Mysterious Objects Research Articles

The Color of Love: <em>Madamismo</em> and Interracial Relationships in the Italian Colonies

This article focuses on madamas , colonized women who provided comforts of home to male Italian settlers in East Africa. While the madamas represented only a small fraction of colonized women in the Horn of Africa, they emerged as a key feature of the Italo-African encounter and dominated colonial discourses on and representations of native women. Native women were stereotypically represented as Black Venuses, voyeuristically gazed at and petrified in atemporal settings without any sociocultural specificity and dismissed as victims of Italian colonialism, or as dangerous and mysterious objects. Even early colonial narratives that expressed some sympathy for the violated indigenous people were unanimous in portraying the madamas who consorted with Italian men as sorceresses, femmes fatales, spies, witches, or manipulators. The madamas were often blamed for Italian military incompetence and for turning many Italian men into insabbiati, literally covered with sand and figuratively gone native. Historians, ethnographers, and writers have inevitably tended to concentrate on the colonizers rather than on the colonized, and on the sexuality of white males in nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonialism. Based on emerging studies on the historical nature of madamismo in Eritrea, and its cultural implications, this article attempts to bring a gender corrective to the dominant discourses surrounding madamismo and to account for the experiences, legacies, and voices on the color of love in colonial times from the colonized perspective.

Milk: a local and global history

How did an animal product that spoils easily, carries disease, and causes digestive trouble for many of its consumers become a near-universal symbol of modern nutrition? In the first cultural history of milk, historian Deborah Valenze traces the rituals and beliefs that have governed milk production and consumption since its use in the earliest societies. Covering the long span of human history, Milk reveals how developments in technology, public health, and nutritional science made this once-rare elixir a modern-day staple. The book looks at the religious meanings of milk, along with its association with pastoral life, which made it an object of mystery and suspicion during medieval times and the Renaissance. As early modern societies refined agricultural techniques, cow's milk became crucial to improving diets and economies, launching milk production and consumption into a more modern phase. Yet as business and science transformed the product in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, commercial milk became not only a common and widely available commodity but also a source of uncertainty when used in place of human breast milk for infant feeding. Valenze also examines the dairy culture of the developing world, looking at the example of India, currently the world's largest milk producer. Ultimately, milk's surprising history teaches us how to think about our relationship to food in the present, as well as in the past. It reveals that although milk is a product of nature, it has always been an artefact of culture.

A Study on the Bird Image Expressed in Modern Fashion Design

As a free creature that can fly in the sky, the bird has been an object of admiration and mystery and a mediator between human beings and the heavens. This study aims to clarify the aesthetic value of birds through study of the various expressions of the bird image on clothing and by the formative will of designers. Based on the general examination of the bird image through the study of documents, this study is composed of a case analysis, which reveals on modern fashion designs. Additionally, the forms of expression of the bird image are organized according to the stereoscopic expression of shaping, the relief expression of handicraft decoration, the flat expression of surface design, and the characteristic expression of wings and feathers. The aesthetic characteristics revealed by the expression patterns are metaphorical symbolism, surrealistic humor, lyrical naturalness, and fantastical femininity. Since antiquity, the bird image continuously recreated by artists has offered aesthetic value in terms of formativeness in the external form and symbolism in the internal form. This study would help to understand the diversity of creation in contemporary fashion design.

Itinerant Cinema

Commentary on Apichatpong Weerasethakul's work to date leaves much to be desired. At best, it affords a survey of his feature filmography in terms of Western art cinema aesthetics, and sometimes of a ‘New Asian Cinema’; at worst, it descends into exoticism. Despite his experimental leanings, and constant appearance in galleries and biennials, engagements from the side of contemporary art have done little to deepen the ahistorical contemplation of his work. This article seeks to contextualise Apichatpong's practice with reference to Thai political and cultural histories, as well as some touchstones in Western modernism. Taking as a starting point his first feature-length film (Mysterious Object at Noon, 2000), the author begins by establishing an ethno-political background for his practice, and follows this with two detours: the first, art historical, explores Apichatpong's putative alignment with a certain Surrealism; the second is psycho-geographic, and brings into relief a poetics of itinerancy in his work. At issue is the question of the moving image's amplitude as a social historical channel; and of what critical purchase an ‘itinerant cinema’ may have on Thailand's fractious political present.

