetic character. It's just as well that I am fictional, or rather that we are.

snailbooty a.k.a. (Awesome) CW Wells is one of my two favourite artists www.flickr.com/photos/snailbooty along with the photographer known as minions and myrmidons www.flickr.com/photos/21891888@N00/

coincidentally both female, both American, and both at the top of their superb games, to the shame of galleries everywhere.

Circa 1962-64 Lockheed Missiles & Space Company artist’s concept of a Saturn-Apollo nuclear “lunar logistics” vehicle, depicting simultaneous jettison of the interstage, S-II stage ignition & payload fairing separation. Striking - what I’m pretty sure to be - artistic license.

 

8.5" x 11".

 

Although unsigned, extrapolating from what I assume to be other works from this series, possibly by Anthony Saporito & J. Kramer? William Collopy? Or the man himself, Ludwik Źiemba?

“SPACE STATION--Concept of 12-man space station is illustrated in cutaway by North American Rockwell’s Space Division, Downey, Calif. Space Division heads one of two teams selected by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for parallel 11-month, $2.9 million definition studies to design and develop a space station which could fly by 1975. Drawing shows crew quarters-command and control area in upper part of station, laboratory - experiment area, and physical conditioning area. Circular openings at top and bottom of station are multiple docking ports for logistics shuttle. Vehicle at lower left is experiment module placed in similar orbit to support station.”

 

Obvious (when viewed firsthand) handling marks, in the form of surface breaks visible under appropriate lighting/oblique angle, do not detract from this striking image, which still retains its high gloss.

 

An often reproduced work, for several reasons. Obviously, for the scene depicted (AS IS) to be plausible, the vehicle would have to be under constant acceleration. That apparent goof, along with the bare-buttocks guy showering, hopefully in addition to it being well-done, is likely why it’s been widely propagated.

 

...I think I've figured it out.

 

This is just one in a sequence (as is usually the case actually) of illustrations depicting a possible/proposed concept, proposal, whatever. In this case the construction of this particular space station configuration. Note the unaddressed component orbiting in the background...with the narrower diameter extension and what appears to be another similar object, at an angle, just behind it.

With that, I invite you to take a look at my other linked photo below.

 

Due to the image’s wider field of view, the initials “D B” are present. With the brilliant assistance of G, some extrapolation & edumuhcated guesses, a huge and totally unexpected WIN. Donald W. Bester.

Picture by Massimo Vitali

Drum scan by CastorScan

Kodak Portra 8x10" color negative

  

-----

 

CastorScan's philosophy is completely oriented to provide the highest scan and postproduction

quality on the globe.

 

We work with artists, photographers, agencies, laboratories etc. who demand a state-of-the-art quality at reasonable prices.

 

Our workflow is fully manual and extremely meticulous in any stage.

 

We developed exclusive workflows and profilation systems to obtain unparallel results from our scanners not achievable through semi-automatic and usual workflows.

  

-----

 

CastorScan uses the best scanners in circulation, Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II, the best and most advanced scanner ever made, Kodak-Creo IQSmart 3, a high-end flatbed scanner, and Imacon 848.

 

The image quality offered by our Dainippon Screen 8060 scanner is much higher than that achievable with the best flatbed scanners or filmscanners dedicated and superior to that of scanners so-called "virtual drum" (Imacon – Hasselblad,) and, of course, vastly superior to that amateur or prosumer obtained with scanners such as Epson V750 etc .

 

Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II exceeds in quality any other scanner, including Aztek Premier and ICG 380 (in the results, not just in the technical specifications).

 

8060's main features: 12000 dpi, Hi-Q Xenon lamp, 25 apertures, 2 micron

 

Aztek Premier's main features: 8000 dpi, halogen lamp, 18 apertures, 3 micron

 

ICG 380's main features: 12000 dpi, halogen lamp, 9 apertures, 4 micron

  

Some of the features that make the quality of our drum scanners better than any other existing scan system include:

 

The scans performed on a drum scanner are famous for their detail, depth and realism.

Scans are much cleaner and show fewer imperfections than scans obtained from CCD scanners, and thus save many hours of cleaning and spotting in postproduction.

Image acquisition by the drum scanner is optically similar to using a microscopic lens that scans the image point by point with extreme precision and without deformation or distortion of any kind, while other scanners use enlarger lenses (such as the Rodenstock-Linos Magnagon 75mm f8 used in the Hasselblad-Imacon scanners) and have transmission systems with rubber bands: this involves mild but effective micro-strain and micro-geometric image distortions and quality is not uniform between the center and edges.

Drum scanners are exempt from problems of flatness of the originals, since the same are mounted on a perfectly balanced transparent acrylic drum; on the contrary, the dedicated film scanners that scan slides or negatives in their plastic frames are subject to quite significant inaccuracies, as well as the Imacon-Hasselblad scanners, which have their own rubber and plastic holders: they do not guarantee the perfect flatness of the original and therefore a uniform definition between center and edge, especially with medium and large size originals, which instead are guaranteed by drum scanners.

Again, drum scanners allow scanning at high resolution over the entire surface of the cylinder, while for example the Hasselblad Imacon scans are limited to 3200 dpi in 120 format and 2000 dpi in 4x5" format (the resolution of nearly every CCD scanner in the market drops as the size of the original scanned is increased).

Drum scanners allow complete scanning of the whole negative, including the black-orange mask, perforations etc, while using many other scanners a certain percentage of the image is lost because it is covered by frames or holders.

Drum scanners use photomultiplier tubes to record the light signal, which are much more sensitive than CCDs and can record many more nuances and variations in contrast with a lower digital noise.

If you look at a monitor at 100% the detail in shadows and darker areas of a scan made with a CCD scanner, you will notice that the details are not recorded in a clear and clean way, and the colors are more opaque and less differentiated. Additionally the overall tones are much less rich and differentiated.

  

We would like to say a few words about an unscrupulous and deceitful use of technical specifications reported by many manufacturers of consumer and prosumer scanners; very often we read of scanners that promise cheap or relatively cheap “drum scanner” resolutions, 16 bits of color depth, extremely high DMAX: we would like to say that these “nominal” resolutions do not correspond to an actual optical resolution, so that even in low-resolution scanning you can see an enormous gap between drum scanners and these scanners in terms of detail, as well as in terms of DMAX, color range, realism, “quality” of grain. So very often when using these consumer-prosumer scanners at high resolutions, it is normal to get a disproportionate increase of file size in MB but not an increase of detail and quality.

To give a concrete example: a drum scan of a 24x36mm color negative film at 3500 dpi is much more defined than a scan made with mostly CCD scanner at 8000 dpi and a drum scan at 2500 dpi is dramatically clearer than a scan at 2500 dpi provided by a CCD scanner. So be aware and careful with incorrect advertisement.

 

Scans can be performed either dry or liquid-mounted. The wet mounting further improves cleanliness (helps to hide dirt, scratches and blemishes) and plasticity of the image without compromising the original, and in addition by mounting with liquid the film grain is greatly reduced and it looks much softer and more pleasant than the usual "harsh" grain resulting from dry scans.

 

We use Kami SMF 2001 liquid to mount the transparencies and Kami RC 2001 for cleaning the same. Kami SMF 2001 evaporates without leaving traces, unlike the traditional oil scans, ensuring maximum protection for your film. Out of ignorance some people prefer to avoid liquid scanning because they fear that their films will be dirty or damaged: this argument may be plausible only in reference to scans made using mineral oils, which have nothing to do with the specific professional products we use.

We strongly reiterate that your original is in no way compromised by our scanning liquid and will return as you have shipped it, if not cleaner.

 

With respect to scanning from slides:

Our scanners are carefully calibrated with the finest IT8 calibration targets in circulation and with special customized targets in order to ensure that each scan faithfully reproduces the original color richness even in the most subtle nuances, opening and maintaining detail in shadows and highlights. These color profiles allow our scanners to realize their full potential, so we guarantee our customers that even from a chromatic point of view our scans are noticeably better than similar scans made by mostly other scan services in the market.

In addition, we remind you that our 8060 drum scanner is able to read the deepest shadows of slides without digital noise and with much more detail than CCD scanners; also, the color range and color realism are far better.

 

With respect to scanning from color and bw negatives: we want to emphasize the superiority of our drum scans not only in scanning slides, but also in color and bw negative scanning (because of the orange mask and of very low contrast is extremely difficult for any ccd scanner to read the very slight tonal and contrast nuances in the color negative, while a perfectly profiled 8060 drum scanner – also through the analog gain/white calibration - can give back much more realistic images and true colors, sharper and more three-dimensional).

 

In spite of what many claim, a meticulous color profiling is essential not only for scanning slides, but also, and even more, for color negatives. Without it the scan of a color negative will produce chromatic errors rather significant, thus affecting the tonal balance and then the naturalness-pleasantness of the images.

  

More unique than rare, we do not use standardized profiles provided by the software to invert each specific negative film, because they do not take into account parameters and variables such as the type of development, the level of exposure, the type of light etc.,; at the same time we also avoid systems of "artificial intelligence" or other functions provided by semi-automatic scanning softwares, but instead we carry out the inversion in a full manual workflow for each individual picture.

 

In addition, scanning with Imacon-Hasselblad scanners we do not use their proprietary software - Flexcolor – to make color management and color inversion because we strongly believe that our alternative workflow provides much better results, and we are able to prove it with absolute clarity.

 

At each stage of the process we take care of meticulously adjusting the scanning parameters to the characteristics of the originals, to extrapolate the whole range of information possible from any image without "burning" or reductions in the tonal range, and strictly according to our customer's need and taste.

 

By default, we do not apply unsharp mask (USM) in our scans, except on request.

 

To scan reflective originals we follow the same guidelines and guarantee the same quality standard.

 

We guarantee the utmost thoroughness and expertise in the work of scanning and handling of the originals and we provide scans up to 12,000 dpi of resolution, at 16-bit, in RGB, GRAYSCALE, LAB or CMYK color mode; unless otherwise indicated, files are saved with Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB color profile.

 

WWW.CASTORSCAN.COM

The very first sizable Classic Space set I had as a kid was 6928 Uranium Search Vehicle, which I loved. I decided to build an updated version.

 

I made a few intentional changes to the design, but they're all extrapolated from the original. Specifically, the two sections are joined with an articulated tunnel rather than a hinge, and there are modest living quarters (including two beds) inside.

 

Be sure to check out the full set of photos!

Domingo Milella, Kodak Portra 160 NC 8x10".

Drum Scan by CastorScan

-----

  

CastorScan's philosophy is completely oriented to provide the highest scan and postproduction

quality on the globe.

  

We work with artists, photographers, agencies, laboratories etc. who demand a state-of-the-art quality at reasonable prices.

  

Our workflow is fully manual and extremely meticulous in any stage.

  

We developed exclusive workflows and profilation systems to obtain unparallel results from our scanners not achievable through semi-automatic and usual workflows.

  

-----

  

Il servizio offerto da CastorScan è completamente orientato

a fornire la massima qualità di scansione e postproduzione sul

mercato internazionale.

  

Lavoriamo con artisti, fotografi, agenzie e laboratori che richiedono

una qualità allo Stato dell'Arte a prezzi ragionevoli.

  

Il nostro flusso di lavoro è completamente manuale ed estremamente meticoloso

in ogni sua fase.

  

Abbiamo sviluppato workflows e sistemi di profilatura esclusivi che ci consentono

di ottenere risultati impareggiabili dai nostri scanners, non raggiungibili

attraverso workflows semiautomatici e/o convenzionali.

  

-----

  

CastorScan uses the best scanners in circulation, Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II, the best and most advanced scanner ever made, Kodak-Creo IQSmart 3, a high-end flatbed scanner, and Imacon 848.

  

The image quality offered by our Dainippon Screen 8060 scanner is much higher than that achievable with the best flatbed scanners or filmscanners dedicated and superior to that of scanners so-called "virtual drum" (Imacon – Hasselblad,) and, of course, vastly superior to that amateur or prosumer obtained with scanners such as Epson V750 etc .

  

Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II exceeds in quality any other scanner, including Aztek Premier and ICG 380 (in the results, not just in the technical specifications).

  

8060's main features: 12000 dpi, Hi-Q Xenon lamp, 25 apertures, 2 micron

  

Aztek Premier's main features: 8000 dpi, halogen lamp, 18 apertures, 3 micron

  

ICG 380's main features: 12000 dpi, halogen lamp, 9 apertures, 4 micron

  

Some of the features that make the quality of our drum scanners better than any other existing scan system include:

  

The scans performed on a drum scanner are famous for their detail, depth and realism.

