StrangeSox

I don't think that's a supportable claim.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 02:58 PM) Come on. The only reason it is taught that the pyramid was built by Kufu was because of one tiny statue found in the sand. I honestly don't know that much about this topic, but this a pretty common problem with these fantastical explanations: the 'official' story isn't completely supported or has some issues, therefore my alternative must be correct. The problem is that these other explanations have significantly less support than the mainstream understandings. And, again, it's prejudicial against the Egyptians that they couldn't have possibly built such fine structures because we don't understand how they would have. The exact dating of the pyramid may be incorrect, but that doesn't mean it wasn't built by Egyptians or that some vast pre-Egyptian society influenced cultures on nearly every continent centuries earlier but left no trace of their own existence anywhere. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Theorizing is equivalent with unsupported assertions in his case. We can come up with all sorts of fantastical stories for things we don't understand, but they don't have any actual explanatory power without supporting evidence.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 12:57 PM) This is the book if you ever are bored. http://www.amazon.com/Fingerprints-Gods-Gr...k/dp/0517887290 Hancock's books aren't exactly well-sourced pieces of scholarly writing.

AFAIK there's nothing in the archaeological records that supports anything like that. It's pure speculation.

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 09:26 AM) I've always wondered why that is. It's not like the average man was 4'6" in 1532. IIRC it's mostly due to nutritional changes, mainly that many humans now have constant adequate nutritional supply. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article....ller&page=2

Also, the Moon doesn't orbit the Earth, the Earth and Moon orbit as a pair with the center of rotation something like 5000km from the center of the earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_the_Moon

QUOTE (Athomeboy_2000 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 09:21 AM) Not sure if this counts, but in 5th or 6th grade I had a teacher tell me the moon didnt rotate. Something didnt seem right. It does indeed rotate, but at the same rate it revolves around the earth, so the same side always faces earth. Which, seems almost impossible. It's tidally locked with the earth. The moon orbits the Earth, but the same side is always facing the earth. It doesn't spin as it orbits, as the Earth does around the sun. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_locking

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 08:53 AM) Our evidence that they built it, is that is it there and that they were there at the same time. That's it. The Egyptians don't even know how they were built. That is the same evidence as any of the relationships between layouts, distances, etc. No, it's really not and I don't know how else to explain the vast, clear difference between the evidence that the Egyptians built the pyramids (pyramids exist in Egypt, are filled with Egyptian artifacts and are documented in Egyptian historical records) with "evidence" that they knew random astronomical dimensions based entirely on modern numerology of backing out arbitrary ratios and then finding matches. That's coincidence, not intentional design.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 09:02 AM) And the current generation just assumes that it is the smartest ever because of it. The theme of this thread and the books in the OP is a deliberate, intentional pushback against that sort of mindset. Jared Diamond started his work on Guns, Germs and Steel with an explicit rejection of technological advancement and intelligence, at least in the PBS documentary version.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 08:48 AM) They have no records for the actual building of the pyramids. No plans, no schematics, no tools, etc. That is why we are still trying to figure out exactly how they did it. They don't know how. They know that they were built, however. That's not the same as "evidence" that Egyptians knew some of the Earth's dimensions but encoded them only in the pyramid and nowhere else.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 08:43 AM) Great. Then will Obama be providing the 30 million lawyers to understand the health care policies that he is forcing people to sign up for? It'd be much simpler, cheaper and more effective to just go with a single-payer system.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 08:36 AM) There is also no proof they actually built the pyramids. We have no idea exactly how they did it, what they used to do it, and how they achieved architectural perfection that we today would struggle with. We have no problem accepting that they did it though, even though we simultaneously believe it was pretty much impossible for them to have such knowledge. The evidence is the same in both situations. It is there. Not really. Egyptians lived in Egypt, pyramids were built, things were meticulously recorded. We have evidence that they built them because they physically exist. That some 4000 years later we come back, measure the pyramids and can then derive arbitrary numerological ratios out of the dimensions doesn't offer any actual proof that the Egyptians knew those things. It's no different from any other form of numerology. Backing out rough approximations and arbitrary ratios and then finding cosmological matches to them is quite a bit different than "Egyptians built pyramids because there are pyramids in Egypt" We can find similar ratios in modern buildings if we want, but that doesn't mean that the architects intentionally encoded those ratios. What it means is that when you have a very, very large search space, you're bound to find a match.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 08:16 AM) The unit of measure is immaterial. The relationship between the two objects doesn't change. There's still no support for the Egyptians actually knowing this information or encoding it in the pyramids and nowhere else. It's just another flavor of numerology, and the search space for "something with an arbitrary whole number ratio to some cosmological dimension, if you fudge the numbers or assume extremely high precision" is virtually infinite.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 14, 2011 -> 07:55 AM) The size of the earth and the size of the pyramid don't change. Their relationship is always the same. Their ratio never changes, no matter what the unit of measurement is. You need a unit of measure in order to measure something and compare it to the size of something else, and you need strong evidence that this is anything more than a coincidence.

