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May 25

Time of SQ321 incident

The Singapore Airlines Flight 321 article does not state the time the severe turbulence occurred, even though it does the time it landed in Bangkok.

According to http://reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/singapore-airlines-flight-makes-emergency-landing-bangkok-30-injured-thai-media-2024-05-21, "...a spokesperson for FlightRadar 24 said it was analysing data at around 0749 GMT which showed the plane tilting upwards and return to its cruising altitude over the space of a minute." Myanmar being GMT+6:30 hours would make it 14:19 (2:19 PM) local time, which isn't a likely time for breakfast. Did Reuters mean 07:49 local time?

Do we have a reliable source of the time to put in the article?

Thanks, cmɢʟee⎆τaʟκ 06:47, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

See Talk:Singapore Airlines Flight 321, thanks. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:22, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

Wuxing iconography

What is the history of the pentagram and quincunx diagrams often used to represent the Chinese five phases? I raised a question about this here, and would be grateful if anyone could point me towards relevant sources. Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 14:33, 25 May 2024 (UTC)

These diagrams are a visual representation of a graph whose vertices correspond to the phases and the edges to relations between two phases. Naturally, artists designing a visual representation will prefer symmetry, especially if it reflects a conceptual symmetry. If the phases are seen as of equal importance, the only way to reflect that visually in a planar representation is by placing them as the five vertices of a regular pentagon, in which the order of one if the cycles, for example 木→火→土→金→水→木, may be preferred. This gives five pairs of phases, with each pair connected by an edge. If the relations between all pairs are represented in the diagram, resulting in the complete graph on five vertices, the other five edges form a pentagram.

Some representations assign a central position to 土, and give only the relations between the central phase and the other four phases. Then the graph is the star graph with four leaves, which is symmetrically represented by a cross.

I don't know why some texts assign a central role to 土 while others treat the five phases on an equal footing, but producing symmetric visual representations for these symmetric abstractions is probably as old as the oldest diagrammatic representations of the five phases.  --Lambiam 12:44, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm really just looking for evidence of the pentagram presentation of the graph in history. It's also possible to draw a graph over the quincunx. [1] "Graph" itself is a modern western mathematical construction, so I'm curious about whether the Chinese tradition surrounding the wuxing really saw the relationships between the phases in a similar way. Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 13:44, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

Graphs are a tool to think about patterns of relations between items. Sociologists use graphs to model social relationships, but social relationships predate graph theory by millions of years. Diagrammatic depictions that are essentially graph diagrams are not a new phenomenon. One example is the Tree-of-life diagram from the Bahir. Another is the Scutum Fidei.  --Lambiam 17:19, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

I suppose so, but I can't apply that information beyond speculation. Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 17:25, 26 May 2024 (UTC)

As a more philosophical point, the pentagram diagram seems to be motivated by the idea that the phases are on "equal footing" as you say, and therefore that the relations between them are interchangable or equivalent, so that the transition from Earth to Metal and from Water to Wood are in some way just reflections of each-other. But in the quincunx diagram, the same transitions look more distinct: an outward motion from the Center to the West, compared to a circular motion from the North to the East. I would be interested to know whether this idea of equivalence shows up in any traditional sources. From the article, I'm not sure whether this is the subject of the debate between translating wuxing as "five elements" and as "five phases." Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 21:00, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

If you're interested in whether early Chinese theorists used the same verb to denote the change from one of the five phases to an adjacent one, the answer is: sometimes, depending on what their point was. I'm not really sure how to approach your question about equivalence in a more robust way, but sometimes I'm stupid, and this was never really my area of concentration. All this theory had its roots ultimately in the Zhouyi, so the earliest extant sources are commentaries on and quotations of lost commentaries on that text. Folly Mox (talk) 22:14, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Lambiam, assigning a central position to 土 comes from assigning cardinal directions to the five phases, in which "earth" is assigned the direction of "center". I don't remember when any of the major developments in five phase theory took place, although I vaguely remember Liu Xin (scholar) pooularising the newer "generative mode" ordering as a natural explanation for the legitimacy of his sovereign. Folly Mox (talk) 21:41, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

This news article about the pentagram in the Tsinghua bamboo strips (volume 13), which is a diagram of musical scales, quotes a musician:

“The five characters on this pentagram correspond to the Chinese traditional five basic elements, or “Wu Xing”, that is, metal, wood, water, fire and earth,” Kong said, adding that it is a musical theory that is unique to China.

I'm not convinced by this: there are many characters around the pentagram, using ancient forms he probably can't read, and they are arranged in five lines, each of which is a text that says something, not an individual character, so where is he getting this from? However, that's his claim.  Card Zero  (talk) 15:20, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Interesting, thank you! Albie's relation of misfortune (talk) 17:00, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

Though not useful to your purpose of finding a traditional image of the wuxing, I'm afraid. I couldn't find one either.  Card Zero  (talk) 18:25, 27 May 2024 (UTC)

It's fine if the words for the five ancient tones correspond with the Five Phases, but the words for the phases / elements themselves are not on that collection of strips (interestingly, the top three lines of characters are written upside down, as if the scribe had rotated the entire roll, or moved to the opposite side of the writing desk).

I don't remember enough about early Chinese intellectual history to say when Five Phase correspondence theory was in vogue, but I feel like it probably postdated this manuscript, which is provisionally placed in mid–Warring States, iirc, although since it was tomb-robbed we'll never have a secure date for it. Folly Mox (talk) 19:12, 27 May 2024 (UTC)