Scans are much cleaner and show fewer imperfections than scans obtained from CCD scanners, and thus save many hours of cleaning and spotting in postproduction.

Image acquisition by the drum scanner is optically similar to using a microscopic lens that scans the image point by point with extreme precision and without deformation or distortion of any kind, while other scanners use enlarger lenses (such as the Rodenstock-Linos Magnagon 75mm f8 used in the Hasselblad-Imacon scanners) and have transmission systems with rubber bands: this involves mild but effective micro-strain and micro-geometric image distortions and quality is not uniform between the center and edges.

Drum scanners are exempt from problems of flatness of the originals, since the same are mounted on a perfectly balanced transparent acrylic drum; on the contrary, the dedicated film scanners that scan slides or negatives in their plastic frames are subject to quite significant inaccuracies, as well as the Imacon-Hasselblad scanners, which have their own rubber and plastic holders: they do not guarantee the perfect flatness of the original and therefore a uniform definition between center and edge, especially with medium and large size originals, which instead are guaranteed by drum scanners.

Again, drum scanners allow scanning at high resolution over the entire surface of the cylinder, while for example the Hasselblad Imacon scans are limited to 3200 dpi in 120 format and 2000 dpi in 4x5" format (the resolution of nearly every CCD scanner in the market drops as the size of the original scanned is increased).

Drum scanners allow complete scanning of the whole negative, including the black-orange mask, perforations etc, while using many other scanners a certain percentage of the image is lost because it is covered by frames or holders.

Drum scanners use photomultiplier tubes to record the light signal, which are much more sensitive than CCDs and can record many more nuances and variations in contrast with a lower digital noise.

If you look at a monitor at 100% the detail in shadows and darker areas of a scan made with a CCD scanner, you will notice that the details are not recorded in a clear and clean way, and the colors are more opaque and less differentiated. Additionally the overall tones are much less rich and differentiated.

  

We would like to say a few words about an unscrupulous and deceitful use of technical specifications reported by many manufacturers of consumer and prosumer scanners; very often we read of scanners that promise cheap or relatively cheap “drum scanner” resolutions, 16 bits of color depth, extremely high DMAX: we would like to say that these “nominal” resolutions do not correspond to an actual optical resolution, so that even in low-resolution scanning you can see an enormous gap between drum scanners and these scanners in terms of detail, as well as in terms of DMAX, color range, realism, “quality” of grain. So very often when using these consumer-prosumer scanners at high resolutions, it is normal to get a disproportionate increase of file size in MB but not an increase of detail and quality.

To give a concrete example: a drum scan of a 24x36mm color negative film at 3500 dpi is much more defined than a scan made with mostly CCD scanner at 8000 dpi and a drum scan at 2500 dpi is dramatically clearer than a scan at 2500 dpi provided by a CCD scanner. So be aware and careful with incorrect advertisement.

  

Scans can be performed either dry or liquid-mounted. The wet mounting further improves cleanliness (helps to hide dirt, scratches and blemishes) and plasticity of the image without compromising the original, and in addition by mounting with liquid the film grain is greatly reduced and it looks much softer and more pleasant than the usual "harsh" grain resulting from dry scans.

  

We use Kami SMF 2001 liquid to mount the transparencies and Kami RC 2001 for cleaning the same. Kami SMF 2001 evaporates without leaving traces, unlike the traditional oil scans, ensuring maximum protection for your film. Out of ignorance some people prefer to avoid liquid scanning because they fear that their films will be dirty or damaged: this argument may be plausible only in reference to scans made using mineral oils, which have nothing to do with the specific professional products we use.

We strongly reiterate that your original is in no way compromised by our scanning liquid and will return as you have shipped it, if not cleaner.

  

With respect to scanning from slides:

Our scanners are carefully calibrated with the finest IT8 calibration targets in circulation and with special customized targets in order to ensure that each scan faithfully reproduces the original color richness even in the most subtle nuances, opening and maintaining detail in shadows and highlights. These color profiles allow our scanners to realize their full potential, so we guarantee our customers that even from a chromatic point of view our scans are noticeably better than similar scans made by mostly other scan services in the market.

In addition, we remind you that our 8060 drum scanner is able to read the deepest shadows of slides without digital noise and with much more detail than CCD scanners; also, the color range and color realism are far better.

  

With respect to scanning from color and bw negatives: we want to emphasize the superiority of our drum scans not only in scanning slides, but also in color and bw negative scanning (because of the orange mask and of very low contrast is extremely difficult for any ccd scanner to read the very slight tonal and contrast nuances in the color negative, while a perfectly profiled 8060 drum scanner – also through the analog gain/white calibration - can give back much more realistic images and true colors, sharper and more three-dimensional).

  

In spite of what many claim, a meticulous color profiling is essential not only for scanning slides, but also, and even more, for color negatives. Without it the scan of a color negative will produce chromatic errors rather significant, thus affecting the tonal balance and then the naturalness-pleasantness of the images.

  

More unique than rare, we do not use standardized profiles provided by the software to invert each specific negative film, because they do not take into account parameters and variables such as the type of development, the level of exposure, the type of light etc.,; at the same time we also avoid systems of "artificial intelligence" or other functions provided by semi-automatic scanning softwares, but instead we carry out the inversion in a full manual workflow for each individual picture.

  

In addition, scanning with Imacon-Hasselblad scanners we do not use their proprietary software - Flexcolor – to make color management and color inversion because we strongly believe that our alternative workflow provides much better results, and we are able to prove it with absolute clarity.

  

At each stage of the process we take care of meticulously adjusting the scanning parameters to the characteristics of the originals, to extrapolate the whole range of information possible from any image without "burning" or reductions in the tonal range, and strictly according to our customer's need and taste.

  

By default, we do not apply unsharp mask (USM) in our scans, except on request.

  

To scan reflective originals we follow the same guidelines and guarantee the same quality standard.

  

We guarantee the utmost thoroughness and expertise in the work of scanning and handling of the originals and we provide scans up to 12,000 dpi of resolution, at 16-bit, in RGB, GRAYSCALE, LAB or CMYK color mode; unless otherwise indicated, files are saved with Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB color profile.

  

WWW.CASTORSCAN.COM

Clearly inspired by Jasper Johns, ‘Beer’ is an art installation in the bay window of an ordinary terrace house in Walthamstow, where one of the curtains is made of beer cans. The brand, Holsten Pils, is a well-known European premium packaged lager, originally made in Germany. Whenever ‘Beer’ is discussed among the E17 art cognoscenti, the conversation invariable revolves around the tension between what is real and what is fantasy, or where reality ends and art begins. This is the rich conceptual way of engaging with art. But would it be possible to extrapolate a private meaning as well? Can we find another explanation for these beer cans? Could they be, for example, a dedication to the artist’s loved ones whose death was alcohol-related? We may even be able to conclude that these objects, suspended as they are between upholstery and pop art, have no narrative expression. Allow that.

Just so people understand whilst reading:

 

Ordinary speech text = Batman

 

Bold and italics = Superman

 

Bold = Cyborg

 

Underlined = Aquaman

 

Bold and underlined = Wonder Woman

 

Italics = Flash

 

Italics and underlined = Green Lantern

 

Enjoy!

 

-

The fighting has come an end at last. Thank goodness. Aquaman would have killed me if not for the timely intervention of Superman. Not sure what it was that he removed from Aquaman but it seems to have done the trick in returning him as well as Wonder Woman and the Flash to normal. Given how Superman claims that all three of them had some form of organism on them I can only suspect it has something to do with what’s in orbit around the planet. As Superman flies to collect both Batman and Wonder Woman I manage to re-establish my connection with the servers before signaling a satellite to reposition itself so I can get a clear view of whatever it is that’s in orbit.

 

“Hey man you alright?”

 

“I’m fine messenger. Yourself?”

 

“Yeah, much better now that I can think straight.”

 

“Messenger? Since when did you become known as the messenger?”

 

“I dunno. He and Wonder Woman both seem to like calling me it so who am I to complain?”

 

“Well I’m still calling you the Flash.”

 

“The Flash?”

 

“Yeah that’s his name. Just as yours is Aquaman.”

 

Aquaman’s face quickly becomes serious at the mention of his name. I guess he’s not the biggest fan of it.

 

“Errr Hal I don’t think you should call him that.”

 

“Well I don’t think you should call me Hal either Barry.”

 

“Oh…..well why did you throw my name out there as well?”

 

“Just returning the favor old buddy.”

 

“Silence both of you. Now is not the time for petty squabbles.”

 

“Agreed Aquaman.”

 

All four of us turn to see both Superman and Batman approaching us on foot. Oddly Aquaman seems rather unphased by Superman using that name. Guess he’s not too fussed over the use of that name as he lets on. Behind both Batman and Superman I see Wonder Woman walking out of the hole in the building Superman created by punching her through the wall. Fortunately she appears completely unharmed by this conflict. Boy I dread to think what would have happened if Batman hadn’t stepped in to stop her.

 

“So what’s the situation?”

 

“Is that Batman?”

 

“Yeah it is. Don’t get too excited though Flash. The guy's a massive di…”

 

“I can hear you.”

 

The Green Lantern falls silent almost immediately after hearing Batman’s remark. Not sure why but I find that funny for some reason.

 

“See what I mean?”

 

“Calm down Lantern, I’m sure he’s not as bad as you think he is.”

 

“Are you alright Diana?”

 

“I am Arthur. Are you well?”

 

“Yes I’m well thanks.”

 

“Who are these people Arthur?”

 

“I’m not too sure Diana.“

 

“I can help with that.”

 

I choose this moment as my time to interject. Time I bring everyone up to speed.

 

“Right now the world as we know it is possibly in great danger.”

 

“What sort of danger?”

 

“Stop talking and let him explain.”

 

“Why don’t you take your own advice spooky?”

 

“Be silent human glowstick."

 

“What did you just call me fishboy?”

 

“Hal shut up and listen.”

 

“You just called me Hal again!”

 

“Come on Lantern stop making a scene. Let Cyborg talk.”

 

“Why’s everyone suddenly against me?”

 

“Because you’re making a scene!”

 

I’m not sure how this managed to get out of hand so quickly and I dare not interject. I need all of these heroes if I’m to stand a chance of stopping this threat that Eiling spoke of. I attempt to get everyone back on track but no-one seems to be listening to me. Fortunately though I think Wonder Woman saw my attempts to stop the arguing as she steps in by lassoing the Green Lantern.

 

“Hey what the hell?”

 

“You are making a scene where there is not to be made. Now be silent and I shall release you.”

 

The lasso around the Lantern begins to glow a bright golden colour as the Lantern quickly falls silent. Not sure how on earth that lasso is able to silence the loud mouth but I need to get my hands on one of them.

 

After a couple of seconds Wonder Woman releases her lasso and the Lantern remains silent simply crossing his arms in response to being released.

 

“Go ahead Cyborg."

 

With those words from Superman I engage my holographic display to show the image of the object in space being streamed straight to my system.

 

“Recently an unknown object entered Earth’s atmosphere. It is unknown why or how it entered the atmosphere but since it’s arrival the composition of the atmosphere has begun to alter dramatically. Oxygen levels in particular have already dropped by three percent.”

 

“What could do such a thing?”

 

“I’m not sure Aquaman, but the President decided to act before things got even more out of hand.”

 

“The missile.”

 

“Indeed, and as I’m sure you’re all aware the missile detonated before it could collide with the target.”

 

“Thus generating the electromagnetic pulse that took out most the countries electronics.”

 

“And nearly downed a plane full of people.”

 

Ever the optimist aren’t you Batman?

 

“Yeah. Also nearly bringing down that plane.”

 

“So what are we able to do that a five tonne payload missile couldn’t?”

 

“I’m not sure honestly Flash. All I know is that we need to stop whatever the heck this thing is before it can do any more damage beyond what we’ve all managed to do to Central City.”

 

“Man you guys sure did leave a mess for me to clean up."

 

“I’ll help you with that later Flash. But right now we’ve got bigger issues to worry about.”

 

“What do you mean Superman?”

 

Superman points up to the sky and as the rest of us look up we notice two large objects falling from the sky.

 

“What is that? Another plane falling out of the sky?”

 

“That doesn’t look like any plane I’ve seen, and I'm in the airforce.”

 

“Well what is it?”

 

I zoom in on the object with my optics and I’m able to spot it’s outline is almost identical to that of the previous object that I managed to intercept before colliding into Central City. A quick analysis by my system predicts that both these new objects will collide in different areas. One will impact in Metropolis whilst another is set to crash into Coast City.

