“Don’t know why I’m sending this, the mysterious is lovely to us, it seems… Robert Frost.”
Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing,
And the sun came out to dry me.
.
.
.
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Thanks to Beth, who is a valued commenter on several blogs, a fine fiction writer, and an engaging blogger here: beththeserf
Thomas Jefferson to John Adams: On Wading Through the Whimsies, Sophisms & Futilities of Plato
I am just returned from one of my long absences, having been at my other home for five weeks past. Having more leisure there than here for reading, I amused myself with reading seriously Plato’s republic. I am wrong however in calling it amusement, for it was the heaviest task-work I ever went through. I had occasionally before taken up some of his other works, but scarcely ever had patience to go through a whole dialogue. While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, & unintelligible jargon of this work, I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this? How the soi-disant Christian world indeed should have done it, is a piece of historical curiosity. But how could the Roman good sense do it? and particularly how could Cicero bestow such eulogies on Plato? Altho’ Cicero did not wield the dense logic of Demosthenes, yet he was able, learned, laborious, practised in the business of the world, & honest. He could not be the dupe of mere style, of which he was himself the first master in the world.
With the moderns, I think, it is rather a matter of fashion and authority. Education is chiefly in the hands of persons who, from their profession, have an interest in the reputation and the dreams of Plato. They give the tone while at school, and few, in their after-years, have occasion to revise their college opinions. But fashion and authority apart, and bringing Plato to the test of reason, take from him his sophisms, futilities, & incomprehensibilities, and what remains? In truth he is one of the race of genuine Sophists, who has escaped the oblivion of his brethren, first by the elegance of his diction, but chiefly by the adoption & incorporation of his whimsies into the body of artificial Christianity.
His foggy mind, is for ever presenting the semblances of objects which, half seen thro’ a mist, can be defined neither in form or dimension. Yet this which should have consigned him to early oblivion really procured him immortality of fame & reverence. The Christian priesthood, finding the doctrines of Christ levelled to every understanding, and too plain to need explanation, saw, in the mysticisms of Plato, materials with which they might build up an artificial system which might, from it’s indistinctness, admit everlasting controversy, give employment for their order, and introduce it to profit, power & pre-eminence.
The doctrines which flowed from the lips of Jesus himself are within the comprehension of a child; but thousands of volumes have not yet explained the Platonisms engrafted on them: and for this obvious reason that nonsense can never be explained. Their purposes however are answered. Plato is canonised: and it is now deemed as impious to question his merits as those of an Apostle of Jesus. He is peculiarly appealed to as an advocate of the immortality of the soul; and yet I will venture to say that were there no better arguments than his in proof of it, not a man in the world would believe it.
It is fortunate for us that Platonic republicanism has not obtained the same favor as Platonic Christianity; or we should now have been all living, men, women and children, pell mell together, like the beasts of the field or forest. Yet ‘Plato is a great Philosopher,’ said La Fontaine. But says Fontenelle ‘do you find his ideas very clear’?—‘oh no! he is of an obscurity impenetrable.’—‘do you not find him full of contradictions?’—‘certainly, replied La Fontaine, he is but a Sophist.’ Yet immediately after, he exclaims again, ‘oh Plato was a great philosopher.’—Socrates had reason indeed to complain of the misrepresentations of Plato; for in truth his dialogues are libels on Socrates.—but why am I dosing you with these Ante-diluvian topics? Because I am glad to have some one to whom they are familiar, and who will not recieve them as if dropped from the moon…
~Thos. Jefferson July 5, 1814
Galileo Galilei to Her Serene Highness, Many Years Ago
This image appears thanks to milestotravel.wordpress.com
“Some years ago, as Your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before in our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them in contradiction to the physical notions commonly held among academic philosophers, stirred up against me no small number of professors — as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature and overturn the sciences. They seemed to forget that the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts; not their diminution or destruction.
Showing a greater fondness for their own opinions than for truth they sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them. To this end they hurled various charges and published numerous writings filled with vain arguments, and they made the grave mistake of sprinkling these with passages taken from places in the Bible which they had failed to understand properly, and which were ill-suited to their purposes.
