Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Egyptian Heh and the Palm Ribs of Infinity? : Staff Alignment based on the Concept of Parallel Lines Extended? - LexiLine Journal 442

William Glyn-Jones wrote about Heh, the Pharaonic representation of Infinity:

"[L]ast night (in the middle of the night, when I would rather have been fast asleep) I had an interesting thought about the parallel lines business. Heh was the Egyptian god who represented infinity and he was frequently showing holding two straight palm ribs, one in each hand, vertically, to either side of himself. [link added by LexiLine Journal]

These ribs are shown with the infinity symbol at the base.

Egyptologists tell us that the palm ribs was used as a bay – a pole held vertically – when finding and aligning to true north from the pole star. I pondered and pondered and pondered what process could have involved holding two bays. I pictured it in my head – two alignments being plotted due north from two bays, side by side. The Egyptians would have noted no angle between them, they would have seemed to be parallel, and parallel lines meet at infinity. So we have Heh, infinity, holding the two vertical (and of course also parallel) palm ribs.

It seems to me we have some kind of Euclidian thing going on with Heh and his staffs. What do you think?"

Evidence-Based Management : A Lesson for the "Soft Sciences" ? - LexiLine Journal 441

We have been preaching "best evidence" to the soft sciences for 30 years but they are still not listening.

Perhaps Robert I. Sutton at Stanford would have more success than we do if he applied to mainstream academia in the humanities what he teaches at the Department of Management Science and Engineering and at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.

Professor Sutton offers managers a course in Organizational Behavior: An Evidence-Based Approach which he describes as follows:
"This course tackles fundamental organizational behavior issues (e.g. employee selection, rewards, teamwork, culture, innovation) from an evidence-based perspective. Evidence-based management is a simple idea. It just means finding the best evidence that you can, facing those facts, and acting on those facts - rather than doing what everyone else does, what you have always done, or what you thought was true. It isn't an excuse for inaction. Leaders of organizations must have the courage to act on the best facts they have right now, and the humility to change what they do as better information is found. The course includes active discussion, industry guests, and case studies."
Professor Sutton, how about if you offered that same course in principle to the archaeologists, Egyptologists, Near East scholars, Biblical scholars, and historians of astronomy on this planet, who generally "do what everyone else does", who persist on "doing what they have always done" and "who do what they think is true" rather than acting on the best evidence available, which often contradicts what they think.

In any case, we are on your side.

Society needs a more solid evidence-based approach in many fields of human endeavor, rather than the witchdoctor-like tea-leaf reading which prevails in many of the soft sciences today. Apparently, the same problem prevails in management as well.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and New Wonders and Technical Enchantments of Modernity - LexiLine Journal 440

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World

Herodotus in his travels was the first to refer to the "wonders" of the world and Callimachus of Cyrene in the 3rd century BC as a scholar at the library of the Alexandria Mouseion wrote A Collection of Wonders around the World .

The original idea of identifying Seven Wonders of the Ancient World comes from a list originally compiled in the 2nd century BC by Antipater of Sidon, who, instead of the Lighthouse of Alexandria listed below, included the Ishtar Gate.

These wonders, however, were not wonders of the natural world, but were all man-made engineering and construction wonders which the ancient Greeks as travelers (tourists) could visit several thousand years ago.

Listed in their order of construction, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were:
  1. The Great Pyramid of Giza
  2. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
  3. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus
  4. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia
  5. The Mausoleum of Maussollos at Halicarnassus
  6. The Colossus of Rhodes
  7. The Lighthouse of Alexandria
The Seven Wonders of the Medieval World

Various locations accessible to travelers in the Middle Ages - and some of these of course were totally unknown to the ancient Greeks - have been included by various sources among the much later Seven Wonders of the Medieval World. This is our selection from a longer list of alternatives: New Ancient Wonders of the World

Modern archaeological discoveries have also opened up our eyes to new, previously unknown wonders which fully qualify as Ancient Wonders of the World, of which this list, created by us, is only a limited example: The Seven Wonders of the Modern World

As world populations and technology have expanded, it has become more difficult to pick out just seven world wonders from the many now available. The Seven Wonders of the Modern World according to the American Society of Civil Engineers (in 1994) were: World Wonders Built in Recent Years

In our view, a number of new building structures definitely fall into the category of world wonders: To those - as follows - we can add modern skyscrapers and similar tall structures which mark the modern age as mankind continues to reach for the stars.

The World's Tallest Man-Made Structures and Buildings

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and Emporis have partnered recently and rank the world's tallest structures and buildings. As written at Emporis: "Taipei 101 is the world's tallest building, surpassing the height of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur in late August 2003."

See the Wikipedia for a current list of tallest buildings and structures in the world, ranked by category. Many of these man-made structures are true world wonders in our modern age. See also a list of the historical development of the world's tallest man-made freestanding structures on land.

Greatest Engineering Achievements of the 20th Century

The National Academy of Engineering has a list of their selection of the Greatest Engineering Achievements of the just past 20th century but none of these are architectural or archaeological tourist travel sites, even though they are world wonders in their own right: As one can see from that list, in ancient times mankind's wonders of the world were confined to things that men built and constructed. In our modern age, the wonders of the world are rightly expanded to include the many new and wondrous things that man has created beyond architecture alone.

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