 

“They’re more of those objects that nearly crashed here earlier.”

 

“There’s another two of those things?”

 

“What happened to the one that was going to crash here? Where did it go?”

 

“I managed to intercept it and force into the ocean.”

 

“What was that thing Cyborg?”

 

“I’m not sure. Before I could get a good look at it I had to deal with Flash, Wonder Woman and Aquaman fighting each other.”

 

As I’m explaining all that happened to the Flash, Wonder Woman and Aquaman both Batman and Superman have their sights set on the object falling out of the sky.

 

“Where are they heading Superman?”

 

“I’m not sure.”

 

“I think I know. I had my system predict their impact sites and they’re set to impact in Coast City and Metropolis.”

 

“Metropolis?”

 

“Coast City?”

 

Those two cities seem to resonate strongly with Superman and the Green Lantern

 

“We need to get there and stop those things from crashing into both those cities.”

 

“Agreed, but we also need to stop whatever it is that’s causing all this trouble.“

 

“Aquaman’s right Lantern. Cyborg can you track where these objects came from?”

 

“If I extrapolate their flight path I should be able to.”

 

“Good because you and I are going to confront this problem head on.”

 

Everyone in the group turns to look at Superman for instructions. I guess it makes sense that he's the one to give out the orders. He's the most powerful of all us here so it only makes sense that he's the one in charge.

 

“Everyone else will need to play damage control. Stop those things from colliding with Metropolis and Coast City.”

 

He turns to look at Batman in particular for his next statement.

 

“Take care of Metropolis whilst I’m gone.”

 

Batman nods his head before the Green Lantern interjects.

 

“How high in the atmosphere is that thing Cyborg?”

 

“Barely. It's practically in space. Honestly I’m not sure if my systems could get me that far out at all.”

 

“Then you go with the others. I can go out into space so that makes me a better candidate than you. Do you have the co-ordinates for that thing?”

 

“Yeah why?”

 

“Bring them up on that hologram of yours and I’ll have my ring scan them.”

 

I comply and display the co-ordinates allowing the Lantern to scan them with his ring. Before he turns to Superman signaling him to follow. Superman agrees and the pair fly off up into the sky towards the predicted launch site of those objects.

 

With them gone Batman turns to the rest of us and begins to issue commands.

 

“Flash, Wonder Woman you two head to Coast City and try to stop that thing from crash landing there.”

 

Both Flash and Wonder Woman nod their heads before the Flash races off to Coast City and Wonder Woman takes off into the air to follow his movements.

 

“Cyborg, Aquaman. Both of you will need to try and prevent that object from hitting Metropolis.”

 

Aquaman raises and eyebrow at the fact that Batman is not coming to Metropolis.

 

“And what about you?”

 

“I’m heading to where Cyborg sent that first object. We need to know what it is that we’re up against. You two keep Metropolis safe. I’ll be in touch.”

 

Batman throws me a headset. Before walking over to his overturned car.

 

Not sure what good that’s going to be but Aquaman looks at me nodding his head to ask me if I’m ready. I nod to acknowledge him and we both set off for Metropolis. He runs to the nearest source of water as I launch up into the sky. I’m not sure what that thing is that’s in the atmosphere causing all this but hopefully Superman and Green Lantern can get to the bottom of it….

The #FlickrFriday #ABitOfOrder challenge

 

"Probably the simplest hypothesis... is that there may be a slow process of annihilation of matter."

 

- Sir Arthur Eddington; Physicist, Astronomer, Philosopher 1882-1944

____________________________________________

 

We live in a highly ordered world. That unremarkable statement may seem to reflect our obsession with neatness, organisation and timeliness. However let's look at what physics has to say about what it believes order actually is.

 

Physics, among other things, introduces the term 'entropy' to express how ordered a system is. Mathematically speaking, it is the number of possible configurations of its component parts which allow the system to exist at all, divided by the total number of possible ways those parts may be configured. Low entropy therefore describes a high degree of order. Physicists frequently explain abstract ideas like this by reference to simple situations so let's do so.

 

Consider going to the seaside, packing damp sand into a bucket, smartly inverting it onto the beach, and removing the bucket in the time honoured fashion. We have made a sandcastle, a simple structure (or system) which can only exist if the grains of sand are configured in a limited number of ways. There are many more ways in which those grains may be arranged, the vast majority of them being unremarkable piles of sand, each pile looking much like all the others. A small number of configurations capable of creating a system divided by a much larger possible number of configurations results in a low number, representing low entropy or a high degree of order.

 

The Second Law of Thermodynamics provides that the entropy of an isolated system, left alone, cannot decrease. In practice it always increases, accounting for the fact that things decay, wear out, fall apart. Spontaneous repair does not happen.

 

Returning to our sandcastle, as the day progresses, its sand dries, reducing adhesion. Grains start to fall or are blown away causing the structure to lose shape. It becomes an unremarkable pile of sand, practically indistinguishable from any other sand pile. In scientific terms its entropy has increased with time, soon becoming indistinguishable from the even higher entropy beach.

 

Now let's extrapolate from sandcastles to The Universe. Nobody can accuse me of lack of ambition! Recall that, from The Second Law of Thermodynamics, Entropy increases as time passes. Consider an abandoned car rusting away into dust; a fallen tree being converted to soil through consumption by fungi; a building falling into disrepair; a small space rock entering our atmosphere and burning up, delighting observers as it presents itself as a shooting star while scattering its atoms among our atmosphere; two asteroids colliding, smashing each other into bits; a comet leaving a trail of dust illuminated by The Sun; and a star exploding in a supernova event, spreading its matter over huge distances. All exemplify increasing entropy. Back on Earth, many of us earn our crusts repairing what we (or more accurately, The Second Law of Thermodynamics) break or wear out. Tradesmen (and DIY stores) earn their livings courtesy of The Second Law and as they can never reverse it, they will always be in business!

 

This all leads us to the concept of The Arrow of Time created by the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington. When The Arrow points to the future, Eddington, applying The Second Law, expects greater randomness or disorder; in other words, higher entropy than now. Recall our sandcastle which we may now regard as a metaphor for the prediction that in about 10 trillion years time the galaxies we may assume will live for all time will be gone. All that will be left will be atomic and subatomic particles (including particles which had once combined to form the extremely low entropy us), randomly moving around in unimaginably vast nothingness, so vast that the probability of those particles ever again interacting to create anything at all is, functionally speaking, zero. That's the bleakest of predictions of our destiny but 10 trillion years is a long time, maybe even long enough for my football team to win something meaningful. Or perhaps not, but anyway, there's no need to cancel your Flickr Pro subs just yet.

 

Conversely, when The Arrow points to the past we see a more ordered world and universe. We might even imagine our sandcastle rebuilding itself from the pile of sand it had become. Go back far enough and we encounter God creating Heaven and Earth, or, according to your belief, the Big Bang when scientists tell us The Universe was simple and highly ordered.

 

A photo of a disintegrating watch overlaid on Genesis 1 as recorded in an old Bible therefore seems to me to be an apt metaphor for The Arrow of Time. It was created by duplicating and resizing twice a single photo of a watch with liquefying applied through Photoshop and various bits deleted and cloned to represent disintegration as time passes. Mould marks on the page and creases are faintly visible despite the increased saturation I applied to add colour to the image. They demonstrate increasing entropy in themselves.

 

“Artist’s concept of Pioneer over Jupiter’s Red Spot.

 

Man will reach out beyond Mars to take the first close look at the planet Jupiter on the mission of the unmanned Pioneer F spacecraft, to be launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration from Cape Kennedy, Fla., between Feb. and March 1972. The trip to Jupiter will last less than two years, for most launch dates, with most arrival times before Dec. 31, 1973. Jupiter is a spectacular planet. It appears to have its own internal energy source and is so massive that it is almost a small star. It may have the necessary ingredients to produce life. Its volume is 1,000 times that of Earth, and it has more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined. Striped in glowing yellow-orange and blue-gray, it floats in like a bright-colored rubber ball. It has a huge red “eye” in its southern hemisphere and spins more than twice as fast as Earth. Pioneer’s 13 scientific experiments are expected to provide new knowledge about Jupiter and many aspects of the outer solar system and our galaxy. It will return the first close-up images of Jupiter, and will made the first measurements of Jupiter’s twilight side, never seen from Earth.”

 

From the estate of Eric Burgess, and possibly featured as figure 3-3(a) in an unidentified publication by him.

 

Although disappointingly, wrongly, yet as expected, acknowledged nowhere within the following document, I’m quite certain that this beautiful work is by Rick Guidice. As the title/header image for chapter 4, along with the title/header artist’s concepts within the publication confirmed to be by Mr. Guidice, a reasonable extrapolation. Besides, it was probably contractually agreed to by Mr. Guidice & NASA.

 

In color:

 

images.nasa.gov/details-ARC-1972-AC72-1354

 

Along with others. Always exceptional:

 

e05.code.blog/category/nasa-un-crewed-programs/pioneer/

Credit: numbers station blog

 

Twenty Interlocking Irregular Hyperboloidal Dodecahedra 600 units

5-fold view.

This is the first working iteration of my magnum opus wireframe project for summer 2022: a supremely complex compound of 20 irregular dodecahedra. This is the icosahedral/dodecahedral symmetry extrapolation of the compound of 8 Dodecahedra I designed a month or two ago. Here, each dodecahedron corresponds to a single 3-fold axis representing the face of an icosahedron (or a vertex of a dodecahedron). This design also illustrates the importance of scaffold construction methods: assembling a model such as this a frame at a time is simply impossible, as the innermost vertices are deeply imbedded within the model. I believe that this is the largest ever compound of polyhedral frames. Designing this model was a considerable effort- this is version 4.5, and it could really use a refold.

Designed by me.

Folded out of copy paper.

 

Certainly protohistoric and potentially prehistoric.

Basins and canals - bassins et rigoles.

The lower panoramic show the context for three south facing basins, all browned with post autumnal detritus and visible from the centre and to the right of the image.

 

The rock is sandstone, so it can lend itself to both form and extrapolation Certainly the greater site has seen a continuum of spiritual uses, most recently, 1076-1772, with a religious order based on relative silence and simplicity. The Monks of the 'Ordre de Grandmont' walked barefoot and preyed without great ornamentation or luxury. Prior to this (and residues and fades of collective memory are so difficult to measure) there was a usage by a local Gaulois tribe. A local plethora of basins seem to link back to an adjacent dolmen suggesting that the site may have been on a continuum of cultural and spiritual understanding that passes between history, past protohistory and into prehistory.

Built on the extrapolation of concepts found in the Weardflota gunboat, the Weosule is designed for range and endurance, and speed when the situation calls for it. Unfortunately the shipyard fairies went on strike halfway through construction and formed a labor union, which was reflected in the final bill to the Ordenric "government" (one bishop of mighty faith trying to get everyone else to stop enjoying a world where they can finally get married) on Ælfeneard.

 

Range: 14

Guns: 5" (-1) [2" secondaries]

Torps: 4 (0)

Armor: 2" (0)

Speed: 23kn (+2)

Big Vic’s Big Magazine (+1)

Auxiliary sails (0)

Ram (0)

Greek Accountant (-1)

Longitudinal Bulkhead (-1)

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

Sturgeon in Orbit

Stories by Theodore Sturgeon

- Extrapolation • (1954)

- The Wages of Synergy • (1953)

- Make Room for Me • (1951)

- The Heart • (1955)

- The Incubi of Parallel X • (1951)

cover: Ed Emshwiller

(The cover is reprinted from the All-Sturgeon issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

Pyramid Books / USA 1964

Reprint: Comic-Club NK 2010

ex libris MTP

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Sturgeon

 

The Macro Monday theme for 7/24 is buckle. (The admin said we could use a toggle and I extrapolated that to include a clasp, also.) We have a dearth of typical belts, so I went hunting for stand-ins. There are a few possibilities so I’ll dither, naturally.

Starships exit jump to stellar zenith (usually) at roughly three quarters c (usually, military vessels routinely manage .9). Any ships or stations in the system can't see an inbound ship immediately—sensors are of course limited to the constant.

 

The second it shows on scan and is confirmed enemy or unknown via ID squawk or lack thereof, system defenses are going to be slinging laser at its extrapolated track. Chaff can confuse scan in a limited way, but it's not under power and can be subtracted from the pattern.