These men would perhaps not have fallen into such error had they but paid attention to a most useful doctrine of St Augustine’s, relative to our making positive statements about things which are obscure and hard to understand by means of reason alone. Speaking of a certain physical conclusions about heavenly bodies, he wrote: “Now keeping always our respect for moderation in grave piety, we ought not to believe anything inadvisedly on a dubious point, lest in favor to our error we conceive a prejudice against something that truth hereafter may reveal to be not contrary in any way to the sacred books of either the Old or the New Testaments.”…
Persisting in their original resolve to destroy me and everything mine by any means they can think of, these men are aware of my views in astronomy and philosophy. They know that as to the arrangement of the pars of the universe, I hold the sun to be situated motionless in the center of the revolution of the celestial orbs while the earth rotates on its axis and revolves about the sun. They know also that I support this position not only by refuting the arguments of Ptolemy and Aristotle, but by producing many counter-arguments; in particular, some which relate to physical effects whose causes can perhaps be assigned in no other way. In additgion there are astronomical arguments derived from many things in my new celestial discoveries that plainly confute the Ptolemaic system while admirably agreeing with and confirming the contrary hypothesis. Possibly because they are disturbed by the known truth of other propositions of mine which differ from those commonly held, and therefore mistrusting their defense so long as they confine themselves to the field of philosophy, these men have resolved themselves to fabricate a shield for their fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible. These they apply, with little judgment, to the refutation of arguments that they do not understand and have not even listened to.”
Response-ability: Overcoming Powerful Automatic Responses Using a 90 Second Guideline
“I define responsibility (response-ability) as the ability to choose how we respond to stimulation coming in through our sensory systems at any moment in time.
Although there are certain limbic system (emotional) programs that can be triggered automatically, it takes less than 90 seconds for one of these programs to be triggered, surge through our body, and then be completely flushed out of our blood stream.
My anger response, for example, is a programmed response that can be set off automatically. Once triggered, the chemical released by my brain surges through my body and I have a physiological experience. Within 90 seconds from the initial trigger, the chemical component of my anger has completely dissipated from my blood and my automatic response is over.
If, however, I remain angry after those 90 seconds have passed, then it is because I have chosen to let that circuit continue to run. Moment by moment, I make the choice to either hook into my neurocircuitry or move back into the present moment, allowing that reaction to melt away as fleeting physiology.”~Jill Bolte Taylor
Quoting Napoleon, Just This Once
“He who knows only his own generation remains always a child.”
Sustainable Energy and Agriculture: The Green Elephant of Economic Ruin
Everywhere.
“From time immemorial white elephants have been known in the East and are still believed to be an incarnation of the lord Buddha. In spite of this, the kings of Burma, Thailand and Cambodia used to present white elephants to people who had incurred the king’s displeasure as a mark of punishment. Their owners were obliged to maintain them without giving them any work to do and the drain on family resources often led to starvation and death; that is why a ‘white elephant’ came to mean economic ruin.”
~Kailash Sankhala
James Madison: Protecting the Rights and Possessions of the Minority from the Passions of the Majority
Walter Hancock, 1901-1998. Image via The Portrait Sculptors Society of the Americas or portraitsculptors.org
“[I]n all cases where the majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger.”
~James Madison
Comment: Today we consider the words of James Madison on the subject of minority and majority rights. James Madison is known as “the Father of the Constitution,” because his Virginia Plan provided the basic framework and guiding principles of the Constitution. He was also, as an elected Representative in the House, sponsor of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.
Madison’s words serve as a guiding light in times of doubt and uncertainty about the role of government in our Republic. Today, it would seem that those who believe government should be used to provide all manner of services and “standards of living” for its citizens are on the side of the angels. They are “are united by a common interest or passion” to expropriate more of the earnings of its citizens in order to institute social programs for all. However, as the majority gains the unimpeded ability to confiscate the income of some of the citizens, who are defined as “wealthy,” in order to pay for these services, a very basic principle is violated. The government ceases to protect the rights and possessions of a certain group of people, who are called “rich,” and begins to use its force to seize more and more of what they have. This is a problem, because as soon as this is done to the “rich,” the argument is effectively made – and won – that government may seize half (or more) of the possessions of all citizens.
