Juliet's Branding

When Juliet's death sentence was commuted in "Stranger in a Strange Land", Ben orders the Others to mark Juliet instead. This is then revealed to be a strange symbol branded onto her lower back. The symbol looks like an upside-down cross (with the top line longer than the others), with two (or four) lines facing away from the center on the horizontal line. The mark is raised, reddened, and inflamed.
What exactly is the significance of this branding? Well, scarification can be used for various reasons , such as :

• to mark slaves and criminals
• to make the body complete
  
• as a rite of passage in adolescence
  
• denote the emotional state of the wearer of the scars
• her maturity and willingness to bear children

I believe the last point is the reason for Juliet's branding. Until it was outlawed in the late 1970’s by their native governments, the people of the Benue-Valley area of Nigeria practiced a process of female scarification called hleeta . Applied in stages beginning at age five or six, the applied patterns of raised dots symbolize within their societies the ripening and maturing of girls into womanhood and their emergence into society as marriageable women, and most significantly they publicize the realization of her reproductive nature. As we all know pregnancy on the island is a death sentence in itself. Is it possible that this is the meaning of this symbol?

Time on the island, all relative, relatively speaking!

Special Relativity proposed that distance and time are not absolute. The ticking rate of a clock depends on the motion of the observer of that clock. Published in 1915, General Relativity proposed that gravity, as well as motion, can affect the intervals of time and of space. The key idea of General Relativity, called the Equivalence Principle, is that gravity pulling in one direction is completely equivalent to an acceleration in the opposite direction. (A car accelerating forwards feels just like sideways gravity pushing you back against your seat. An elevator accelerating upwards feels just like gravity pushing you into the floor. If gravity is equivalent to acceleration, and if motion affects measurements of time and space (as shown in Special Relativity), then it follows that gravity does so as well. In particular, the gravity of any mass, such as our sun, and in this case the island, has the effect of warping the space and time around it. For example, the angles of a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees and clocks tick more slowly the closer they are to a gravitational mass like the sun/island. This video explains it all perfectly!!!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2VMO7pcWhg as does this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyM1ffXb-sQ

Scenario 1

• Imagine you are standing on a boat, and your friend, lets say he’s called Daniel is on an island.
• Your watches are synchronised.
• You fire a rocket at the island.
• The rocket lands on the island in 2:45:03

Scenario 2

• Imagine you are standing on a boat, and your friend, lets say he’s called Daniel, is on an island.
• Your watches are synchronised.
• You fire a rocket at the island.
• You radio Daniel and tell him the rocket has landed. The time is 2:45:03
• Daniel tells you it hasn’t.
• The rocket lands on the island in 3:16:22
• There is a time difference of 31 minutes, or exactly 1879 seconds.(Thank you Lucidity)

How can this be possible?

• The Electromagnetism of the island is creating a vortex in a swirling motion.
• This in turn bends time, causing it to slow.
• It also scatters the light differently.
• You can escape the island by using heading 325; this is a safe path through the vortex.

1. Boat

2. Vortex

3. Heading 325

4. Island