Clever things from the past
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[_]......<--- Care Cup
Must be nice being part of a group where nobody in America gives a fig either.
Jews must be laughing their socks off, they used to be picked on, now another group willingly creates a global emnity out of nothing and replaces them in that role.
Read 'At Home' by Bill Bryson. Amazing book
Explains many things of modern living. Rg Cirn cannot grow without human intervention and sheep originally had about 1/7th of the wool they do now. Selective breeding made this difference.
But yeah things like brick making us an art which relied on trial and error. No computers or internet
Explains many things of modern living. Rg Cirn cannot grow without human intervention and sheep originally had about 1/7th of the wool they do now. Selective breeding made this difference.
But yeah things like brick making us an art which relied on trial and error. No computers or internet
They have more than one button and you need the correct sequence.
Man of Honour
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Here knock yourself out - http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17959353&highlight=pyramid+startername_dimple
This is also the now favoured method of Zahi Hawass the Egyptian Curator of Antiquities and other ancient buildings have been found built with the same method.
It fits all the pieces and no other great projects are needed like ramps which were bigger than the pyramid.
There's loads of material out there to read and BBC Timewatch did an excellent documentary on it.
The thing that is really interesting about that story when I first read it was that he had already assumed that the Earth was a sphere! #
His method also assumed that the Sun was very much further away than the Earth's diameter, otherwise the method wouldn't have worked
(# It is obvious that the Moon is a sphere, and for somebody with good eyesight, Venus too. From this it is not unreasonable to assume the Earth was one too! and any half decent mathematician would have been able to explain how ships dropped below the horizon. It is actually surprising that anybody (Except for really primitive peoples) ever assumed otherwise )
Soldato
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Drilling for oil is a modern phenomenon. In times past there have been. due to geological movements, oil deposits just under the ground or in some cases the movements ruptured the salt crust cover and the oil mixed with whatever was above it(usually sand). In WW2 both sides accused the other of poisoning wells with petrol but in most cases it was natural oil. There is a gas deposit that has surfaced in Russia and has been burning for decades.
The Dead Sea area was one example of ancient oil deposits on the surface. The ancients mainly used it to waterproof boats and buildings. They also used it for warfare, the most known example being Greek Fire although it was used by other civilisations well before the Greeks.
As above, Pitch is an oil derivative and was used widely. As ancients saw it's properties they used it for that purpose( waterproofing and fire)
A lot of machines were driven by wood or coal until someone tried to find a way of making it run with less pollution and more efficiently. In our day Gas for fuel was driven by trying to do something about health risk associated with smog over cities. In a lot of cases it is we have a cheap resource how can we
exploit it.
Man is creative and would have found another way of moving things faster and more cheaply.
I don't find these odd at all. Humans take a food source and eat it, or take a food source and cook it. Its not like 10s to hundreds of thousands of years ago they had are level if disgust for food sources.
Many many animals eat eggs from other animals.
We do know how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids and we could build pyramids with the tools and the time and manpower available to the ancient Egyptians. If you're able to throw hundreds of thousands of person-years of work at building a pyramid, it'll get built.
It's a conceptual change to replace technology with labour. How do you raise a 10 tonne block of stone over 20 feet straight up using stone age tools? Wrong question - it contains the assumption of technology. Instead, you raise the ground. It requires only the simplest of tools to make a ramp of compacted earth 20 feet high and 400 feet long (to ensure a gradient shallow enough for people to drag the block up it).
The only uncertain aspect is how the stones for the higher sections of the tallest pyramids were moved there. A ramp would have to be unfeasibly large to reach the highest parts with a suitable gradient. There are some explanations and experiments have shown them to work (with enormous labour requirements), but we don't know how they did it.
One of the ancient technologies that gets me is smelting!
The temperatures required for successful smelting are far to high to have been achieved by accident (Say in a camp fire). Whoever first achieved it must have had an idea of what he was trying to achieve!
Now, I do have an idea as to how this might have come about. But it is still a remarkable achievement!
The temperatures required for successful smelting are far to high to have been achieved by accident (Say in a camp fire). Whoever first achieved it must have had an idea of what he was trying to achieve!