One potential solution to the problem of allowing an unrestricted majority to pluck the rights and possessions of a minority is to move toward instituting a flat tax. This would bring simplification of the tax code and the protection of upper income couples, while introducing neutrality into the tax system towards the earnings and rights of both the minority and the majority.
A flat tax would introduce simplicity and neutrality to the tax code. Source.
Norman Borlaug: One Man’s Scientific Vision and Perseverance Extends the Staff of Life to Hundreds of Millions of People Around the World
Norman Ernest Borlaug (March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) “was an American agronomist, humanitarian, and Nobel laureate who has been called “the father of the Green Revolution”. Borlaug was one of six people to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second highest civilian honor.
Borlaug received his Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.
During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.[5] These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.
Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production to Asia and Africa.
Dwarfing
Dwarfing is an important agronomic quality for wheat; dwarf plants produce thick stems. The cultivars Borlaug worked with had tall, thin stalks. Taller wheat grasses better compete for sunlight, but tend to collapse under the weight of the extra grain—a trait called lodging— from the rapid growth spurts induced by nitrogen fertilizer Borlaug used in the poor soil. To prevent this, he bred wheat to favor shorter, stronger stalks that could better support larger seed heads. In 1953, he acquired a Japanese dwarf variety of wheat called Norin 10 developed by Orville Vogel, that had been crossed with a high-yielding American cultivar called Brevor 14.[19] Norin 10/Brevor is semi-dwarf (one-half to two-thirds the height of standard varieties) and produces more stalks and thus more heads of grain per plant. Also, larger amounts of assimilate were partitioned into the actual grains, further increasing the yield. Borlaug crossbred the semi-dwarf Norin 10/Brevor cultivar with his disease-resistant cultivars to produce wheat varieties that were adapted to tropical and sub-tropical climates.[20]
Borlaug’s new semi-dwarf, disease-resistant varieties, called Pitic 62 and Penjamo 62, changed the potential yield of spring wheat dramatically. By 1963, 95% of Mexico’s wheat crops used the semi-dwarf varieties developed by Borlaug. That year, the harvest was six times larger than in 1944, the year Borlaug arrived in Mexico. Mexico had become fully self-sufficient in wheat production, and a net exporter of wheat.[21] Four other high yield varieties were also released, in 1964: Lerma Rojo 64, Siete Cerros, Sonora 64, and Super X.” ~Wikipedia
“[S]ome of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be shocked that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”.
~Norman Borlaug, on environmental and other groups hostile to bringing high yield crops to Africa
- Happy Autumn and Fall Festivities
CHUNDER DOWN UNDER
HOW GHCN v3.2 MANUFACTURES WARMING IN THE OUTBACK
by Roger Andrews
I originally entitled this post “Blunder Down Under”, but then it occurred to me that all of what I’m about to describe wasn’t a blunder at all, but intentional. So I changed “Blunder” to “Chunder”, which as those of you familiar with the Strine language will know, means “throw up”.
NCDC recently released the latest version of the Global Historic Climate Network data set – GHCN version 3.2, which applies adjustments to remove the artificial man-made discontinuities and spurious gradients that allegedly plague the “raw” GHCN Version 2 data.
I started to go through the GHCN v3.2 data, and the first record I looked at was Alice Springs in the middle of Australia. I plotted the “raw” GHCN v2 data against the adjusted GHCN v3.2 data for the station, and here’s what I got:
http://oi49.tinypic.com/2e34y6d.jpg
GHCN…
View original post 776 more words
Washington State Constitution Article 1, Section 1
All political power is inherent in the people, and governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights.
