You can't tell the players......................

.....................................................without a program.  More than everything you wanted to know about the war(s) in Syria - here.

Diagrams......................

Today's episode (of excerpts from 100 Diagrams That Changed the World) brings us The Color Wheel of  Moses Harris.  Harris, concluding that Issac Newton had it wrong when he proposed seven primary colors in 1704, published his theory, The Natural System of Colour, in 1766.  Harris proposed three primary colors (Red, Yellow, Blue).  His handy Prismatic diagram made it easy for all to understand.

Revolutionary anatomy.................................

"For more than 1,300 years, all Western professional knowledge about human anatomy has stemmed from the teachings of the Greek physician Galen (AD 129-216), and most physicians were never required to study the inside of the human body.  So when Flemish physician and anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-64) suddenly focused his attention on dissecting human corpses and describing what he found in meticulous detail, both his approach and its results shook up the medical field.  Many considered it profane."
-Scott Christianson, 100 Diagrams That Changed The World

Speculation..............................

In case we ever needed reminding about how much we don't know, here comes the Phaistos Disc. Discovered in 1908 by an Italian archaeologist digging in a Minoan palace in Crete, the fired-clay disc is stamped with glyphs on both sides.  Based on the location of the discovery, it was estimated that the Phaistos Disc dates to 1700 BC.  What does it mean?  This is where the fun begins:  "Most experts believe the symbols have some sort of hidden meaning, theorizing that its message may have been a geometric theorem, a board game, a prayer, or a mythological story.  Some experts speculate that the pictograms may have been use phonetically, in a manner similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.  However, no other samples of the script have been found and efforts to decipher the text have proved unsuccessful.....Some experts contend that the employment of reusable characters to make an reproduce a body of text means that the Phaistos Disc represents the earliest known example of ancient movable type printing."   Adding to the fun, at least one expert believes the Phaistos Disc is a hoax.

The quotation used above was taken from Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed The World

Diagrams....................................

Shedding a little light.....................

The diagram from Thomas Edison's patent for the "Electric-Lamp,"  the first incandescent lighting.
From 100 Diagrams That Changed The World

Diagrams..........................

Nicolaus Copernicus published his heliocentric model and theory of the solar system in 1543.  No biggie, just contradicted fourteen centuries of western thought and belief by placing the sun, not the earth but the sun, as the fixed center of the solar system.  As one might suspect, it did not immediately garner a lot of love.  More on the story here.

Diagrams.......................................

Lunar Eclipse diagram from Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, dating to 1019 AD.  The Wiki translation of the writing reads: Why – why the increase and decrease of the light of the moon is settled while other stars don't behave so, observing these and not understanding the spirit of these is a misdeed   that the light of the stars is of their own

Found this while thumbing through Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed the World