 

Riders are limpeted (commonly 4 to a carrier), and can be deployed or not, squawking the carrier's ID or none at all. Riders are ninety percent engines, fuel, and warheads, with a minimal crew of 4 (pilot, scan, weapons, systems), up to about 30 (these are mostly dedicated to scan and systems). A rider detaching keeps the carrier's v (or adjusts to confuse system scan and diffuse the carrier's track), although it is not capable of jump, and the physical forces on the crew are much less compensated than onboard the carrier.

 

Unshielded, riders present a minimal frontal profile, with flattened bodies carrying a grossly high percentage of fuel mass—the rider's balance changes constantly as this is burnt and munitions are unloaded, the pilots are very good.

 

Munitions are generally sufficient to cripple an enemy carrier or station. Lasers are not carried but instead missiles, flak, and defensive chaff. Rider power distribution is overwhelmingly to engines—the ship must be capable of maneuvering under fire as well as returning to the carrier before jump.

 

-

 

Based on C.J. Cherryh's titular "Hellburner" ship prototype. It's big for a starfighter, but about as close as you might get to the concept in a harder sci-fi setting.

 

Culprit: 【Carmen Miranda's Ghost】- Bomber

LXF: www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Cagerrin/MOCs/LDD/hellburner3.lxf

  

I was just gifted this awesome 1980’s era manual focus lens and must post test shots. Vignetting added in photoshop. Full res for the pixel-peepers.

 

The old little Tammie 17mm hits its resolution wall here when used with the Canon 5D Mark II (21 megapixel sensor). The DxO "perceived megapixel" score for the lens is around 10 "perceptual" mp, whereas the 5DII sensor tests with DxO at 14 mp. Now, why would a nominal 21 mp sensor yield only 14 "perceptual megapixels?" According to DxO, it's because with the standard Bayer sensor array design, a third of those pixels are "fake"—extrapolated/created by the camera software. BTW, this 15mp file is at full 21-mp res—I just cropped out a bunch of crap on the left and right sides.

 

A lovely image of this lens by flickr-ite Y.H. Lee:

www.flickr.com/photos/yhlee/2553586424

 

Here’s PopPhoto/Modern Photography’s comparison MTF resolution & sharpness tests vs. the competition at the time: www.adaptall-2.com/lenses/51B.html

view my photos on black

  

CNN would not shut up about tsunamis yesterday. Please don't take that to mean that I have no feelings about people in a bad situation, I just mean that I think 24 hour news must be stopped. The one thing they did say that caught my ear was that as a result of the earthquake off Chili, we might be getting some good waves in California. Weather or not this is true, it got me off my couch and into my truck.

Once I got to the Golden Gate, I realized that I didn't want to get crushed into rocks, so I headed into the marina.

I've always been amazed by the Palace of Fine Arts. It's so big once you're standing in it. It also reminds me of a time when America would build things to see if they could, and to impress, not just to make money. The extrapolated result of the form follows function movement has left us with too few structures like these in recent times.

Anywho, I've shot here several times, and never been happy with the result. I got closer this time in large part due to the foreground. The reflection always handles itself, and the building is always amazing. It's difficult at night as the highlights blow out so easy.

What sets this image apart is that by setting the camera so low, I could use the silhouette of the grass as my foreground element, so even though its a silhouette, that's where my focus point was.

I also used a Cokin 1.2 GND to bring the lights of the structure closer to the level of the reflection. (I can't wait to replace my Cokin stuff with Lee or something else!)

Cheers!

 

Canon 5d mark ii

16-35mm at 31mm

iso 200

f19

208 seconds

Cokin 1.2 GND

circular polarizer

 

www.ropelatophotography.net

 

“1” METAL SHIELD WILL “SPONGE UP” HEAT AS MERCURY CAPSULE RE-ENTERS ATMOSPHERE

 

When the first astronaut plummets back to earth in the Mercury capsule, the scene may be similar to this one, which appears as the cover of the September issue of SPACE/AERONAUTICS, the magazine of aerospace technology.

 

As the capsule falls back into the earth’s atmosphere, it will resemble a gigantic automobile type cigarette lighter -- its tip almost white hot. The only protection for the first space man, against the disintegrating heat caused by re-entry, will be a “heat sink” (or shield) 6 feet in diameter and 1 inch thick. Made of Berrylium, the shield can withstand temperatures up to 1,250 degrees Centigrade or 2,282 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

A ”heat sink” is actually a metal body, with good thermal conductivity, that sponges up the heat as it is formed, and stores it. It has a high melting point and good oxidation resistance.

 

In this artist’s conception the Mercury capsule is descending through the atmosphere. The bulge in the middle of the shield houses retro-rockets (to push the vehicle out of orbit) which have already been fired. The rockets still firing are used for attitude control – to keep the vehicle from spinning and twisting. The final descent of the vehicle will be by parachute which can be seen opening up.”

 

Thanks to issuu and it’s posting of “A Century At Langley”, by Joseph R. Chambers, the capsule depiction is seen to be based entirely upon the test article used in the 20-ft Spin Tunnel there, seen here:

 

issuu.com/nasalangley/docs/chap1-12_spds/52

 

Not surprisingly, I wasn’t able to come across an image of the referenced magazine’s cover. A shame, this had to have looked fantastic in color, which I assume that was. Regardless of color, that background is pretty ‘non-traditional’ for 1959. I can also overlook the artistic license of the retro-pack still being attached at re-entry. I assume there may have still been reaction control firings during drogue parachute deployment.

 

The artist is George Meyerreicks. Examples that I found of works by a gentleman with that name however do not comport, to include signature style. Yet, there’s this…the lifespan cited works as does the “technical publications” reference:

 

“George Meyerriecks (1920-1990) studied at Pratt and later at the Art Students League with Reginald Marsh. He had a long career as an illustrator for technical publications. In later years, he devoted his talents to landscapes and portraits.”

 

At:

 

www.invaluable.com/auction-lot/meyerriecks-george-the-mai...

Credit: Invaluable website (via Heritage Auctions)

 

So, who knows. I’m actually pleasantly surprised there’s even the above! Maybe a “WIN”?

 

Very interesting…to me that is:

 

history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch5-7.htm

 

history.nasa.gov/SP-4201/ch6-4.htm

 

www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum29/HTML/001426.html

Credit: collectSPACE website

 

Finally…which raises the possibility that Mr. Meyerreicks may have rendered this wonderful image on behalf of the Brush Beryllium Company.

 

materion.com/about/new-at-materion/before-and-after-apoll...

 

Possibly supporting my above, the small print at the bottom cites (amongst others) the very issue of “SPACE AERONAUTICS” referenced in the caption. Coincidence? I think not...in fact, I'll even go one further. Based on, and extrapolating into the future (I think) Mr. Meyerricks' genre of works, I think the following (the knight, since the link will crap out) is probably by him as well:

 

materion.com/-/media/images/business-units/beryllium--com...

Credit: Materion website

Aletheia - The Oracle Of Exosthys by Daniel Arrhakis (2025)

 

>> With the music : Fort Azimuth: Dark Ambient Space Music by Futurescapes

 

youtu.be/utaMC8bIysw

  

Aletheia or Alethia is truth or disclosure in philosophy.

 

Originating in Ancient Greek philosophy, the term was explicitly used for the first time in the history of philosophy by Parmenides in his poem "On Nature", in which he contrasts it with "Doxa" (opinion).

 

The literal meaning of the word ἀλήθεια is "the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident.

 

Aletheia began as a Counter Movement after the turbulent times of Trump in America and the Rise of Elon and has mainly marked the second half of the 21st Century.

 

Truth as the basis of a new society and a powerful mystical vision of a future based on Science and Spirituality and the extrapolation of future events through Artificial Intelligence - The Oracle Of Exosthys.

 

Let's talk stratigraphy. Typically I would avoid it. Stratigraphers are an odd bunch, in my experience. They like naming things and ordering them. I find their ramblings a lot like reading off fantasy football teams; that kind of thing. Today is one of those days when I can't put it off any longer.

 

The question about whether the Bumbo Latite Member of the Gerringong Volcanics was intrusive or extrusive has been addressed. Let's just say others have had a good look at what lies beneath and decided it's extrusive. Those same investigators say there is a non-conformity between the Bumbo Latite Member and the underlying Kiama Sandstone. Look across this little cove. That band of reddish rocks belongs to the Kiama Sandstone and the Bumbo Latite with its columnar jointing is on top.

 

All of this is part of the Sydney Basin which is demonstrably the right way up. Recalling Steno that makes the latite younger than the sandstone. Stratigraphers love to extrapolate what little they know so their recitations of lists might be longer making somewhat of a saga of them. They say that west of here is one great layer of sandstone equivalent to the multiple units above and below, just interrupted by these untidy volcanic extrusions. Yada yada…I told you their lists were tedious!

 

Knowing that the Kiama Sandstone Member can't just be hanging in space or floating on the back of a great turtle — whatever — there's something underneath. We'll go there later. Right now, you'll need a break from stratigraphy. I know I do.

The Macro Monday theme for 7/24 is buckle. (The admin said we could use a toggle and I extrapolated that to include a clasp, also.) We have a dearth of typical belts, so I went hunting for stand-ins. There are a few possibilities so I’ll dither, naturally.

laclefdescoeurs: I Mori di Venezia (detail), Cesare Maccari So, I got this message in the ol inbox asking about this post: Hello! I’ve been seeing this post floating around - laclefdescoeurs.tumblr.com/post/118906947237/i-mori-di-ve... - and while I love it, I wish I could find more information about it? I’ve used any number of keywords based on the caption, even translating it to (obviously) ‘The Moors of Venice’, but still: no luck. There’s not even any clues on Maccari-dedicated art archives. Do you happen to know anything about it? Hope all’s well; your work is staggering and so much appreciated. — myloveisaquestion And let me tell you, I really, really tried. I’ve never seen it before, but from looking at it, it appears to be an Orientalist painting, probably Italian, probably c. 1850-1900ish. Nothing depicted rung any symbolic bells for me, either. I ignored the title, since this person already tried that and a lot of the time, titles given are at the discretion of whatever art historian happens to be writing about it (or archivist is entering it into a database) at the time. It’s also labeled with (detail), from which we can extrapolate that it is a detail of a larger painting, which makes it difficult to find through image searches. But I did it anyhow. They turned up two books in French which had used this painting for their covers. The first is about the Italian School of Orientalist Painters (i used google translate on the page): And the second is a book of fairy tales: Now, if you have a way to see inside the first few pages, which Amazon has sometimes, you can see the copyright page where the work used on the cover should be listed (even if it’s public domain). Alas, this was not the case for either of these two books. So, my second tack was to check specific art history and image databases individually for this artist, Cesare Maccari. The most fruitful was Bridgeman Images, which turned up a few paintings by this artist, but I didn’t see the people pictures above embedded in any larger paintings. I also checked the Web Gallery of Art, The Getty, Rijksmuseum, The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Art History Site Database and Search (which includes links to auction sites which I also looked through), The Getty Research Institute, WikiPaintings, and WikiMedia Commons. The auction sites had some paintings listed, but none matched up with this image that I saw. Now, if anyone really MUST know, has about 27 dollars, and can read French, the answer to this mystery is probably in the first book I linked to up there about the Italian Orientalist painters, although the edition featured on Amazon has a different painting on the cover. It may also only contain the artist, estimated year of production, dimensions, and where it’s currently being held. A lot of information that people might want to know about it like who modeled for it, what the subject is (or is supposed to be), what they’re doing, or why this guy is holding a fishbowl, may never be able to be known. The thing about Orientalist paintings is they’re basically fantasy. They don’t realistically reflect people or cultures they’re supposed to depict (if any); they’re pretty much made up: clothes, people, situations, and places, influenced by whatever impression or ideas European painters formed about “the East”. Any given Orientalist painting, like this one by Ludvig Deutsch (1892), for example: Is it awesome?? Sure!! Is it like 75-90% made up? Yes it is. I mean, same with a fantasy painting like this one: [Joseph Noel Paton; Study for The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania. c. 1849] It’s basically a collection of archetypes, stereotypes, bowdlerized literature and lots and lots of glitter. You have works that are considered more “ethnographic”, like various portraits by José Tapiró y Baró: [José Tapiró y Baró; Portrait of a Moroccan Man Spain, c. 1890] But honestly, I haven’t seen much to convince me that these can be considered accurate representations of culture or fashion. There is plenty to support the hypothesis that the man who modeled for the artist was very handsome, however. ;) And there you have absolutely everything I could figure out and/or extrapolate on regarding the painting in the original post above. If anyone else knows more about the painting above, even what the full painting looks like, feel free to let me know!

if you'll...