John Christy, Anthony Watts, et al. Release Analysis of Thermometer Siting and NOAA Temperature Adjustments
Link to paper here: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/watts-et-al_2012_discussion_paper_webrelease.pdf
Comment: This paper introduces a finer method of classifying sites where temperatures are recorded. Many sites are affected by the presence of asphalt (either from roofs, tarmacs, or parking lots), buildings, and even exhaust from cars and AC units. These sites receive a lower compliance rating. Yet climate scientists still insisted that the overall trend remained the same for good or bad surface stations. In this paper, a better classification of sites is used. This classification is applied to historic data sets. The signal for good sites give a very slight warming over 3 decades. The poor sites give a greater warming trend. The adjustments made to the data later all conform to, and even exceed, the trends from the poor sites. See figure above, and the paper – in particular lines 189-211 and 284-298 – for more detail.
Yes You May Stop What Your Are Doing and Take a Walk
“Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road.
Henceforth I ask not good fortune: I myself am good fortune…
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms.
Strong and content, I take to the open road.”
James Allen, The Heavenly Life (p. 21). Kindle Edition.
Comment: We are all scolded enough with what exercise ought to be: heart rate raised for 20 min – nay that was last decade – heart rate raised for a minimum of 30 min at 130 beats per minute. Those who fall short of this sometimes give up exercise altogether, thinking that if they cannot attain the minimum definition of exercise published by experts, why bother? Others who do attain this daily habit very often go beyond it and overtrain, stressing their bodies and not allowing proper rest and healing between workouts of several hours. Today’s quote is from James Allen, and is to remind us that along with the toning of the body’s musculature, a simple walk under the crystal arcing sky is clearing and needful for mental vitality. Just as many athletes overtrain and strain their bodies, people who are busy sometimes strain the natural strength and tone of the mind.
A walk along a favorite or nearby path will refresh the mind as well as the body.
Excerpts from Paradise
“The One who turned His compass to mark the world’s confines, and in them to set so many things concealed
and things revealed,
could not imprint His power into all the universe without His Word remaining in infinite excess of such a vessel.
In proof of this, the first proud being, he who was the highest of all creations, fell –
unripe, because he did not wait for light.”
~Dante
“The sword that strikes from Heaven’s height is neither hasty nor slow, except as it appears to him who waits for it – who longs or fears.”
~Beatrice
In Memory of Beatrice Portinari (d. June 8, 1290)
Italian Alabaster Figure Beatrice Portinari
Beatrice Portinari, remembered forever in Dante’s poetic works as his inspiration and his radiant guide through the after-worlds of the Divine Comedy, died in Italy on the 8th of June in 1290. She was only 24 at the time of her death.
Dante himself, and many others, have chronicled the relationship of the poet to the young lady. Occasional commenters have even questioned whether she was a real person or was rather some spiritualized ideal of a woman. It is held by some societies that “Beatrice” is a representative of such inner qualities as wisdom and knowledge, which are to be pursued with the devoted passion of young love. However, researchers have uncovered civil records of Beatrice Portinari, the daughter of the noble family in Florence, Italy, who is likely to be the subject of Dante’s La Vita Nuova – the book which relates their brief encounters until the year of her untimely death.
From the moment he saw her at a May party when they were children, he claims his life was entirely under the influence of his love for her. He finally completed his master works in fulfillment of a promise to himself “to say that of her, that never yet hath been said of any lady.”
Although Beatrice is immortalized in her connection to Dante, not much is understood of her own side of the experience. Did Beatrice Portinari return Dante Alighieri’s love? Was she equally overpowered by her love for him? Did their love have something to do with her tragic death at the age of 24? Today I will share a quote from the introduction to La Vita Nuova by Theodore Martin, 1862. This brief quote is offered in order to highlight one of the very few things we actually know about Beatrice Portinari’s experience with Dante: she ceased to greet him because she did not wish to be treated as he appeared to treat other ladies. Here is the account:
“The incidents recorded in the Vita Nuova are few and meagre. Dante, a boy of nine, meets Beatrice, a girl of eight, very much as Boccaccio mentions. He falls in love with her then at once and for ever. They do not meet, so as to interchange greetings, until nine years afterwards, although Dante, in the interval, seized every opportunity of seeing and watching the growing girl. This second meeting, and the words which fell from her on the occasion, confirm his passion, which finds its natural vent in poetry. No direct intimation of his love is, however, made by the poet to Beatrice; and, in order to mislead the curious, who saw from his appearance and demeanor that the fever fit of love was upon him, he resorted to the device, then not an uncommon one, of feigning to be the admirer par armours of two other ladies in succession.