Effects of dust on light-curves ofϵAurigae-type stars

\epsilon Auriga is one of the most mysterious objects on the sky. Prior modeling of its light-curve assumed a dark, inclined, non-transparent or semi-transparent, dusty disk with a central hole. The hole was necessary to explain the light-curve with a sharp mid-eclipse brightening. The aim of the present paper is to study the effects of dust on the light-curves of eclipsing binary stars and to develop an alternative physical model for $\epsilon$ Aur type objects which is based on the optical properties of dust grains. The code Shellspec has been modified to calculate the light-curves and spectra of such objects. The code solves the radiative transfer along the line of sight in interacting binaries. Dust and angle dependent Mie scattering were introduced into the code for this purpose. Our model of $\epsilon$ Aur consists of two geometrically thick flared disks: an internal optically thick disk and an external optically thin disk which absorbs and scatters radiation. Disks are in the orbital plane and are almost edge-on. We argue that there is no need for an inclined disk with a hole to explain the current eclipse of $\epsilon$ Aur not even if there is a possible shallow mid-eclipse brightening. It was demonstrated that phase dependent light scattering and the optical properties of the dust can have an important effect on the light-curves of such stars and can even produce a mid-eclipse brightening. This is a natural consequence of the strong forward scattering. It was also demonstrated that shallow mid-eclipse brightening might result from eclipses by nearly edge-on flared (dusty or gaseous) disks.

Synthetic Spectra and Light Curves of Interacting Binaries and Exoplanets with Circumstellar Material: SHELLSPEC

AbstractProgram SHELLSPEC is designed to calculate light-curves, spectra and images of interacting binaries and extrasolar planets immersed in a moving circumstellar environment which is optically thin. It solves simple radiative transfer along the line of sight in moving media. The assumptions include LTE and optional known state quantities and velocity fields in 3D. Optional (non)transparent objects such as a spot, disc, stream, jet, shell or stars may be defined (embedded) in 3D and their composite synthetic spectrum calculated. The Roche model can be used as a boundary condition for the radiative transfer. Recently, a new model of the reflection effect, dust and Mie scattering were incorporated into the code.ϵ Aurigae is one of the most mysterious objects on the sky. Prior modeling of its light-curve assumed a dark, inclined, disk of dust with a central hole to explain the light-curve with a sharp mid-eclipse brightening. Our model consists of two geometrically thick flared disks: an internal optically thick disk and an external optically thin disk which absorbs and scatters radiation. Shallow mid-eclipse brightening may result from eclipses by nearly edge-on flared (dusty or gaseous) disks. Mid-eclipse brightening may also be due to strong forward scattering and optical properties of the dust which can have an important effect on the light-curves.There are many similarities between interacting binary stars and transiting extrasolar planets. The reflection effect which is briefly reviewed is one of them. The exact Roche shape and temperature distributions over the surface of all currently known transiting extrasolar planets have been determined. In some cases (HAT-P-32b, WASP-12b, WASP-19b), departures from the spherical shape can reach 7-15%.

UV spectroscopy of the hot bare stellar core H1504+65 with the HST Cosmic Origins Spectrograph

We present new ultraviolet spectra of the hottest known, peculiar white dwarf H1504+65, obtained with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. H1504+65 is the hottest known white dwarf (Teff=200 000 K) and has an atmosphere mainly composed by carbon and oxygen, augmented with high amounts of neon and magnesium. This object is unique and the origin of its surface chemistry is completely unclear. We probably see the naked core of either a C–O white dwarf or even a O–Ne–Mg white dwarf. In the latter case, this would be the first proof that such white dwarfs can be the outcome of single-star evolution. The new observations were performed to shed light on the origin of this mysterious object.

Between the Mythic and the Monstrous: The Early Skyscraper's Weird Frontiers

The early skyscraper posed a persistent challenge to modernist mimetic description during the early twentieth century. Although canonical urban novels resisted the skyscraper, the structure appears as a speculative object of mystery within the genred space of weird fiction. As a cipher for the recently closed Western frontier, these fantastic depictions of the skyscraper channeled both American melancholy for this lost space of American imagining and ethical distaste for its legacy of barbarism and misanthropy. With the decline of the mythic frontier and the rise of the amorphous space of the metropolis, the weird skyscraper played out the nation’s anxieties about the nation’s cosmopolitan and colonial future as inherited from America’s old spatial legacies of both creation and destruction.

