5/28/2023 0 Comments Alchemy meaning![]() In March 2016, the Chemical Heritage Foundation bought a 17th-century alchemy manuscript written by Newton. For instance, Isaac Newton, best known for his study of gravity and his laws of motion, also wrote more than a million words of alchemical notes throughout his lifetime, historians have estimated. ![]() Early investigators of natural processes centered their search on a mythical substance they knew as philosopher's stone, which was supposed to possess many valuable attributes such as the power to heal, to prolong life, and to change base metals into precious metal - such as gold." (This "philosopher's stone" was not a literal stone but instead a wax, liquid, or powder that held magical powers.)Īlchemy shows up in some odd places. To the alchemists, metals were not the unique substances that populate the Periodic Table, but instead the same thing in different stages of development or refinement on their way to spiritual perfection.Īs James Randi notes in his "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural," "Beginning about the year 100 and reaching its flower in medieval times, alchemy was an art based partly upon experimentation and partly upon magic. When a base, or common, metal such as lead was found, it was thought to simply be a spiritually and physically immature form of higher metals such as gold. Finally, for good measure, I used the dwell locations to generate trade areas incorporating the closest 75% of those points, to give the client a visual of where the bulk of his customers were coming from.Alchemy was rooted in a complex spiritual worldview in which everything around us contains a sort of universal spirit, and metals were believed not only to be alive but also to grow inside the Earth. These were the "traffic drivers" the client was looking for. I used FME's ability to compare adjacent rows to figure out how far a phone traveled in a certain time period and filter out "on the road" pings, leaving only those locations where a phone "dwelled" for a period of time. Using FME, I created workflows to figure out which phones belonged to employees and filter them out. Unfortunately, there's a lot of noise in that data: phones belonging to employees, not customers "pings" located on highways, in transit or pings in the parking lot of your store. You can obtain location information for smartphones that have visited your store, and in that data you see where each phone went in the hour before, and the hour after, the store visit. UberMedia collects (and sells) smartphone location "pings" recorded whenever an associated smartphone app serves you an ad. ![]() In my internship, I was faced with a challenge: a client with a chain of restaurants wanted to know if he could use UberMedia smartphone location data to discover where his customers were coming from, how far they traveled, and what nearby businesses were driving traffic to his restaurants. ![]() But what can anyone DO with that much data? Can you create something meaningful from that ocean of noise? Big Data is being collected on every one of us with a smartphone - every time we use Twitter or Facebook, or play Angry Birds, or use any one of 1000s of different free apps that are free because they serve you ads. ![]()
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