Beatrice, however, he gives us to understand, had reason to know the true state of the case; but he dissembles only too well, for his attentions to one of the ladies for whom he feigned affection becomes a topic of scandal. Beatrice, incensed, refuses him her salutation, or, in other words, declines further acquaintance with him. The poet is in despair. Her indignation 
lasts apparently for a considerable time, and during this period, it may with great probability be inferred, she married, – although Dante is silent throughout on this subject. How a reconciliation takes place we are not told; but we are left to infer that they were reconciled…” ~Theodore Martin, 1862
In La Vita Nuova, Dante relates how he writes poetry to another woman, and even moves to the city in which the other woman lives, all the while believing Beatrice understood it was just a fashionable ruse on his part, 
and that the poetry was written to her. Given that Dante himself admits the possibility later that she “wist not” that he was writing to her, it is not unreasonable to raise the possibility that if Beatrice truly loved Dante, she may have been privately devastated by these events. By the time he has publicly written poems to a second lady, meaning them for Beatrice, the ruse misfires, and Beatrice then no longer greets Dante in the lane. An alternative view is that at this point not only was she unable to interpret the repeated public attentions to other ladies, but also she was disappointed by his clumsiness in the resulting public “scandal.” Her decision then not to greet him shows a strictness with herself, and on her part a great inner strength and dignity which would not accept such apparent shabby behavior, even from one she loved.
Neither do I think it is unreasonable to observe that her father likely gave her in marriage to one of his business partners in banking, and that she did not have any choice but to obey her father in this marriage. Her fate then was to carry out the wishes of her father in an arranged marriage, a task which she seems to bravely meet. But when her father dies in December of 1289, her grief is so great, and she is so bereft, that it is remarked by her friends at the funeral that she would not live long. Dante becomes very ill, and experiences visions of her death. Then, some months after the death of her father, Beatrice Portinari passed away at the young age of 24.
The traditional site of her tomb is not ornate, but gives honor to her memory and her quiet strength with her maiden name. This rose marks the passing of a young medieval Florentine woman whose nobility was not merely outward, but inward as well.
Runaway Temperatures, or Runaway Numerical Modeling in the Natural Sciences?
“One of the messages that I like to convey after these five years of working in the topic is that I believe that in the general world community there has been a breaking of the balance between the three key aspects of any research in the natural sciences, which is observation, theory – by theory I mean physical, chemical, biological theory based on principles – and numerical modeling. I believe the three are extremely important. They all should be interacting, but they should be balanced.
My view is that in the last 20 years there has been much too much on the numerical side and absolutely not enough on observation, and I would suggest that observation is the key thing that should be supported in the coming decade.
So I begin with a critical look at some global and regional temperature data. I think this is either from […] or Fred Singer – I stole this slide from. It’s just to remind people what the recording of temp at a station looks like. On the left I don’t know which station but from 1850 to the year 2000 you have all the temperature data and you see that actually the trend you are going to try to extract is the mean on the right. When we talk about climate change in terms of temperature, what we are looking at is the figure on the right, which is always expanded on the vertical axis in such a way that you forget where it’s extracted from. It doesn’t mean that it is not interesting or not meaningful. It means one you should remember how difficult it is to extract this small signal, and two, it doesn’t have an error bar. Someone asked the question about uncertainties. Another one of my messages is that I believe uncertainties in many cases have been enormously underestimated, and we should always bear them in mind.” (To be cont’d.)
~Vincent Courtillot
“The Boast of the Stoic is Empty”
“The boast of the Stoic is empty, that the mind is its own place.
The mind lives by its takings, and fresh experience feathers the wings of the human spirit, and lends them scope and power.”
~Sir Walter Raleigh
Aleksandra Andreevna Glagoleva Arkad’eva
Aleksandra Andreevna Glagoleva Arkad’eva (1884-1945)
Soviet physicist.