 

This image has had quite the circuitous path to completion.

On 02 January, I had been strolling around the ABQ Botanic Garden. At the entrance to the children's fantasy garden is this dragon. That morning the over cast sky acted as a giant softbox, giving fairly even light rather than our more common hard light and harsh shadow.

I had been thinking that somehow, I might find a use for the capture in something composited, but so far, nothing has compelled its use.

Recently, with purchasing the iPhone 7, I realized that I could get images from my computer, shot with my "real" cameras, into the phone via the Dropbox app.

In the first comment box below, you'll see the relatively unedited image that had been shot with the Fuji X-T1 and the long lens.

I used Lr to send it there as a jpeg, and from Dropbox it was imported into Snapseed.

Snapseed was used to lighten the shadows and lighten the white background, then exported back to the camera's gallery/album.

 

Just yesterday I learned about the Handy Photo app which has something called "magic crop." One can expand an image, and the app extrapolates data, providing more real estate around a subject.

You might not see much of that difference between this finished image and the start image due to the border, but quite a bit of space was added around the subject in the Handy Photo app.

 

From there it was imported into the Stackables app. One reviewer calls Stackables, a "grunge" app. Essentially, it can stack layers of textures and colors and provide various blend modes and even rudimentary masking.

This is where most of the colors and textures were added.

 

Also yesterday I learned about the Leonardo app. Like Stackable, it does things in layers, but can mask more completely. I didn't need to use that feature, but imported the last image created in Stackables, then on top of it placed the essentially black and white image edited in Handy Photo. Changing that layer's blend mode to multiply caused only the darker areas to show, and created a bit more contrast.

 

But that's not all you get...

That image worked on in Leonardo was then imported into the Hipstamatic app, where filters of lens and film were utilized. The combo of Jane Lens and the Love 81 film created a much more dramatic image.

 

However, once imported back into the computer, I wasn't happy that the last editing had blown out some of the white highlights in the image.

So from Lr, the last image edited in Hipstamatic and the last image edited in Leonardo were layered in Ps, where masking allowed the better highlights of the Leonardo image come through, hiding the blown highlights in the Hipstamatic image.

And now we're done.

  

Happy Sliders Sunday!

It's not broke but it is badly Dented. My very first Chromes of UP #844 were near a trestle on the UP Dent Branch (not here) while it was still an active route. I was busy backing away from the tracks as it neared. That must not have been long ago; I see on Google satellite an abandoned branchette to the disastrous Fort St, Vrain nuclear generating plant construction site, just northeast of here. I shot the image through a migrant shack window on the eastern plains. I found a copy of the DP RR locating map and cleaned it up as much as possible It does not appear that the line was abandoned an exceedingly long time ago but it seems entirely scrap. It must have helped the barn and ranch, next door, stay in business in it's day. That set me to compile research and study. This location, marked on the map is nearer the erstwhile St. Vrain River (badly wandering behind the barn) than the South Platte River but both are close to their confluence downstream past the barn. In reality, the St. Vrain has little flow when it merges with the South Platte. There are far too many gravel pits to fill on it's exit from the Rockies and onto the plains to here.

 

Granny's description of Great-Grandfather related that, upon homesteaading, had him working to cut ties and float them down the river to the construction camps by the St. Vrain on the original railroad line through this place. Boy do I have a lot to sort out and the research sources have the shakes. Fortunately, Google maps offers glimpses of the line north and south of the barn so I was able to extrapolate some information that follows.

  

On another experimental foray, but with 35mm Arista and use of Rodinal followed by Xtol. Not alot of experience using this film with different developers so had to do some extrapolation. Unfortunately, freezing rain, overcast skies, and temps below 20 degrees F made it more challenging. I did appreciate more sharpness with this combo, but can't really tell about dynamic range given the blah weather. Thanks for the continued inspiration from my fellow flickeranians. Be safe out there.

I didn't have the references for this model, so I drew in Inkscpae the basic structure of the 4 Star version and extrapolated from there. Then I used Reference Finder for the main reference.

 

Folded from a square of 20 cm on the side of Swiss gift wrapping paper.

The Macro Monday theme for 7/24 is buckle. (The admin said we could use a toggle and I extrapolated that to include a clasp, also.) We have a dearth of typical belts, so I went hunting for stand-ins. There are a few possibilities so I’ll dither, naturally.

The progressive, evolution story

is one huge MISTAKE

which, ironically,

depends on MISTAKES

as its mechanism ...

Mistake

- upon mistake

- upon mistake

- upon mistake

So that the whole human genome

is created from billions of mistakes.

 

If, after reading this, you still believe in the progressive evolution story - you will believe anything.

 

EVOLUTION .....

What is the truth about Darwinian, progressive (microbes to human) evolution?

Although we are told it is an irrefutable, scientific fact .....

the real fact is, as we will show later, there is no credible mechanism for such progressive evolution.

 

So what was the evolutionary idea that Darwin popularised?

Darwin believed that there was unlimited variability in the gene pool of all creatures and plants.

However, the changes possible were well known by selective breeders to be strictly limited.

 

This is because the changes seen in selective breeding are due to the shuffling, deletion and emphasis, or duplication, of genetic information already existing in the gene pool (micro-evolution). There is no viable mechanism for creating new, beneficial, genetic information required to create entirely new body parts ... anatomical structures, biological systems, organs etc. (macro-evolution).

 

Darwin rashly ignored the limits which were well known to breeders (even though he selectively bred pigeons himself, and should have known better). He simply extrapolated the strictly limited, minor changes observed in selective breeding to major, unlimited, progressive changes able to create new structures, organs etc. through natural selection, over an alleged multi-million year timescale.

 

Of course, the length of time involved made no difference, the existing, genetic information could not increase of its own accord, no matter how long the timescale.

 

That was a gigantic flaw in Darwinism, and opponents of Darwin's ideas tried to argue that changes were limited, as selective breeding had demonstrated.

But because Darwinism had acquired a status more akin to an ideology than purely, objective science, belief in the Darwinian idea outweighed the verdict of observational and experimental science, and classical Darwinism became firmly established as scientific orthodoxy for nearly a century.

 

Opponents continued to argue all this time, that Darwinism was unscientific nonsense, but they were ostracised and dismissed as cranks, weirdoes or religious fanatics.

 

Finally however, it was discovered that the opponents of Darwin were perfectly correct - and that constructive, genetic changes (progressive, macro-evolution) require new, additional, genetic information.

 

This looked like the ignominious end of Darwinism, as there was no credible, natural mechanism able to create new, constructive, genetic information. And Darwinism should have been heading for the dustbin of history.

 

Darwin's idea that a single, celled microbe could transform itself into a human and every other living thing, through natural selection over millions of years, had always been totally bonkers. That it is, or ever could have been, regarded as a great 'scientific' theory, beggars belief.

 

However, rather than ditch the whole idea, the vested interests in Darwinism had become so great, with numerous, lifelong careers and an ideological agenda which had become dependant on the Darwinian belief system, a desperate attempt was made to rescue it from its justified demise.

A mechanism had to be invented to explain the origin of new, constructive information.

 

That invented mechanism was 'mutations'. Mutations are ... literally, genetic, copying MISTAKES.

 

The general public had already been convinced that classical Darwinism was a scientific fact, and that anyone who questioned it was a crank, so all that had to be done, as far as the public was concerned, was to give the impression that the theory had simply been refined and updated in the light of modern science.

 

The fact that classical Darwinism had been wrong all along, and was fatally flawed from the outset was kept quiet. This meant that the opponents of Darwinism, who had been right all along, and were the real champions of science, continued to be vilified as cranks and scorned by the mass media and establishment. Ideology and vested interests took precedence over common sense and proper science.

 

The new developments were simply portrayed as the evolution and development of the theory. The impression was given that there was nothing wrong with the idea of progressive (macro) evolution, it had simply 'evolved' and 'improved' in the light of greater knowledge.

 

A sort of progressive evolution of the idea of evolution.

 

This new, 'improved' Darwinism became known as Neo-Darwinism.

 

So what is Neo-Darwinism? And did it really solve the fatal flaws of the Darwinian idea?

 

Neo Darwinism is progressive, macro evolution - as Darwin had proposed, but based on the ludicrous idea that random mutations (accidental, genetic, copying mistakes) selected by natural selection, can provide the constructive, genetic information capable of creating entirely new features, anatomical structures, organs, and biological systems. In other words, it is macro-evolution based on a belief in the total progression from microbes to man through billions of random, genetic, copying MISTAKES, over millions of years.

 

However, there is no evidence for it whatsoever, and it is should be classified as unscientific nonsense which defies logic, the laws of probability and Information Theory.

 

Mutations are not good, they are something to be feared, not celebrated as an agent of improvement or progression.

The vast majority of mutations are harmful, they cause illness, cancer and deformities, which is not surprising. It is precisely what we would expect from mistakes.

If you throw a spanner into the works of a machine, you wouldn't expect it to improve the operation of the machine.

 

Ironically, evolutionists fear mutations as much as everyone else. You won't get evolutionists volunteering to subject themselves or their families to mutagenic agents, you won't get them deliberately going to live near chemical or nuclear plants - in order to give their idea of progressive evolution a helping hand.

Evolutionists know that mutations are very risky and likely to be harmful, and not something anyone should desire.

Yet, perversely, they still present them as the agent responsible for creating the constructive, genetic information which, they claim, progressively transformed the first living cells into every living thing that has ever lived, including humans. Incredible!

 

People are sometimes confused, because they know that 'micro'-evolution is an observable fact, which everyone accepts. Disgracefully, evolutionists cynically exploit that confusion by citing obvious examples of micro-evolution such as: the Peppered Moth, Darwin's finches, so-called superbugs etc., as evidence of macro-evolution.

 

Of course such examples are not evidence of macro-evolution at all. The public is simply being hoodwinked and lied to, and it is a disgrace to science. There are no observable examples or evidence of macro-evolution and no examples of a mutation, or a series of mutations capable of creating new anatomical structures, organs etc. and that is a fact. It is no wonder that W R Thompson stated in the preface to the 1959 centenary edition of Darwin's Origin of the Species, that ... the success of Darwinism was accompanied by a decline in scientific integrity.

 

Micro-evolution is simply the small changes which take place, through natural selection or selective breeding, but only within the strict limits of the built-in variability of the existing gene pool. Any constructive changes outside the extent of the existing gene pool requires a credible mechanism for the creation of new, beneficial, genetic information, that is essential for macro evolution.

 

Micro evolution does not involve or require the creation of any new, genetic information. So micro evolution and macro evolution are entirely different. There is no connection between them at all, whatever evolutionists may claim.

 

Once people fully understand that the differences they see in various dogs breeds, for example, are merely an example of limited micro-evolution (selection of existing genetic information) and nothing to do with progressive macro-evolution, they begin to realise that they have been fed an incredible story.

A dog will always remain a dog, it can never be selectively bred into some other creature, the extent of variation is constrained by the limitations of the existing, genetic information in the gene pool of the dog genus, and evolutionists know that.

 

To explain further.... Neo-Darwinian, macro evolution is the ridiculous idea that everything in the genome of humans and every living thing past and present (apart from the original genetic information in the very first living cell) is the result of millions of genetic copying mistakes..... mutations of mutations .... of mutations.... of mutations .... and so on - and on - and on.

 

In other words, Neo-Darwinism proposes that the complete genome (every scrap of genetic information in the DNA) of every living thing that has ever lived was created by a long series ... of mistakes ... upon previous mistakes .... upon previous mistakes .... upon previous mistakes etc. etc.

 

If we look at the whole picture we soon realise that what is actually being proposed by evolutionists is that, apart from the original information in the first living cell (and evolutionists have yet to explain how that original information magically arose?) - every additional scrap of genetic information for all - the biological features, anatomical structures, systems and processes that exist, or have ever existed in living things, such as:

skin, bones, bone joints, shells, flowers, leaves, wings, scales, muscles, fur, hair, teeth, claws, toe and finger nails, horns, beaks, nervous systems, blood, blood vessels, brains, lungs, hearts, digestive systems, vascular systems, liver, kidneys, pancreas, bowels, immune systems, senses, eyes, ears, sex organs, sexual reproduction, sperm, eggs, pollen, the process of metamorphosis, marsupial pouches, marsupial embryo migration, mammary glands, hormone production, melanin etc. .... have been created from scratch, by an incredibly long series of small, accumulated mistakes ... mistake - upon mistake - upon mistake - upon mistake - over and over again, millions of times.

