The Apple iPhone as a Design Copy of the First Pharaonic Cartouche of the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt: A Design in the Public Domain as Prior Art for 4500 Years

People who support patents like to say that you should be able to patent anything under the Sun made by man. But what is new under the Sun?

The outer iPhone design, to which Apple is shamefully trying to obtain exclusive rights in seeking injunctions against the sale of the similarly designed Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, reminds us strongly of the Pharaonic cartouche in which the Ancient Egyptians inscribed the names of their Pharaohs. Indeed, Egyptologists, rightly or wrongly, regard the cartouche of the Pharaoh Snofru to be the first such royal cartouche.

From the image below that we have prepared -- trying to retain the original relative dimensions of the Cartouche of Snofru and the iPhone -- it would appear to us that a good argument can be made that the iPhone was preceded by prior art in the early stages of ancient human writing by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, which inscribed royal names inside a so-called "shen ring", signifying eternity. It is a pretty close design match.

The Apple iPhone as conceivably copied in design
from the first Pharaonic Cartouche, that of the Pharaoh Snofru.

The first Pharaoh to allegedly use a cartouche was the Pharaoh erroneously today called Sneferu, Snephru, or Snofru, who was more correctly known in Ancient Greek as Soris, probably an Indo-European variant for Sun (Sol).
The windpipe hieroglyph in the cartouche of Soris is a vocal determinative (so I allege) erroneously transliterated into English by the Egyptologists as NFR (as a consonant cluster corresponding to matching Indo-European terms such as e.g. Latvian aNVAR or aNTVAR, meaning "opening, windpipe").

The windpipe hieroglyph in ancient Egyptian writing in my opinion actually meant a "windpipe sound" rather than standing for the consonant cluster NFR or the "word" for windpipe.

You can compare the windpipe hieroglyph NFR to a comparable hieroglyph-like symbol we might draw for the word BREATH, showing the windpipe, which you would not then read as "Breath" but would rather make a breath sound, e.g. a hieroglyph in English written as Breath-A-R-D would be read "H-A-R-D" and not be read "Breath-ard" or "BRTH". The Egyptologists still don't get this.

In any case, there is nothing new under the Sun in this case. The shape and the relative dimensions of the iPhone are so similar to the first royal cartouche in Ancient Egypt, that this design in the context of a surface for a writing-oriented electronic device can have no claim to originality. Rather, it is the close implementation of an age-old design in the public domain -- for the last 4500 years.

There are few things new under the Sun, and this is the SUN.

Crossposted from LawPundit because of the related ancient world topic.

The Unreliability of Human Perception -- also in the Practice of Science -- as Evidenced by the Problems of Eyewitness Identification in Law Enforcement

Eyewitness Identification is to be reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time in 34 years, in the case of Perry v. New Hampshire, No. 10-8974, as reported at the New York Times by Adam Liptak in 34 Years Later, Supreme Court Will Revisit Eyewitness IDs.

See Questions Presented.

I was for a short time on the staff of the Project on Law Enforcement Policy and Rulemaking (POLEPAR) at Arizona State University Law School, a joint project with the Police Foundation of the United States. See Gerald M. Caplan, The Case for Rulemaking by Law Enforcement Agencies, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 36, No. 4, Autumn, 1971. Caplan initially headed the POLEPAR project.

Our job was to draft model rules for law enforcement, and one of those model rules was on Eyewitness Identification.

Those model rules are cited e.g. in Gary L. Wells, et seq., Eyewitness Identification Procedures: Recommendations for Lineups and Photospreads, Law and Human Behavior, Vol. 22, No. 6, 1998. Six Model Rules for Law Enforcement by POLEPAR are listed in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, including Eyewitness Identification.

The Model Rules were recently cited (2011) by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts in the case of Commonweatlh vs. Gerald Eddington (and six companion cases).

I have written ever since this project about the unreliability of the manner in which evidence is viewed and interpreted, not only in the law generally, but also in diverse academic disciplines, where many scholars are not even remotely aware of how much their observation is colored by all kinds of extraneous factors.

Eyewitness and similar personal observation of "facts" can be quite faulty.

"Beauty" may be in the eye of the beholder, but the "truth" may not be.
 

Nature News Newest DNA Data: Neanderthals Interbred With Modern Humans: New DNA Data Throws Your Average So-Called Scientist Into Warp Mode

Only a couple of years ago, the mass of the uncritical academic community was abuzz with all kinds of theories about Neanderthal man and how he had not interbred with modern man. At the National Geographic the absurd and despicable theory was even given credence by publication that Neanderthals had disappeared because the predecessors of modern man had eaten them: Last of the Neanderthals. This was the ridiculous buzz of the many incompetents in the archaeological field, an incompetence which pervades the industry.

We did not join that buzz, because we were certain the theory of non-interbreeding was wrong. We do not just hop on and join the ride of every idiot theory that the mainstream archaeological and anthropological community produces.

The amount of absolute junk that was written about this topic by so-called reputable mainstream scientists would fill volumes. Is there any way to create a database of these people and suggest to them all that they go dig for coal in Siberia rather than clutter the academic journals and online postings with their nonsense?

Nature News at Ancient DNA reveals secrets of human history now writes:

"Barely a year after the publication of the genomes of Neanderthals1 and of an extinct human population from Siberia2, scientists are racing to apply the work to answer questions about human evolution and history that would have been unfathomable just a few years ago.