Peter Whitehead's Pottery

Peter Whitehead's Pottery Michael O'Brien (bio) A Lidded Bowl from Vumé ... In African villages, it is said that you make your best pots when you are slightly hungry. A small lidded bowl from Vumé,1 (see figure 12) a serving dish made for food, which Peter Whitehead had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), was created by the English potter Michael Cardew at Vumé in Ghana. The dish fascinated Whitehead. He found himself compelled to go back to the museum again and again to confront it, to discover why it had begun to haunt him. The shape was ambiguous: in two parts. When separated, there were two separate bowls, each of which could be filled with food. The compulsion to return to this object of mystery, he had felt once, when as a student at Cambridge University he had seen a sculpture in the Fitzwilliam Museum, a head of Princess Meritaten of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, daughter of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his wife Nefertiti. Staring at the Cardew lidded bowl, which was one pot, but also two, Whitehead sensed that if he were to become a serious potter, he would always be striving to re-create this pot—until the day he died. The number of coincidences between Whitehead and Cardew seems remarkable. Peter Whitehead was born in the slums of Liverpool and brought up in a one-parent family. He became head boy of a prestigious public school and won a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge. Cardew's two elder brothers were sent to Westminster School, but there was not enough money for Michael, so he was sent to the local grammar school, from which he won a scholarship to Oxford (almost unheard of in the 1920s) to study classics. These are the kinds of stories politicians and academics love to hear. At college, both Whitehead and Cardew discovered other things far more interesting than their studies, which they duly neglected. Both were threatened [End Page 944] with expulsion and realized that they had better make a token effort to mollify their long-suffering tutors to snatch a degree of sorts (instead of the first-class honors that had been smugly predicted for them). Forty years later, Whitehead's career had been as colorful as it had promised to be brilliant: from filming the Rolling Stones and student riots in America, to hunting falcons in the freezing wastes of Alaska (and being hunted in turn by the U.S. Army for doing so), to breeding them in Saudi Arabia. But perhaps the strangest part of the story is still to come. It is a story I tell here, even though it is one almost too improbable to command respect as a proper academic study. It tells of how Whitehead found in pottery the strength to put behind him the threat of death, when an emergency qua druple heart bypass operation after a massive heart attack failed and he became inoperable—how he coped, late in life, with the problems of trying to make serious pottery and developing exactly what he wanted in his newly chosen field. In describing what Whitehead has made and achieved in this quest to create pottery, we must return to the source of his energy, through the potters Michael Cardew and the great Japanese potter (and Whitehead's mentor) Shoji Hamada, back to the uninhibited work of peasant potters, to the basic values in the pottery made in traditional, unspoiled African villages. In some of these villages, potters today are making pottery as fine, aesthetically, as any ever made. Whitehead's work is equally original and distinctive, deriving much of its quality from inner considerations, a deliberate lack of concern for commerce. Yet given present Western attitudes, it is more than likely that what ever Whitehead makes, however unique, his work will be overlooked in the official circles of the world of ceramics. Whitehead had just finished his last novel, Girl on the Train, in 2000, when his bypass operation suddenly failed and he was rushed back to the hospital with life-threatening complications. After a prolonged, complicated angiography when he came close to having a...

Cohomology and support varieties for Lie superalgebras

Unlike Lie algebras, the finite dimensional complex representations of a simple Lie superalgebra are usually not semisimple. As a consequence, despite over thirty years of study, these remain mysterious objects. In this paper we introduce a new tool: the notion of cohomological support varieties for the finite dimensional supermodules for a classical Lie superalgebra g = g 0 ⊕ g 1 which are completely reducible over g 0 . They allow us to provide a new, functorial description of the previously combinatorial notions of defect and atypicality. We also introduce the detecting subalgebra of g. Its role is analogous to the defect subgroup in the theory of finite groups in positive characteristic. Using invariant theory we prove that there are close connections between the cohomology and support varieties of g and the detecting subalgebra.

EPSILON AURIGAE: AN IMPROVED SPECTROSCOPIC ORBITAL SOLUTION

A rare eclipse of the mysterious object Epsilon Aurigae will occur in 2009-2011. We report an updated single-lined spectroscopic solution for the orbit of the primary star based on 20 years of monitoring at the CfA, combined with historical velocity observations dating back to 1897. There are 518 new CfA observations obtained between 1989 and 2009. Two solutions are presented. One uses the velocities outside the eclipse phases together with mid-times of previous eclipses, from photometry dating back to 1842, which provide the strongest constraint on the ephemeris. This yields a period of 9896.0 +/- 1.6 days (27.0938 +/- 0.0044 years) with a velocity semi-amplitude of 13.84 +/- 0.23 km/s and an eccentricity of 0.227 +/- 0.011. The middle of the current on-going eclipse predicted by this combined fit is JD 2,455,413.8 +/- 4.8, corresponding to 2010 August 5. If we use only the radial velocities, we find that the predicted middle of the current eclipse is nine months earlier. This would imply that the gravitating companion is not the same as the eclipsing object. Alternatively, the purely spectroscopic solution may be biased by perturbations in the velocities due to the short-period oscillations of the supergiant.