That is ... every body part, system and process of all living things are the result of literally billions of genetic MISTAKES of MISTAKES, accumulated over many millions of years.

All this from an original, single, living cell.

If, for example, there is no genetic information for bones in the original living cell, how could copying mistakes of the original, limited information in such a single cell produce such entirely new information?

 

Incredibly, what we are asked to believe is that something like a vascular system, or reproductive organs, developed in small, random, incremental steps, with every step being the result of a copying mistake, and with each step being able to provide a significant survival or reproductive advantage in order to be preserved and become dominant in the gene pool. Incredible!

 

If you believe that ... you will believe anything.

 

Even worse, evolutionists have yet to cite a single example of a positive, beneficial, mutation which adds constructive information to the genome of any creature. Yet they expect us to believe that we have been converted from an original, single living cell into humans by an accumulation of billions of beneficial mutations (mistakes).

 

Conclusion:

 

Progressive, microbes-to-man evolution is impossible - there is no credible mechanism to produce all the new, genetic information which is essential for that to take place.

 

The evolution story is an obvious fairy tale presented as scientific fact.

 

However, nothing has changed - those who dare to question Neo-Darwinism are still portrayed as idiots, retards, cranks, weirdoes, anti-scientific ignoramuses or religious fanatics.

 

Want to join the club?

 

What about the fossil record?

 

The formation of fossils.

 

Books explaining how fossils are formed frequently give the impression that it takes many years of build up of layers of sediment to bury organic remains, which then become fossilised.

 

Therefore many people don't realise that this impression is erroneous, because it is a fact that all good, intact fossils require rapid burial in sufficient sediment to prevent decay or predatory destruction.

 

So it is evident that rock containing good, undamaged fossils was laid down rapidly, sometimes in catastrophic conditions.

 

The very existence of intact fossils is a testament to rapid burial and sedimentation.

 

You don't get fossils from slow burial. Organic remains don't just sit around on the sea bed, or elsewhere, waiting for sediment to cover them a millimetre at a time, over a long period.

 

Unless they are buried rapidly, they would soon be damaged or destroyed by predation and/or decay.

 

The fact that so many sedimentary rocks contain fossils, indicates that the sediment that created them was normally laid down within a short time.

 

Another important factor is that many large fossils (tree trunks, large fish, dinosaurs etc.) intersect several or many strata (sometimes called layers) which clearly indicates that multiple strata were formed simultaneously in a single event by grading/segregation of sedimentary particles into distinct layers, and not stratum by stratum over long periods of time or different geological eras, which is the evolutionist's, uniformitarian interpretation of the geological column.

 

In view of the fact that many large fossils required a substantial amount of sediment to bury them, and the fact that they intersect multiple strata (polystrate fossils), how can any sensible person claim that strata or, for that matter, any fossil bearing rock, could have taken millions of years to form?

What do laboratory experiments and field studies of recent, sedimentation events show? sedimentology.fr/

 

You don't even need to be a qualified sedimentologist or geologist to come to that conclusion, it is common sense.

 

Rapid formation of strata - some recent, field evidence:

www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/sets/72157635944904973/

 

All creatures and plants alive today, which are found as fossils, are the same in their fossil form as the living examples, in spite of the fact that the fossils are claimed to be millions of years old. So all living things today could be called 'living fossils' inasmuch as there is no evidence of any evolutionary changes in the alleged multi-million year timescale. The fossil record shows either extinct species or unchanged species, that is all.

When no evidence is cited as evidence:

www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/15157133658

 

The Cambrian Explosion.

Trilobites and other many creatures appeared suddenly in some of the earliest rocks of the fossil record, with no intermediate ancestors. This sudden appearance of a great variety of advanced, fully developed creatures is called the Cambrian Explosion. Trilobites are especially interesting because they have complex eyes, which would need a lot of progressive evolution to develop such advanced features However, there is no evidence of any evolution leading up to the Cambrian Explosion, and that is a serious dilemma for evolutionists.

 

Trilobites are now thought to be extinct, although it is possible that similar creatures could still exist in unexplored parts of deep oceans.

 

See fossil of a crab unchanged after many millions of years:

www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/12702046604/in/set-72...

 

Fossil museum: www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/sets/72157641367196613/

 

What about all the claimed scientific evidence that evolutionists have found for evolution?

 

The evolutionist 'scientific' method has resulted in a serious decline in scientific integrity, and has given us such scientific abominations as:

 

Piltdown Man (a fake),

 

Nebraska Man (a pig),

 

South West Colorado Man (a horse),

 

Orce man (a donkey),

 

Embryonic Recapitulation (a fraud),

 

Archaeoraptor (a fake),

 

Java Man (a giant gibbon),

 

Peking Man (a monkey),

 

Montana Man (an extinct dog-like creature)

 

Nutcracker Man (an extinct type of ape - Australopithecus)

 

The Horse Series (unrelated species cobbled together),

 

Peppered Moth (faked photographs)

 

The Orgueil meteorite (faked evidence)

 

Etc. etc.

 

Anyone can call anything 'science' ... it doesn't make it so.

 

All these examples were trumpeted by evolutionists as scientific evidence for evolution.

 

Do we want to trust evolutionists claims about scientific evidence, when they have such an appalling record?

 

Just how good are peer reviews of scientific papers?

www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

 

Want to publish a science paper?

www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7036/full/nature03653...

 

www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gib...

 

Piltdown Man was even used in the famous, Scopes Trial as positive evidence for evolution.

 

Piltdown Man reigned for over 40 years, as a supreme example of evidence of human evolution, before it was exposed as a crudely, fashioned fake.

 

Is that 'science'?

 

The ludicrous Hopeful Monster Theory and so-called Punctuated Equilibrium (evolution in big jumps followed by long periods of stasis) were invented by evolutionists as a desperate attempt to explain away the lack of fossil evidence for evolution. They are proposed methods of evolution which, it is claimed, need no fossil evidence. They are actually an admission that the required fossil evidence does not exist.

 

Piltdown Man... it survived as alleged proof of evolution for over 40 years in evolution textbooks and was taught in schools and universities, it survived peer reviews etc. and was used as supposed irrefutable evidence for evolution at the famous Scopes Trial..

 

Nebraska Man, this was a single tooth of a peccary. it was trumpeted as evidence for the evolution of humans, and artists impressions of an ape-like man appeared in newspapers magazines etc. Such 'scientific' evidence is enough to make any genuine, respectable scientist weep.

 

South West Colorado Man, another tooth .... of a horse this time... presented as more evidence for human evolution.

 

Orce man, a fragment of skullcap, which was most likely from a donkey, but even if it was human. such a tiny fragment is certainly not any proof of human evolution as it was made out to be.

 

Embryonic Recapitulation, the evolutionist zealot Ernst Haeckel (who was a hero of Hitler) published fraudulent drawings of embryos and his theory was readily accepted by evolutionists as proof of evolution. Even after he was exposed as a fraudster, evolutionists still continued to use his fraudulent evidence in books and publications on evolution, including school textbooks, until very recently.

 

Archaeoraptor, A so-called feathered dinosaur from the Chinese fossil faking industry. It managed to fool credulous evolutionists, because it was exactly what they were looking for. The evidence fitted the wishful thinking.

 

Java Man, Dubois, the man who discovered Java Man and declared it a human ancestor ..... admitted much later that it was actually a giant gibbon, however, that spoilt the evolution story which had been built up around it, so evolutionists were reluctant to get rid of it, and still maintained it was a human ancestor. Dubois had also 'forgotten' to mention that he found the bones of modern humans at the same site.

 

Peking Man, made up from monkey skulls which were found in an ancient limestone burning industrial site where there were crushed monkey skulls and modern human bones. Drawings were made of Peking Man, but the original skull conveniently disappeared. So that allowed evolutionists to continue to use it as evidence without fear of it ever being debunked.

 

The Horse Series, unrelated species cobbled together, They were from different continents and were in no way a proper series of intermediates, They had different numbers of ribs etc. and the very first in the line, is similar to a creature alive today - the Hyrax.

 

Peppered Moth, moths were glued to trees to fake photographs for the peppered moth evidence. They don't normally rest on trees in daytime. In any case, the selection of a trait which is part of the variability of the existing gene pool, is not progressive evolution. It is just normal, natural selection within limits, which no-one disputes.

 

The Orgueil meteorite, organic material and even plant seeds were embedded and glued into the Orgueil meteorite and disguised with coal dust to make them look like part of the original meteorite, in a fraudulent attempt to fool the world into believing in the discredited idea of spontaneous generation of life, which is essential for progressive evolution to get started. The reasoning being that, if it could be shown that there was life in space, spontaneous generation must have happened there and could therefore be declared by evolutionists as being a scientific fact.

 

Is macro evolution even science? The answer to that has to be an emphatic - NO!

 

The usual definition of science is: that which can be demonstrated and observed and repeated. Evolution cannot be proved, or tested; it is claimed to have happened in the past, and, as such, it is not subject to the scientific method. It is merely a belief.

 

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having beliefs, especially if there is a wealth of evidence to support them, but they should not be presented as scientific fact. As we have shown, in the case of progressive evolution, there is a wealth of evidence against it. Nevertheless, we are told by evolutionist zealots that microbes to man evolution is a fact and likewise the spontaneous generation of life from sterile matter. They are deliberately misleading the public on both counts. Evolution is not only not a fact, it is not even proper science.

 

You don't need a degree in rocket science to understand that Darwinism has damaged and undermined science.

However, what does the world's, most famous, rocket scientist (the father of modern rocket science) have to say?

 

Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) PhD Aerospace Engineering

 

"In recent years, there has been a disturbing trend toward scientific dogmatism in some areas of science. Pronouncements by notable scientists and scientific organizations about "only one scientifically acceptable explanation" for events which are clearly outside the domain of science -- like all origins are -- can only destroy the curiosity of those who must carry on the future work of science. Humility, a seemingly natural product of studying nature, appears to have largely disappeared -- at least its visibility is clouded from the public's viewpoint.

 

Extrapolation backward in time until there are no physical artifacts of certainty that can be examined, requires sophisticated guessing which scientists prefer to refer to as "inference." Since hypotheses, a product of scientific inference, are virtually the stuff that comprises the cutting edge of scientific progress, inference must constantly be nurtured. However, the enthusiasm that encourages inference must be matched in degree with caution that clearly differentiates inference from what the public so readily accepts as "scientific fact." Failure to keep these two factors in balance can lead either to a sterile or a seduced science. 'Science but not Scientists' (2006) p.xi"

 

And the eminent scientist, William Robin Thompson (1887 - 1972) Entomologist and Director of the Commonwealth Institute of Biological Control, Ottawa, Canada, who was asked to write the introduction of the centenary edition of Darwin's 'Origin', wrote:

 

"The concept of organic Evolution is very highly prized by biologists, for many of whom it is an object of genuinely religious devotion, because they regard it as a supreme integrative principle. This is probably the reason why the severe methodological criticism employed in other departments of biology has not yet been brought to bear against evolutionary speculation." 'Science and Common Sense' (1937) p.229

 

“As we know, there is a great divergence of opinion among biologists … because the evidence is unsatisfactory and does not permit any certain conclusion. It is therefore right and proper to draw the attention of the non-scientific public to the disagreements about evolution. But some recent remarks of evolutionists show that they think this unreasonable ......

This situation, where scientific men rally to the defence of a doctrine they are unable to define scientifically, much less demonstrate with scientific rigor, attempting to maintain its credit with the public by the suppression of criticism and the elimination of difficulties, is abnormal and unwise in science.”

 

Prof. W. R. Thompson, F.R.S., introduction to the 1956 edition of Darwin's 'Origin of the Species'

 

"When I was asked to write an introduction replacing the one prepared a quarter of a century ago by the distinguished Darwinian, Sir Anthony Keith [one of the "discoverers" of Piltdown Man], I felt extremely hesitant to accept the invitation . . I am not satisfied that Darwin proved his point or that his influence in scientific and public thinking has been beneficial. If arguments fail to resist analysis, consent should be withheld and a wholesale conversion due to unsound argument must be regarded as deplorable. He fell back on speculative arguments."

 

"He merely showed, on the basis of certain facts and assumptions, how this might have happened, and as he had convinced himself he was able to convince others."

 

"But the facts and interpretations on which Darwin relied have now ceased to convince."