The past months have seen a swathe of discoveries, from details about when Neanderthals and humans interbred, to the important disease-fighting genes that humans now have as a result of those trysts."

[Ancient World Blog note: the new DNA data would have been "unfathomable" only to the uncritical mainstream, who blindly accept everything thrown at them by the oft uninformed authority of their purported but often greatly misled so-called "superiors", who are often nothing more than stuffed shirts in a business suit.]

Ancient Cuneiform Math Tablet Precedes in Designer Prior Art the Design Claims of Apple for the iPad2 by ca. 4000 Years: Columbia University's Plimpton 322

In the previous Ancient World posting -- "Wafer Thin" Writing Tablets of Vindolanda and an Erroneous Modern Claim by Apple to Origination of Thin Tablet Design for the iPad2 -- we showed that wafer-thin writing tablet design preceded the Apple iPad2 by at least 2000 years.

What happens if we go back another ca. 2000 years? Can we find writing tablets of the approximate same aspect ratio as the Apple iPad2 or the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? We can. We can.

There is not that much new in the outer design of tablets in this field.

Let us take the Babylonian writing tablet designated as Plimtpon 322, which is dated to ca. 1800 BC. It is the most renowned mathematical tablet in the world of cuneiform script. People in the computer industry, which has a lot to do with math, should be well aware of it. They known their math. Nicht wahr?

Do we have a match? We do. We do. Plimpton 322 is 13  x 9 cm  or ca. 5 x 3.5 inches, or about half the size of the iPad2. Not only that, but it presents four columns of cuneiform "numbers" (like icons) in 15 rows. The Apple iPad2 also has four columns of "icons". There are only limited possibilities of presenting symbols for legible reading on a tablet. In this regard, Apple claims as its own a tablet design feature already found 4000 years ago.

Below is a photograph of Plimpton 322:

Plimpton 322 is in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University. The image at Wikipedia was copied from http://www.math.ubc.ca/~cass/courses/m446-03/pl322/pl322.html. An academic presentation of Plimpton 322 with image is found at page 12 of Rida T. Farouki, Pythagorean-hodograph curves: algebra and geometry inseparable.

As written at the Wikipedia about Plimpton 322:

"Plimpton 322 is a Babylonian clay tablet, notable as containing an example of Babylonian mathematics. It has number 322 in the G.A. Plimpton Collection at Columbia University.^[1] This tablet, believed to have been written about 1800 BC, has a table of four columns and 15 rows of numbers in the cuneiform script of the period....

Plimpton 322 is partly broken [LawPundit comment: partly broken at the top left], approximately 13 cm wide, 9 cm tall, and 2 cm thick. New York publisher George A. Plimpton purchased the tablet from an archaeological dealer, Edgar J. Banks, in about 1922, and bequeathed it with the rest of his collection to Columbia University in the mid 1930s. According to Banks, the tablet came from Senkereh, a site in southern Iraq corresponding to the ancient city of Larsa.^[3]

The tablet is believed to have been written about 1800 BCE, based in part on the style of handwriting used for its cuneiform script: Robson (2002) writes that this handwriting "is typical of documents from southern Iraq of 4000–3500 years ago." More specifically, based on formatting similarities with other tablets from Larsa that have explicit dates written on them, Plimpton 322 can be dated to the period 1822–1784 BCE.^[4] Robson points out that Plimpton 322 was written in the same format as other administrative, rather than mathematical, documents of the period.^[5]"

Alas, dear Apple, you are at least 4000 years too late in your design claim for the iPad2 when looking at the historical prior art of flat writing tablets with the same approximate aspect ratio of length and width.

"Wafer Thin" Writing Tablets of Vindolanda and an Erroneous Modern Claim by Apple to Origination of Thin Tablet Design for the iPad2

In the previous LawPundit posting we did not discuss the Apple claim that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 infringed on the iPad2 because (using our English translation from the original German-language motion): "Tab 10.1 copies the prominent thin profile of the iPad2".

Alas, dear Apple, you are at least 2000 years too late in your design claim for "thin" writing tablets. You were preceded by the "wafer thin" Vindolanda wooden tablets, which are dated to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD.

As written at the British Museum and at Wikipedia, quoting the Wikipedia:

"The Vindolanda tablets are "the oldest surviving handwritten documents in Britain".^[1][2] Written on fragments of thin, post-card sized wooden leaf-tablets with carbon-based ink, the tablets date to the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (roughly contemporary with Hadrian's Wall). Although similar records on papyrus were known from elsewhere in the Roman Empire, wooden tablets with ink text had not been recovered until 1973, when archaeologist Robin Birley discovered these artefacts at the site of a Roman fort in Vindolanda, northern England.^[1][3]"

Roman writing tablet from the Vindolanda Roman fort of Hadrian's Wall, in Northumberland (1st-2nd century AD). Tablet 343: Letter from Octavius to Candidus concerning supplies of wheat, hides and sinews. British Museum (London) | Author = Michel wal) | 2008. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license.

When we look at these 2000-year old tablets, we see that not too much has changed in the shape of the "outer" rectangular design for ""thin" tablet writing that Apple has in fact copied from our forebears and to which it is wrongfully and shamefully trying to claim exclusive rights.

Genetics of Swedish Population in the North Varies from the South. Dalarna is a Special Case of Remote Finnish or Norwegian Ancestry

See Dienekes' Anthropology Blog on Keith Humphreys et al., The Genetic Structure of the Swedish Population.