SEARCHING FOR GRAVITATIONAL WAVES WITH THE HILBERT–HUANG TRANSFORM

Gravitational waves are a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity applied to the motion of very dense and massive objects such as black holes and neutron stars. Their detection will reveal a wealth of information about these mysterious objects that cannot be obtained with electromagnetic probes. Two projects are underway to attempt the detection of gravitational waves: LISA, a space based mission being designed to search for waves from supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies, and LIGO, a ground based facility that is now searching for waves from supernovae, pulsars, and the coalescence of black hole and neutron star systems. Because general relativity is an inherently nonlinear theory, many of the predicted source waveforms show strong frequency modulation. In addition, the LIGO and LISA detectors are highly sensitive devices that produce a variety of nonlinear, transient noise features. Thus the unique capabilities of the HHT, the extraction of intrawave modulation and the characterization of nonlinear and nonstationary signals, have a natural application to both signal detection and experimental characterization of the detectors.

Diffuse 18 $\mu$m Emission around TYC 3159-6-1 Discovered by the AKARI MIR All-Sky Survey

Abstract We report on observations of the mysterious object TYC 3159-6-1 located toward the Cygnus X region. It shows interesting characteristics in the AKARI mid-infrared All-Sky Survey. The central star is clearly detected as a point source at 9 $\mu$m, while no point-like source, but a large shell-like structure is seen around the source at 18 $\mu$m. The optical spectrum indicates the presence of the weak H$\alpha$emission on the red smooth continuum, whereas the mid-infrared $N$band spectrum shows neither excess emission nor significant silicate absorption. Interferometric continuum observations at 104 GHz do not show any appreciable peak at the position of the star. On the basis of these observations, we investigate three possibilities of concerning the nature of TYC 3159-6-1: a nearby young stellar object, a heavily extincted high-mass star, and an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star with a detached shell. We conclude that none of these cases can account for the observations consistently, and the nature of TYC 3159-6-1 remains a mystery.

Three-dimensional reconstruction from real data using a conjugate gradient-coupled dipole method

The aim of the present work is to validate a full vectorial electromagnetic inverse scattering algorithm against experimental data. Data were provided courtesy of Institut Fresnel, Marseille, France. These data were carried out in an anechoic chamber and correspond to different canonical targets as well as one mysterious object which is known only by experimentalists who measured the associated scattered field. The inverse algorithm was first developed in the optical domain and is adapted herein to the microwave domain. It is an iterative approach where the parameter of interest, namely the relative permittivity distribution, is updated gradually by minimizing a cost function describing the discrepancy between data and those that would be obtained via a forward solver for the best available estimate of the relative permittivity. The forward solver is based on the coupled dipole method which was introduced in the seventies to study the scattering of light by non-spherical dielectric grains. The forward and inverse schemes are briefly described and various examples are presented that demonstrate the efficiency of the inverse algorithm.

Infrared and millimetre-wavelength evidence for cold accretion within az= 2.83 Lyman α blob

This paper discusses infrared and millimetre-wavelength observations of a Lyman α blob (LAB) discovered by Smith & Jarvis, a candidate for ionization by the cold accretion scenario discussed in Fardal et al. and Dijkstra et al. We have observed the counterpart galaxy at infrared wavelengths in deep observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope using the IRAC 3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 μm and MIPS 24 μm bands, as well as using the Max-Planck Millimeter Bolometer (MAMBO-2) at a wavelength of 1.2 mm with the IRAM 30 m telescope. These observations probe the ≳95 kpc Lyman α halo for the presence of obscured active galactic nucleus (AGN) components or the presence of a violent period of star formation invoked by other models of ionization for these mysterious objects. 24 μm observations suggest that an obscured AGN would be insufficiently luminous to ionize the halo, and that the star formation rate within the halo may be as low as <140 M⊙ yr−1 depending on the model spectral energy distribution (SED) used. This is reinforced by our observations at 1.2 mm using MAMBO-2, which yield an upper limit of star formation rate <550 M⊙ yr−1 from our non-detection to a 3σ flux limit of 0.86 mJy beam−1. Finding no evidence for either AGN or extensive star formation, we conclude that this halo is ionized by a cold accretion process. We derive model SEDs for the host galaxy, and use the Bruzual & Charlot and Maraston libraries to show that the galaxy is well described by composite stellar populations of total mass 3.42 ± 0.13 × 1011 or 4.35 ± 0.16 × 1011M⊙ depending on the model SEDs used.

