[vision-master]

Look, I watch the history channel often, and I greatly enjoy it, but I can't take most of it seriously as it doesn't measure up to my knowledge base.

I know enough to know bullshit when I see it.

I guess you can call me closed-minded then.

HisStory Channel? That's like Nova....

This is on the Documentory Channel.

Cusco......




img]edit: try and avoid displaying tagged and serialized stock photos[/img]

The portal of Aramu Muru is known as “Gate of the Gods” or “Gate to Heaven”.

The structure pre-dates the Inca civilization by hundreds of years. (It is very similar to a portal in Tiahuanaco, Bolivia, and may date back to the Tiwanaku culture.) The legends say that the God Meru’s “Temple of Illumination” lies behind the 23 feet by 23 feet (7 m x 7 m) portal. The niche in the center is the keyhole and it can only be unlocked by certain people at certain times.

[vision-master]

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon
The Chacoan people designed and constructed massive ceremonial buildings in a complex celestial pattern throughout a vast desert region. Aerial and time lapse footage, computer modeling, and interviews with scholars show how the Chacoan culture designed, oriented and located its major buildings in relationship to the sun and moon. Pueblo Indians, descendants of the Chacoan people, regard Chaco as a place where their ancestors lived in a sacred past. Pueblo leaders speak of the significance of Chaco to the Pueblo world today.







Sun Dagger Chaco Canyon




Winter Solstice Sun Dagger, Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon.


We will know the earth has tilted when the Sun Daggers no longer aline.

[AgentR11]

The Earth is a nearly spherical, rapidly spinning body orbiting one object, that is orbiting yet another center of mass, its the very definition of the term "tilt".

Axial Precession

[vision-master]

Animated Sun Dagger - marking the seasons

[vision-master]

The Earth is a nearly spherical, rapidly spinning body orbiting one object, that is orbiting yet another center of mass, its the very definition of the term "tilt".

Axial Precession

Ok, explain Precession of the Equinoxes.

[vision-master]

Underwater Alexandria...

[vision-master]

Antikythera mechanism

The Antikythera mechanism ( /ˌæntɨkɨˈθɪərə/ ant-i-ki-theer-ə or /ˌæntɨˈkɪθərə/ ant-i-kith-ə-rə) is an ancient mechanical computer[1][2] designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from the Antikythera wreck.[3] Its significance and complexity were not understood until decades later. Its time of construction is now estimated between 150 and 100 BC.[4] Technological artifacts of similar complexity and workmanship did not reappear until the 14th century, when mechanical astronomical clocks were built in Europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism


Replica..

[The Practician]

You will get no argument from me that some ancient peoples did not possess a complex understanding of astronomy and the natural world in general, and that they were able to use that knowledge in the design of structures and objects. I would also not argue that a great deal of this technology/knowledge was not was "lost", or that the fossil fueled tech we have these days is more "advanced" in a truly meaningful sense of the word.

One thing I think needs to be at least considered is that numbers, as we use them in science and math, are really a technology, and they are almost certainly not the technology nature uses to do all the amazing things that nature does. Sure, math is a great way to quantify natural phenomena, but then again math is a very flexible technology- you can take as many decimal places as you need to do the job right. This is a good thing, too because if you want to calculate the circumference or volume of anything remotely round, you are going to use the highly inelegant, never ending, "irrational" number, Pi.
The point I am trying to make is that I do not think it is inconceivable that some ancient peoples may have had a very different, possibly more elegant, form of "math", and they could have used this alternate conception to do a lot of neat things with stone and wood, without need of "space age" energy intensive technology.

*I must admit however I find the idea of "magnet technology" somewhat intriguing, and you have to give Novus props for at least offering an explanation of what the hell he was on about instead of some photos with some triangles and circles drawn on them next to a rhetorical question.

[vision-master]

Re: Ancient archetecture
by The Practician » Fri Dec 23, 2011 8:34 pm

You will get no argument from me that some ancient peoples did not possess a complex understanding of astronomy and the natural world in general, and that they were able to use that knowledge in the design of structures and objects. I would also not argue that a great deal of this technology/knowledge was not was "lost", or that the fossil fueled tech we have these days is more "advanced" in a truly meaningful sense of the word.

One thing I think needs to be at least considered is that numbers, as we use them in science and math, are really a technology, and they are almost certainly not the technology nature uses to do all the amazing things that nature does. Sure, math is a great way to quantify natural phenomena, but then again math is a very flexible technology- you can take as many decimal places as you need to do the job right. This is a good thing, too because if you want to calculate the circumference or volume of anything remotely round, you are going to use the highly inelegant, never ending, "irrational" number, Pi.