Now, I do have an idea as to how this might have come about. But it is still a remarkable achievement!
Someone who had seen a calf suckling. I can think of two obvious reasons off the top of my head;
1) Calves grow very quickly and become large, powerful animals. It was a common idea that eating something imbued you with the properties of it. So drinking cow milk would make you large and powerful. Or so some people would think.
2) People who were hungry.
Many animals eat eggs. No doubt humans did before cooking started. Once cooking had started, people would have experimented with various ways of cooking anything and everything. Frying is an obvious and simple method of cooking with very simple equipment.
People were well aware of electricity at least throughout recorded history and probably far earlier because it's naturally occuring. People were studying it at least 2500 years ago. Granted, major advances in understanding didn't occur until a few hundred years ago, but the key factor is that electricity occurs naturally and can be reliably generated with only the simplest technology and as a result of actions intended for some other purpose (i.e. it would have been discovered without being able to predict its existence from theory). People in the ancient world would, for example, have rubbed amber with wool (dusting/polishing an ornamental item). That will generate static electricity. Some ancient Greek philosophers studied it as far as they could because they didn't understand it.
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Tin and lead can be smelted (crudely, but it'll work) in a wood fire. So that could have happened by accident.
So the concept of getting metal from rocks would have been known long ago.
Given that, I'd bet good money that people tried putting all sorts of rocks in fires. Partly from curiosity and partly from speculation - perhaps some type of rock would yield something useful or valuable. Maybe gold - lead and tin were much more like gold than other materials known at that time. Maybe something new. Lead and tin were useless, but maybe putting the right kind of rock in a fire would result in gold or something even better for jewellry. If you discovered it, you could become rich and powerful. Stick another rock in the fire. Maybe the next one will be the right one.
Wealth and power and curiosity are all powerful motives that could have driven experimentation with different rocks and different conditions for the fire. Malachite might well have been an attractive option for the rock because it looks different to most rock. Hmm...copper does occur naturally as metal - is copper ore commonly found in the same place as naturally occuring metallic copper? That might create an association. It's possible to smelt malachite with stone age technology. A stone age pottery kiln, perhaps.
No need for him to assume it - it had already been proven.
It had been assumed long before his day, but it was an earlier Greek philosopher who proved it.
No, it didn't. The distance between the earth and the sun had already been calculated by an earlier Greek philosopher (Eratosthenes repeated the experiment himself to test it, of course).
It's not immediately obvious that the moon is a sphere. We see a circle. Various shapes other than a sphere would look the same if they were at the right angle to us.
The oldest known formal proof that the Earth is spherical comes from repeated observations of the Earth's shadow on the moon. Quick summary - it's always a segment of a circle and the only shape that casts a circular shadow from every angle is a sphere, therefore the Earth is a sphere.
That would prove that the surface of the sea is curved. It wouldn't prove the Earth was spherical. That would require assuming that the curvature is consistent over the whole world.
There's hardly any evidence that anyone did assume otherwise. Plenty of evidence that hardly anyone cared, but not much evidence that anyone assumed otherwise.
If you blow on tinder it glows brighter, adding bellows to a fire wasn't too much of a leap.
Then later making the connection between oxygen and flame, to blow oxygen through molten iron to get steel.
Man of Honour
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Didn't you read my post above?
Even Zahi Hawass is mostly convinced and wrote the forward in the engineers book.
They've even found other buildings built the same way.
I read your post the first time, a couple of years ago.
I watched the documentary when it was first on.
I am aware that you believe it is absolutely definitely the truth.
I try to follow the basic principle of agnosticism - since there isn't objective proof, I do not claim objectively certain knowledge.
I'll quote myself:
I even emphasised the key word.
I'll summarise an alternative possible explanation:
The lower levels, which of course consists of the great majority of the blocks, were constructed with an external ramp. Above the level where that became impractical, stones were raised further by leverage and shims. This has been shown to be possible by experimentation with raising stones of the appropriate size and weight in that way. It also matches the oldest known description of how it was constructed.
Note that I am not claiming certain knowledge of how it was done. I am not saying that the above method is absolutely certainly how it was done and I am not saying that you must have not read it if you don't believe absolutely that it is absolutely the complete truth.
Internet dating thread?