Atom &amp; Cosmos: School teacher spots green blob: Mystery object appears to be a starless dwarf galaxy

Atom &amp; Cosmos: School teacher spots green blob: Mystery object appears to be a starless dwarf galaxy

Law’s Empiricism of the Object: How Law Recreates Cultural Objects in its Own Image

1.0 INTRODUCTION: FINDING LEGAL CERTAINTY? Things, called objects for a good reason, appear to be the most 'pure' form of objectivity.'1 Watch an antique or collectables show on television, and more often than not, one segment is devoted to testing the knowledge of an expert panel (and sometimes members of the public) with a problem or 'mystery' object. The object of the exercise (no other word will do so the pun must stay), is to find out what the object actually is, what it was used for, and when it was used. Sometimes the experts know what it is, but more often than not, the host has to tell them. The only way an object can provide some kind of objective knowledge about itself is in terms of a weighing and measuring exercise, but without more, the object is bare, meaningless, and lifeless. The appearances of objects can be deceiving, as Mieke BaI is telling us, because pure and certain objects are meaningless without context, meaning, value, or significance. Meanings and values discursive factors - have to be imposed on these objects in order to make sense of them as objects of culture or objects of value.2 The only things that an object can tell us with precision are those things we impose upon it. The object, despite these deficiencies, is prized by the legal enterprise (a term I will use to encompass law as doctrine, law within its categories of meaning, and law in the hands of its practitioners) because it provides a sense of clarity and certainty that brooks no opposition. If something can be described, quantified, weighed and measured, then that thing and its existence is incontrovertible, by apparently providing knowledge about the object in its clearest and most precise mode. It assumes the veracity of the object as a physical presence as a fact, which can provide a trustworthy source of information about the object itself. But as the example of the television collectables program shows, objects can only do so much, and explanations about the object must be imposed externally on the object. While these may be described as facts about the object (who owned it, who painted it and so on) the legal enterprise characterises these interventions, generally speaking, as opinion. Opinions, by their nature, are uncertain, and always suspect because they are based on the views of the people who make diem. They cannot, unlike objects, be certain at all. Yet as the example of the 'mystery object' shows, objects as they are used in the social world are fallible because they have no meaning other than that placed upon them, such as their associations with a particular historical person, or because of their rarity. However, this reliance on the veracity of objects is fundamental to a range of areas of law from the law of contract to personal property law, and informs the rules of evidence dirough decisions whether or not to admit expert 'opinion'. As will be seen shortly, the idea that the fact of an object can be determined with precision, but that opinions are suspect, is imbued within the stuff of the legal enterprise. Yet law's practitioners are mostly unaware that the fact/opinion divide was a creation of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophical empiricism which suited the emerging commercial temperament of the legal doctrines and categories that took their modern shape during the same period. The fact/opinion divide embedded itself within law because it has the appearance of making legal decision-making more certain, more rational, and more objective. However, I will argue here that not only does it make some types of decisionmaking less certain, other methods based around the discursive practices used to create meanings about objects (which the legal enterprise would classify as opinion) have the potential to create a more solid and certain set of meanings about objects. I will suggest that the duality of fact and opinion is a divisive analytical tool that can alter the appearance of meanings and value of an object, and rather than ensure a certainty of outcome in cases involving art and cultural objects, may result in greater uncertainty than if the legal enterprise used a less divisive method to make decisions about the veracity of objects. …

Working practices in Thai independent film production and distribution1

In the late 1990s, independent Thai films became a new burgeoning industry, with the beginnings of international recognition. Taking three case studies, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Mysterious Object at Noon (2000), Thunska Pansittivorakul’s Voodoo Girls (2003) and Aditya Assarat and Mingmongkol Sonakul’s Ma‐mee/ Three Friends (2005), I argue that the digital format for DVD/VCDs is paving the way for independent filmmakers/producers to participate in the art film market abroad and to cut production costs. Following the economics of money flows makes it clear that ‘independent film’ in Thailand is less about economic independence than a type of branding and packaging of aesthetics and content. While film, economically, is never outside the workings of capital, the content and style of the three film projects considered here seek to break out of the conventions set by the commercial Thai film narrative style.

Mysterious Object at Noon (review)

Mysterious Object at Noon (review)

Mysterious Object at Noon

Mysterious Object at Noon