 

"This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories Nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by the theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion."—*W.R. Thompson, "Introduction," to Everyman’s Library issue of Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1958 edition).

 

"The evolution theory can by no means be regarded as an innocuous natural philosophy, but rather is a serious obstruction to biological research. It obstructs—as has been repeatedly shown—the attainment of consistent results, even from uniform experimental material. For everything must ultimately be forced to fit this theory. An exact biology cannot, therefore, be built up."—*H. Neilsson, Synthetische Artbildng, 1954, p. 11

 

www.trueorigin.org/

 

Berkeley University law professor, Philip Johnson, makes the following points: “(1) Evolution is grounded not on scientific fact, but on a philosophical belief called naturalism; (2) the belief that a large body of empirical evidence supports evolution is an illusion; (3) evolution is itself a religion; and, (4) if evolution were a scientific hypothesis based on rigorous study of the evidence, it would have been abandoned long ago.”

 

DNA.

The discovery of DNA should have been the death knell for evolution. It is only because evolutionists tend to manipulate and interpret evidence to suit their own preconceptions that makes them believe DNA is evidence FOR evolution.

 

It is clear that there is no natural mechanism which can produce constructional, biological information, such as that encoded in DNA.

Information Theory (and common sense) tells us that the unguided interaction of matter and energy cannot produce constructive information.

 

Do evolutionists even know where the very first, genetic information in the alleged Primordial Soup came from?

Of course they don't, but with the usual bravado, they bluff it out, and regardless, they rashly present the spontaneous generation of life as a scientific fact.

However, a fact, it certainly isn't .... and good science it certainly isn't.

 

Even though evolutionists have no idea whatsoever about how the first, genetic information originated, they still claim that the spontaneous generation of life (abiogenesis) is an established scientific fact, but this is completely disingenuous. Apart from the fact that abiogenesis violates the Law of Biogenesis, the Law of Cause and Effect and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it also violates Information Theory.

 

Evolutionists have an enormous problem with explaining how the DNA code itself originated. However that is not even the major problem. The impression is given to the public by evolutionists that they only have to find an explanation for the origin of DNA by natural processes - and the problem of the origin of genetic information will have been solved.

That is a confusion in the minds of many people that evolutionists cynically exploit,

Explaining how DNA was formed by chemical processes, explains only how the information storage medium was formed, it tells us nothing about the origin of the information it carries.

 

To clarify this it helps to compare DNA to other information, storage mediums.

For example, if we compare DNA to the written word, we understand that the alphabet is a tangible medium for storing, recording and expressing information, it is not information in itself. The information is recorded in the sequence of letters, forming meaningful words.

You could say that the alphabet is the 'hardware' created from paper and ink, and the sequential arrangement of the letters is the software. The software is a mental construct, not a physical one.

The same applies to DNA. DNA is not information of itself, just like the alphabet it is the medium for storing and expressing information. It is an amazingly efficient storage medium. However, it is the sequence or arrangement of the amino acids which is the actual information, not the DNA code.

So, if evolutionists are ever able to explain how DNA was formed by chemical processes, it would explain only how the information storage medium was formed. It will tell us nothing about the origin of the information it carries.

Thus, when atheists and evolutionists tell us it is only a matter of time before 'science' will be able to fill the 'gaps' in our knowledge and explain the origin of genetic information, they are not being honest. Explaining the origin of the 'hardware' by natural processes is an entirely different matter to explaining the origin of the software.

Next time you hear evolutionists skating over the problem of the origin of genetic information with their usual bluff and bluster, and parroting their usual nonsense about science being able to fill such gaps in knowledge in the future, don't be fooled. They cannot explain the origin of genetic information, and never will be able to. The software cannot be created by chemical processes or the interaction of energy and matter, it is not possible. If you don't believe that. then by all means put it to the test, by challenging any evolutionist to explain how genetic information (not DNA) can originate by natural means? I can guarantee they won't be able to do so.

 

It is true to say - the evolution cupboard is bare when it come to real, tangible evidence.

 

For example:

1.The origin of life is still a mystery, evolutionists have failed to demonstrate that the Law of Biogenesis (which rules out the spontaneous generation of life) is not universally valid.

 

2.They have no explanation for where the first, genetic information came from.

 

3.They assume (without any evidence) that matter is somehow intrinsically predisposed to produce life whenever the environmental conditions for life permit.

 

4.They deny that there is any purpose in the universe, yet completely contradict that premise by assuming the above intrinsic predisposition of matter to produce life, as though matter is somhow endowed with a 'blueprint' for the creation of life.

 

5.They have no credible mechanism for the increase of genetic information required for progressive evolution and increasing complexity.

 

6.They have failed to produce any credible, intermediate, fossil examples, in spite of searching for over 150 years. There should be millions of examples, yet there is not a single one which is a watertight example.

 

7.They regularly publish so-called evidence which, when properly examined, is discovered to be nothing of the sort: Example ... Orce Man (the skullcap of a donkey!).

 

8.They use dubious dating techniques, such as circular reasoning in the dating of fossils and rocks.

 

9. They discard any evidence - radiocarbon dating, sedimentation experiments, fossils etc. that doesn't fit the preconceptions.

 

10. They frequently make the claim that there has to be life on other planets, simply on the assumption (without evidence) that life spontaneously generated and evolved on Earth which they take it for granted is a proven fact.

 

11.They cannot produce a single, credible example of a genuinely, beneficial mutation, yet billions would be required for microbes to human evolution.

 

There is much more, but that should suffice to debunk the incessant hype and propaganda that microbes-to-human evolution is an established, irrefutable fact.

It should be enough to put an end to the greatest fraud that has been foisted on the public in scientific history.

 

We are constantly told by evolutionists that the majority of scientists accept progressive evolution (as though that gives it credence) ... but most scientists, don't actually study evolution in any depth, because it is outside their field of expertise. They simply trust what they are taught in school, and mistakenly trust the integrity of evolutionists to present evidence objectively.

That is another great MISTAKE!

 

Evolutionism: The Religion That Offers Nothing.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=znXF0S6D_Ts&list=TLqiH-mJoVPB...

 

FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE

The Law of Cause and Effect. Dominant Principle of Classical Physics. David L. Bergman and Glen C. Collins

www.thewarfareismental.net/b/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/b...

 

"The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict: (Updated Aug 3, 2017.) As documented below, trust in the big bang's predictive ability has been misplaced when compared to the actual astronomical observations that were made, in large part, in hopes of affirming the theory."

kgov.com/big-bang-predictions

Massimo Vitali, Drum Scan by CastorScan

 

Original picture: www.flickr.com/photos/castorscan/10738367025/

  

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The scans performed on a drum scanner are famous for their detail, depth and realism.

Scans are much cleaner and show fewer imperfections than scans obtained from CCD scanners, and thus save many hours of cleaning and spotting in postproduction.

Image acquisition by the drum scanner is optically similar to using a microscopic lens that scans the image point by point with extreme precision and without deformation or distortion of any kind, while other scanners use enlarger lenses (such as the Rodenstock-Linos Magnagon 75mm f8 used in the Hasselblad-Imacon scanners) and have transmission systems with rubber bands: this involves mild but effective micro-strain and micro-geometric image distortions and quality is not uniform between the center and edges.

Drum scanners are exempt from problems of flatness of the originals, since the same are mounted on a perfectly balanced transparent acrylic drum; on the contrary, the dedicated film scanners that scan slides or negatives in their plastic frames are subject to quite significant inaccuracies, as well as the Imacon-Hasselblad scanners, which have their own rubber and plastic holders: they do not guarantee the perfect flatness of the original and therefore a uniform definition between center and edge, especially with medium and large size originals, which instead are guaranteed by drum scanners.

Again, drum scanners allow scanning at high resolution over the entire surface of the cylinder, while for example the Hasselblad Imacon scans are limited to 3200 dpi in 120 format and 2000 dpi in 4x5" format (the resolution of nearly every CCD scanner in the market drops as the size of the original scanned is increased).

Drum scanners allow complete scanning of the whole negative, including the black-orange mask, perforations etc, while using many other scanners a certain percentage of the image is lost because it is covered by frames or holders.

Drum scanners use photomultiplier tubes to record the light signal, which are much more sensitive than CCDs and can record many more nuances and variations in contrast with a lower digital noise.

If you look at a monitor at 100% the detail in shadows and darker areas of a scan made with a CCD scanner, you will notice that the details are not recorded in a clear and clean way, and the colors are more opaque and less differentiated. Additionally the overall tones are much less rich and differentiated.

  

We would like to say a few words about an unscrupulous and deceitful use of technical specifications reported by many manufacturers of consumer and prosumer scanners; very often we read of scanners that promise cheap or relatively cheap “drum scanner” resolutions, 16 bits of color depth, extremely high DMAX: we would like to say that these “nominal” resolutions do not correspond to an actual optical resolution, so that even in low-resolution scanning you can see an enormous gap between drum scanners and these scanners in terms of detail, as well as in terms of DMAX, color range, realism, “quality” of grain. So very often when using these consumer-prosumer scanners at high resolutions, it is normal to get a disproportionate increase of file size in MB but not an increase of detail and quality.

To give a concrete example: a drum scan of a 24x36mm color negative film at 3500 dpi is much more defined than a scan made with mostly CCD scanner at 8000 dpi and a drum scan at 2500 dpi is dramatically clearer than a scan at 2500 dpi provided by a CCD scanner. So be aware and careful with incorrect advertisement.

  

Scans can be performed either dry or liquid-mounted. The wet mounting further improves cleanliness (helps to hide dirt, scratches and blemishes) and plasticity of the image without compromising the original, and in addition by mounting with liquid the film grain is greatly reduced and it looks much softer and more pleasant than the usual "harsh" grain resulting from dry scans.

  

We use Kami SMF 2001 liquid to mount the transparencies and Kami RC 2001 for cleaning the same. Kami SMF 2001 evaporates without leaving traces, unlike the traditional oil scans, ensuring maximum protection for your film. Out of ignorance some people prefer to avoid liquid scanning because they fear that their films will be dirty or damaged: this argument may be plausible only in reference to scans made using mineral oils, which have nothing to do with the specific professional products we use.

We strongly reiterate that your original is in no way compromised by our scanning liquid and will return as you have shipped it, if not cleaner.

  

With respect to scanning from slides:

Our scanners are carefully calibrated with the finest IT8 calibration targets in circulation and with special customized targets in order to ensure that each scan faithfully reproduces the original color richness even in the most subtle nuances, opening and maintaining detail in shadows and highlights. These color profiles allow our scanners to realize their full potential, so we guarantee our customers that even from a chromatic point of view our scans are noticeably better than similar scans made by mostly other scan services in the market.

In addition, we remind you that our 8060 drum scanner is able to read the deepest shadows of slides without digital noise and with much more detail than CCD scanners; also, the color range and color realism are far better.

  

With respect to scanning from color and bw negatives: we want to emphasize the superiority of our drum scans not only in scanning slides, but also in color and bw negative scanning (because of the orange mask and of very low contrast is extremely difficult for any ccd scanner to read the very slight tonal and contrast nuances in the color negative, while a perfectly profiled 8060 drum scanner – also through the analog gain/white calibration - can give back much more realistic images and true colors, sharper and more three-dimensional).

  

In spite of what many claim, a meticulous color profiling is essential not only for scanning slides, but also, and even more, for color negatives. Without it the scan of a color negative will produce chromatic errors rather significant, thus affecting the tonal balance and then the naturalness-pleasantness of the images.

  

More unique than rare, we do not use standardized profiles provided by the software to invert each specific negative film, because they do not take into account parameters and variables such as the type of development, the level of exposure, the type of light etc.,; at the same time we also avoid systems of "artificial intelligence" or other functions provided by semi-automatic scanning softwares, but instead we carry out the inversion in a full manual workflow for each individual picture.

  

In addition, scanning with Imacon-Hasselblad scanners we do not use their proprietary software - Flexcolor – to make color management and color inversion because we strongly believe that our alternative workflow provides much better results, and we are able to prove it with absolute clarity.

  

At each stage of the process we take care of meticulously adjusting the scanning parameters to the characteristics of the originals, to extrapolate the whole range of information possible from any image without "burning" or reductions in the tonal range, and strictly according to our customer's need and taste.

  

By default, we do not apply unsharp mask (USM) in our scans, except on request.

  

To scan reflective originals we follow the same guidelines and guarantee the same quality standard.

