The Norton Disney Archaeology Group found an example of a “Gallo Roman Dodecahedron”. One of archaeology’s great enigmas,
there are now about 33 known examples in what was Roman occupied Britain.
The opposed flat pentagons of a regular duodecagon gives us its height, in this case measured to be 70 mm. Dividing 0.070 meters by 0.3048 gives 0.22965 feet and, times 4, gives a possible type of foot as 0.91864 or 11/12 feet**.
** Where possible, one should seek the rational fraction of the foot, here 11/12, over the decimal measurement which assumed base-10 arithmetic and loses the integer factors at work within the system of ancient foot-based metrology.
An Essay from DuVersity Newsletter 35 – 2014
The Light and Dark, as Value and Fact, could be viewed as reconciled by an evolved mind, within the biosphere. They could indeed be the cause of the arising of proto-minds, since existential situations in the Biosphere are of value for its beings whilst being factual. As Bennett points out, sex and death are innovations of the biospheric world, and we can now date their arrival during the Cambrian “explosion” (around 542 million years ago) when plants and animals (multicellular life forms) innovated sex to reproduce their organisms as a whole as well as regenerating their cells through cell division. Animals, unlike single-celled algae, are able to express action but must die to benefit from generational improvement by natural selection. Only by such means could the three brains of humans, motive, emotive and cognitive, be selected through their effectiveness in adaptation to living conditions within a variety of different biomes.
But there have been problems for humans in their maintaining a shared cultural harmony towards nature and the biosphere, due to the success of their cognitive brain capacity to solve environmental problems based upon facts. Technologies can arise whose consequences may conflict with social values that are somewhat weakly held to. Arguments can break out over values and the impact of technologies and those that wield them, but the factual benefits generally dominate other human views. The environmental argument is being lost whilst technology becomes an ever stronger threat to the biosphere as we know it. The modern world is simply the latest and greatest in which actions often clearly go against valuing the environment over the wealth it can create, and better-off populations have become used, inured and psychically hardened to human and biospheric tragedy.
Continue reading “Evolving Intelligence of the Biosphere:”