The bankers are supposed to be the experts on financial risk anyway. The problem came from derivatives, which meant loan originators didn't care if you could pay out back because their profits were not going to come from waiting court 30 years for you to repay.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 06:50 PM) You don't need to know it at all, because the ratio of the two is all that matters. It doesn't matter if it was called feet, meters, cubits, or what. If the ratio is 1:12 for example, it doesn't matter what it is determined in, it will always end up being 1:12. You need a unit of measure to determine the ratio and knowledge of their precision and accuracy capabilities. You can't measure the earth our the pyramid with out a unit of measure. edit: that first page you linked to relies entirely on numerology ratios derived from the pyramid inch, a unit of measure for which there's no actual evidence other than "we need to invent it to make all these amazing ratios with arbitrary scaling factors work out, roughly, if we assign unreasonably high, micron-level precision to the unit"

I've also been meaning to pick up Guns, Germs and Steel which follows a similar theme to Mann's books.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 04:10 PM) But in like...1-2 generations of people! Can you imagine how that would affect someone? My thoughts while reading that were "Oh, so it was kinda like The Road for the survivors"

Yeah that goes right back to the 1491 problem of prejudice against a bunch of societies in the form of "well, they simply weren't smart enough to do that!" that's rarely laid against contemporary European societies.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:56 PM) I'm not referring to that stuff. I'm talking about stuff like the pyramids size in relation to the length of the earth, or the placement and sizing of pyramids in relation to specific stars. Things that aren't dependent on relative units of measure. You need to know the unit of measure that the Egyptians were using and the precision and accuracy they could maintain in order to determine that, which is where the pyramid inch comes in. There's also the problem that they recorded damn near everything in their written language, but only recorded some pretty amazing astronomical knowledge in a large monument that couldn't be realized for several millennia. Their astronomical knowledge, engineering abilities and construction capabilities are still remarkable, however.

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:52 PM) It still blows me away from the book just how quickly disease destroyed a whole culture of people. It's just incomprehensible. Dozens of cultures, as much as 90% of the Western Hemisphere population and a good percentage (40% was the estimate, I think) of the world population.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:48 PM) Some of it is far fetched, but their use of distances related to the length of the earth, and angles relating to star locations is pretty solid. More rigorous surveys of the pyramids (by Petrie, IIRCCole) discount anything based on the "pyramid inch" since it didn't exist. I can link you to a hundreds-of-pages-long thread on another forum covering this in excruciating detail (thanks, aspie scientists who like to argue with creationists!) You also need to play around an awful lot with significant digits and measurement precision that just isn't possible.

The political realities of not destroying a country and his personal anti-slavery convictions are two separate things. Going back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates at least, his parsing of the Declaration's preamble meant that all men were equal. (I learned this in the Lincoln Memorial last week!)

QUOTE (bmags @ Oct 13, 2011 -> 03:22 PM) The biggest lie here was addressed by strangesox...that native americans were just dumb hunter gatherers that came up against the european intellectual machine. The biggest problem there is that the standard narratives, be they from the Manifest Destiny, rah-rah settlers end or from the noble savage, perfectly in tune with the environment until evil Europeans came is that Indians are rarely, if ever, granted actual agency and identity. They're merely pawns in the Europeans' games, not actors in their own right.