PI AND THE GREAT PYRAMID

Fibonacci number

Fibonacci numbers are closely related to Lucas numbers in that they are a complementary pair of Lucas sequences. They are intimately connected with the golden ratio, for example the closest rational approximations to the ratio are 2/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5, ... . Applications include computer algorithms such as the Fibonacci search technique and the Fibonacci heap data structure, and graphs called Fibonacci cubes used for interconnecting parallel and distributed systems. They also appear in biological settings,[6] such as branching in trees, arrangement of leaves on a stem, the fruit spouts of a pineapple,[7] the flowering of artichoke, an uncurling fern and the arrangement of a pine cone.[8]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

[Quinny]

To VM - love to listen, but so what. The Pyramids dimensions are related in a ratio divisible by Pi.

Bit of news for you. All (yes that's every single f$£%ing one of them) circles have a circumference where the ratio to the radius is divisible by Pi.

wtf

[ObiWan]

To VM - love to listen, but so what. The Pyramids dimensions are related in a ratio divisible by Pi.

Bit of news for you. All (yes that's every single f$£%ing one of them) circles have a circumference where the ratio to the radius is divisible by Pi.

wtf

You must be kidding!! I thought this entire Pi thing was an alien invention back when mankind was subservient to the alien overlords? And how in the heck did Alexandria get under the waves, were those Egyptians building coal fired power plants and didn't mention it in their hieroglyphs?

[vision-master]

Nice Hand Carving with copper tools and biorite balls . It is made of Diorite.




Modern Egyptian shows the use of Diorite balls as carving tools for granite, at Aswan

Can anyone believe this shit?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obelisk_bu ... ient_Egypt

[AgentR11]

VM... if stone tools are so crude, why can a skilled swordsmith shape the geometry of a steel cutting blade and polish it to a mirror finish and terrifying lethality... with stone tools?

[vision-master]

Heat....

[vision-master]

VM... if stone tools are so crude, why can a skilled swordsmith shape the geometry of a steel cutting blade and polish it to a mirror finish and terrifying lethality... with stone tools?

The superbly made black diorite Khafre statue, flawless and without a tool-mark, still shines with its ‘impossible’ age-old sheen. Cast it and even this oopart becomes a testament to well-learned craftsman skills, rather than the impossible luck of a farmer with wooden mallet and a copper chisel. Diorite hardly yields to diamond, let alone copper.


http://www.oopart.co.uk/egypt/

[AgentR11]

Heat....

You'll destroy the sword if you apply heat while cutting its geometry.

[vision-master]

Heat....

You'll destroy the sword if you apply heat while cutting its geometry.

Link.......

'Cutting it's geometry'? With what - stones?

[AgentR11]

Swordmaking 101.

Make flat hunk of metal, as free of junk as you can, hopefully kinda uniform in composition.
encase a hard metal piece in a soft metal piece
make piece long and thin and more or less straight.
optional cosmetic applications now that it looks more like a sword than a rock.

end of use of fire

use stone to cut&grind down the soft metal to the appropriate cross sectional shape and expose a very thin bit of the hard metal
polish with stone so that it doesn't bind when it cuts into the target.
cosmetically polish with stone and goo to make pretty.

Granted, I can't do it. I'm the thug that you point at the bellows and say, "sake over there, and DON'T TOUCH MY TOOLS!" {I can touch my own tools because I have a big trash can that they fit in after I break them}

The deal is, that the use of fire is where the process looks cool on TV, the hammering, the sparks, the glow, the quenching, the oooohhh ahhh... otoh, 500 hours of sitting in front of a set of rocks and a bowl of water going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until your back screams and your fingers want to fall off... much less appealing.

[vision-master]

The deal is, that the use of fire is where the process looks cool on TV

The traditional Making of a Samurai Sword

[AgentR11]

Indeed.

Note that in the video, the use of fire takes up 8:30min of the 9:50min video.

Yet, if you took that steel stick and hit something with it, it'd either fail to cut, or would bind horribly in the target. What takes it from steel stick, to sword, is the process of "giving it its final shape" (as spoken in your vid, aka cross sectional geometry) and the polishing which permits the flats of the sword to pass through the target without getting stuck. That is all done with stone tools. End of the video shows a great set of them too. (envy!) That process gets like 30 seconds in that video. Very typical, because it is the very definition of the word "boring".