  

We guarantee the utmost thoroughness and expertise in the work of scanning and handling of the originals and we provide scans up to 12,000 dpi of resolution, at 16-bit, in RGB, GRAYSCALE, LAB or CMYK color mode; unless otherwise indicated, files are saved with Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB color profile.

  

WWW.CASTORSCAN.COM

Picture by Massimo Vitali

Drum scan by CastorScan

Kodak Portra 8x10" color negative.

  

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CastorScan's philosophy is completely oriented to provide the highest scan and postproduction

quality on the globe.

 

We work with artists, photographers, agencies, laboratories etc. who demand a state-of-the-art quality at reasonable prices.

 

Our workflow is fully manual and extremely meticulous in any stage.

 

We developed exclusive workflows and profilation systems to obtain unparallel results from our scanners not achievable through semi-automatic and usual workflows.

  

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CastorScan uses the best scanners in circulation, Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II, the best and most advanced scanner ever made, Kodak-Creo IQSmart 3, a high-end flatbed scanner, and Imacon 848.

 

The image quality offered by our Dainippon Screen 8060 scanner is much higher than that achievable with the best flatbed scanners or filmscanners dedicated and superior to that of scanners so-called "virtual drum" (Imacon – Hasselblad,) and, of course, vastly superior to that amateur or prosumer obtained with scanners such as Epson V750 etc .

 

Dainippon Screen SG-8060P Mark II exceeds in quality any other scanner, including Aztek Premier and ICG 380 (in the results, not just in the technical specifications).

 

8060's main features: 12000 dpi, Hi-Q Xenon lamp, 25 apertures, 2 micron

 

Aztek Premier's main features: 8000 dpi, halogen lamp, 18 apertures, 3 micron

 

ICG 380's main features: 12000 dpi, halogen lamp, 9 apertures, 4 micron

  

Some of the features that make the quality of our drum scanners better than any other existing scan system include:

 

The scans performed on a drum scanner are famous for their detail, depth and realism.

Scans are much cleaner and show fewer imperfections than scans obtained from CCD scanners, and thus save many hours of cleaning and spotting in postproduction.

Image acquisition by the drum scanner is optically similar to using a microscopic lens that scans the image point by point with extreme precision and without deformation or distortion of any kind, while other scanners use enlarger lenses (such as the Rodenstock-Linos Magnagon 75mm f8 used in the Hasselblad-Imacon scanners) and have transmission systems with rubber bands: this involves mild but effective micro-strain and micro-geometric image distortions and quality is not uniform between the center and edges.

Drum scanners are exempt from problems of flatness of the originals, since the same are mounted on a perfectly balanced transparent acrylic drum; on the contrary, the dedicated film scanners that scan slides or negatives in their plastic frames are subject to quite significant inaccuracies, as well as the Imacon-Hasselblad scanners, which have their own rubber and plastic holders: they do not guarantee the perfect flatness of the original and therefore a uniform definition between center and edge, especially with medium and large size originals, which instead are guaranteed by drum scanners.

Again, drum scanners allow scanning at high resolution over the entire surface of the cylinder, while for example the Hasselblad Imacon scans are limited to 3200 dpi in 120 format and 2000 dpi in 4x5" format (the resolution of nearly every CCD scanner in the market drops as the size of the original scanned is increased).

Drum scanners allow complete scanning of the whole negative, including the black-orange mask, perforations etc, while using many other scanners a certain percentage of the image is lost because it is covered by frames or holders.

Drum scanners use photomultiplier tubes to record the light signal, which are much more sensitive than CCDs and can record many more nuances and variations in contrast with a lower digital noise.

If you look at a monitor at 100% the detail in shadows and darker areas of a scan made with a CCD scanner, you will notice that the details are not recorded in a clear and clean way, and the colors are more opaque and less differentiated. Additionally the overall tones are much less rich and differentiated.

  

We would like to say a few words about an unscrupulous and deceitful use of technical specifications reported by many manufacturers of consumer and prosumer scanners; very often we read of scanners that promise cheap or relatively cheap “drum scanner” resolutions, 16 bits of color depth, extremely high DMAX: we would like to say that these “nominal” resolutions do not correspond to an actual optical resolution, so that even in low-resolution scanning you can see an enormous gap between drum scanners and these scanners in terms of detail, as well as in terms of DMAX, color range, realism, “quality” of grain. So very often when using these consumer-prosumer scanners at high resolutions, it is normal to get a disproportionate increase of file size in MB but not an increase of detail and quality.

To give a concrete example: a drum scan of a 24x36mm color negative film at 3500 dpi is much more defined than a scan made with mostly CCD scanner at 8000 dpi and a drum scan at 2500 dpi is dramatically clearer than a scan at 2500 dpi provided by a CCD scanner. So be aware and careful with incorrect advertisement.

 

Scans can be performed either dry or liquid-mounted. The wet mounting further improves cleanliness (helps to hide dirt, scratches and blemishes) and plasticity of the image without compromising the original, and in addition by mounting with liquid the film grain is greatly reduced and it looks much softer and more pleasant than the usual "harsh" grain resulting from dry scans.

 

We use Kami SMF 2001 liquid to mount the transparencies and Kami RC 2001 for cleaning the same. Kami SMF 2001 evaporates without leaving traces, unlike the traditional oil scans, ensuring maximum protection for your film. Out of ignorance some people prefer to avoid liquid scanning because they fear that their films will be dirty or damaged: this argument may be plausible only in reference to scans made using mineral oils, which have nothing to do with the specific professional products we use.

We strongly reiterate that your original is in no way compromised by our scanning liquid and will return as you have shipped it, if not cleaner.

 

With respect to scanning from slides:

Our scanners are carefully calibrated with the finest IT8 calibration targets in circulation and with special customized targets in order to ensure that each scan faithfully reproduces the original color richness even in the most subtle nuances, opening and maintaining detail in shadows and highlights. These color profiles allow our scanners to realize their full potential, so we guarantee our customers that even from a chromatic point of view our scans are noticeably better than similar scans made by mostly other scan services in the market.

In addition, we remind you that our 8060 drum scanner is able to read the deepest shadows of slides without digital noise and with much more detail than CCD scanners; also, the color range and color realism are far better.

 

With respect to scanning from color and bw negatives: we want to emphasize the superiority of our drum scans not only in scanning slides, but also in color and bw negative scanning (because of the orange mask and of very low contrast is extremely difficult for any ccd scanner to read the very slight tonal and contrast nuances in the color negative, while a perfectly profiled 8060 drum scanner – also through the analog gain/white calibration - can give back much more realistic images and true colors, sharper and more three-dimensional).

 

In spite of what many claim, a meticulous color profiling is essential not only for scanning slides, but also, and even more, for color negatives. Without it the scan of a color negative will produce chromatic errors rather significant, thus affecting the tonal balance and then the naturalness-pleasantness of the images.

  

More unique than rare, we do not use standardized profiles provided by the software to invert each specific negative film, because they do not take into account parameters and variables such as the type of development, the level of exposure, the type of light etc.,; at the same time we also avoid systems of "artificial intelligence" or other functions provided by semi-automatic scanning softwares, but instead we carry out the inversion in a full manual workflow for each individual picture.

 

In addition, scanning with Imacon-Hasselblad scanners we do not use their proprietary software - Flexcolor – to make color management and color inversion because we strongly believe that our alternative workflow provides much better results, and we are able to prove it with absolute clarity.

 

At each stage of the process we take care of meticulously adjusting the scanning parameters to the characteristics of the originals, to extrapolate the whole range of information possible from any image without "burning" or reductions in the tonal range, and strictly according to our customer's need and taste.

 

By default, we do not apply unsharp mask (USM) in our scans, except on request.

 

To scan reflective originals we follow the same guidelines and guarantee the same quality standard.

 

We guarantee the utmost thoroughness and expertise in the work of scanning and handling of the originals and we provide scans up to 12,000 dpi of resolution, at 16-bit, in RGB, GRAYSCALE, LAB or CMYK color mode; unless otherwise indicated, files are saved with Adobe RGB 1998 or ProPhoto RGB color profile.

 

WWW.CASTORSCAN.COM

A composite view of the outer atmosphere of the Sun, the corona.

 

This image combines a wide-angle view of the corona from the Metis instrument on ESA’s Solar Orbiter taken in visible light (580-640 nm, shown in green) with images from the ground-based Mauna Loa K-Cor coronagraph (shown in blue) and from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) taken in ultraviolet light (19.3nm, shown in yellow). The texture represents the field lines from an extrapolation of the Sun’s magnetic field.

 

The combination of these complementary views shows the full extent of the solar corona. The global scale solar magnetic field confines the plasma mostly near the equatorial belt, where the field lines are closed, giving rise to the bright streamers. Polar regions, where the magnetic field lines are open, exhibit a fainter brightness due the plasma outflow in the solar wind.

 

Credits: Solar Orbiter/Metis Team (ESA & NASA); Mauna Loa Solar Observatory/HAO/NCAR/NSF; Predictive Science Inc./NASA/NSF/AFOSR; NASA/SDO/AIA

Advertising Tycoon: David Mackenzie Ogilvy 23 June 1911 – 21 July 1999. was a British advertising tycoon, founder of Ogilvy & Mather, and known as the "Father of Advertising". Trained at the Gallup research organisation, he attributed the success of his campaigns to meticulous research into consumer habits.

 

David Mackenzie Ogilvy was born on 23 June 1911 at West Horsley, Surrey in England. His mother was Dorothy Blew Fairfield (1881-1942), daughter of Arthur Rowan Fairfield, a civil servant from Ireland. His father, Francis John Longley Ogilvy, (1866 - 1943) was a stockbroker.

 

He was a first cousin once removed of the writer Rebecca West and of Douglas Holden Blew Jones, who was the brother-in-law of Freda Dudley Ward and the father-in-law of Antony Lambton, 6th Earl of Durham. Ogilvy attended St Cyprian's School, Eastbourne, on reduced fees because of his father's straitened circumstances and won a scholarship at age thirteen to Fettes College, in Edinburgh. In 1929, he again won a scholarship, this time in History to Christ Church, Oxford. Without the scholarships, Ogilvy would not have been able to attend Fettes or Oxford University because his father's business was badly hit by the depression of the mid-1920s. His studies were not successful, however, and he left Oxford for Paris in 1931 where he became an apprentice chef in the Hotel Majestic. After a year, he returned to Scotland and started selling AGA cooking stoves, door-to-door. His success at this marked him out to his employer, who asked him to write an instruction manual, The Theory and Practice of Selling the AGA Cooker, for the other salesmen. Thirty years later, Fortune magazine editors called it the finest sales instruction manual ever written.

 

After seeing the manual, Ogilvy's older brother Francis Ogilvy—the father of actor Ian Ogilvy—showed the manual to management at the London advertising agency Mather & Crowther where he was working. They offered the younger Ogilvy a position as an account executive.

 

In 1938, Ogilvy persuaded his agency to send him to the United States for a year, where he went to work for George Gallup's Audience Research Institute in New Jersey. Ogilvy cites Gallup as one of the major influences on his thinking, emphasizing meticulous research methods and adherence to reality.

 

During World War II, Ogilvy worked for the British Intelligence Service at the British embassy in Washington, DC. There he analyzed and made recommendations on matters of diplomacy and security. According to a biography produced by Ogilvy & Mather, "he extrapolated his knowledge of human behaviour from consumerism to nationalism in a report which suggested 'applying the Gallup technique to fields of secret intelligence.'"Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Board picked up the report and successfully put Ogilvy’s suggestions to work in Europe during the last year of the war.

 

Also during World War II David Ogilvy was a notable alumnus of the secret Camp X, located near the towns of Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. According to an article on the camp: "It was there he mastered the power of propaganda before becoming king of Madison Avenue. Although Ogilvy was trained in sabotage and close combat, he was ultimately tasked with projects that included successfully ruining the reputation of businessmen who were supplying the Nazis with industrial materials."

 

Ogilvy married Sophie Louise Blew Jones.

 

After the war, Ogilvy bought a farm in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and lived among the Amish. The atmosphere of "serenity, abundance, and contentment" kept Ogilvy and his wife in Pennsylvania for several years, but eventually he admitted his limitations as a farmer and moved to Manhattan

 

Born: 23 June 1911 West Horsley, Surrey, England, United Kingdom

Died: 21 July 1999 (aged 88)

Château de Touffou, Bonnes, France

 

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Ogilvy_(businessman)&oldid=1048218206

 

David Ogilvy (businessman) (1911–1999), British advertising executive

 

Artwork by TudioJepegii

IF you could extrapolate this road, it would lead you to Mexico.