“Upon graduating from the physics and mathematics department of the Moscow Advanced Courses for Women in 1910, she began working there. From 1914 to 1918 she worked in the X-ray department of a military hospital. From 1918 she was at Moscow University, becoming a professor both at the university and at the Second Moscow Medical Institute in 1930. In 1916, Glagoleva-Arkad’eva constructed an instrument for measuring the depths of bullets and shell fragments in wounds–the X-ray stereometer. In 1922 she constructed a new source of electromagnetic waves, the so-called mass radiator, a vessel with aluminum filings suspended in a viscous oil. The filings, being moving hertz oscillators, radiate electromagnetic waves when electric sparks are passed through them. Because of the small dimensions of the oscillators, Glagoleva-Arkad’eva was able to obtain (in 1923) wavelengths of 5 cm to 82 μm, filling a gap in the scale of electromagnetic waves between the spectra of infrared and radio waves.”
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Glagoleva-Arkadeva,+Aleksandra+Andreevna
Mastery
“The struggle against lying in oneself and the struggle against fears is the first positive work which a man begins to do.”
~GI Gurdjieff
Seeing the Unseen
“No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”
~Helen Keller
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Nikola Tesla on Aether
The inventor responded thus to an article by Laurence M. Cockaday:
“I have read the article, and I quite agree with the opinion expressed – that wireless power transmission is impractical with present apparatus. This conclusion will be naturally reached by any one who recognizes the nature of the agent by which the impulses are transmitted in present wireless practice.
“When Dr. Heinrich Hertz undertook his experiments from 1887 to 1889 his object was to demonstrate a theory postulating a medium filling all space, called the ether which was structureless, of inconceivable tenuity and yet solid and possessed of rigidity incomparably greater than that of the hardest steel. He obtained certain results and the whole world acclaimed them as an experimental verification of that cherished theory. But in reality what he observed tended to prove just its fallacy.
“I had maintained for many years before that such a medium as supposed could not exist, and that we must rather accept the view that all space is filled with a gaseous substance. On repeating the Hertz experiments, with much improved and very powerful apparatus, I satisfied myself that what he had observed was nothing else but effects of longitudinal waves in a gaseous medium, that is to say, waves, propagated by alternate compression and expansion. He had observed waves in the ether much of the nature of sound waves in the air.
“Up to 1896, however, I did not succeed in obtaining a positive experimental proof of the existence of such a medium. But in that year I brought out a new form of vacuum tube capable of being charged to any desired potential, and operated it with effective pressures of about 4,000,000 volts. I produced cathodic and other rays of transcending intensity. The effects, according to my view, were due to minute particles of matter carrying enormous electrical charges, which, for want of a better name, I designated as matter not further decomposable. Subsequently those particles were called electrons.
“One of the first striking observations made with my tubes was that a purplish glow for several feet around the end of the tube was formed, and I readily ascertained that it was due to the escape of the charges of the particles as soon as they passed out into the air; for it was only in a nearly perfect vacuum that these charges could be confined to them. The coronal discharge proved that there must be a medium besides air in the space, composed of particles immeasurably smaller than those of air, as otherwise such a discharge would not be possible. On further investigation I found that this gas was so light that a volume equal to that of the earth would weigh only about one-twentieth of a pound.
“The velocity of any sound wave depends on a certain ratio between elasticity and density, and for this ether or universal gas the ratio is 800,000,000,000 times greater than for air. This means that the velocity of the sound waves propagated through the ether is about 300,000 times greater than that of the sound waves in air, which travel at approximately 1,085 feet a second. Consequently the speed in ether is 900,000 × 1,085 feet, or 186,000 miles, and that is the speed of light.”
~Nikola Tesla
H/T PG Truspace
“Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe”
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) Image: purchase this fine giclee print online
“There is no longer anyone who does not know that the earth we inhabit shows everywhere clear traces of large and violent revolutions; but it is not yet possible to unravel the history of these upheavals, despite the efforts of those who have collected and compared their documentation.”
~Georges Cuvier, 1798
zekeunlimited 
