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News Briefs 13-06-2006

More history news today than you could shake a stick at. Stick not included…

  • Did the ancient Greeks and Native Americans swap starcharts? A follow-up to the recent story about the depiction of an ancient supernova.
  • Archaeologists believe they have found an ancient Indian port which connected it with the Roman Empire.
  • Discovery of new drawing by Da Vinci. Bandwagon jumper…
  • Is the truth about Masada less romantic than the accepted story?
  • Accelerating development in Ireland leaves Irish archaeology near crisis point.
  • What is it with Stonehenge and the Druids (would make a good band name wouldn’t it…).
  • The battle to save the treasures of Lascaux Cave.
  • A profile of Jim B. Tucker, a psychiatrist who investigates past-life memories of children. Tucker is also the author of the well-regarded book, Life Before Life (Amazon US and UK).
  • Rare counting ability temporarily induced by switching off brain region.
  • South America’s Aymara people see time in the opposite way to us – the future is behind us, and the past ahead.
  • Avert your eyes Shadows. Village plans to cash in on their annual tourist attraction: mass bird suicide.
  • The man who helped crack the human genome says the work allowed him to “glimpse at the workings of God.”
  • A review of George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe (Amazon US and UK), which voices criticisms of SETI.
  • Playing those mind games
  • Did you know that Earth has a second moon? It’s a massive 20 metres across, and travels like a corkscrew.
  • And did you know how flies walk on ceilings? Love that image.
  • The ISS and the Moon take precedent, as NASA shelves its climate satellites.
  • Scientists claim they’ve synthesized an anti-aging molecule that can even make cells younger.
  • String theory debunked in Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Continuing Challenge to Unify the Laws of Physics (Amazon US & UK).
  • China’s controversial 3 Gorges Dam – by the numbers.
  • New report says there’s as much wind power potential off US coasts as the current capacity of all US power plants combined.
  • The Simpsons almost disproves Fermat’s last theorem.
  • Using gravity to get off the ground, new plane will climb like a balloon and fly like a glider.
  • Genes governing embryonic stem cell immortality discovered.
  • Simply exhaling allows laser-based breath analyzer to diagnose disease.
  • Alzheimer’s vaccine shows success in mice.
  • Outsourcing war to the ‘bullet sponges‘ – discussing those ‘contractors’ that seem everywhere in Iraq (the happy new word for ‘mercenaries’ used by politicians and the media).
  • Jesus loves a machine gun. He could have done with one when those crazy Romans decided to put him up on a cross. Now that would make for a readable Bible!

Thanks Kat and Heartsguy.

Quote of the Day:

I don’t believe anything, but I have many suspicions. I strongly suspect that a world “external to,” or at least independent of, my senses exists in some sense. I also suspect that this world shows signs of intelligent design, and I suspect that such intelligence acts via feedback from all parts to all parts and without centralized sovereignity, like Internet; and that it does not function hierarchically, in the style an Oriental despotism, an American corporation or Christian theology…I sometimes suspect that what Blake called Poetic Imagination expresses this exact thought in the language of his age, and that visits by”angels” and “gods” states it an even more archaic argot.

These suspicions have grown over 72 years, but as a rather slow and stupid fellow I do not have the chutzpah to proclaim any of them as certitudes. Give me another 72 years and maybe I’ll arrive at firmer conclusions.

Robert Anton Wilson

Editor
  1. Fantastic quote!
    Don’t you just love that man!

    You seem to have found some rather unusual news today Greg.
    I like the story about switching off part of the brain to make you able to count better.My brain is already switched off and I still can’t do numbers.
    The little autistic boy in my extended family at the age of 2 could immediately tell his mother how many sticks she dropped on the floor,and they numbered over 50.He just saw the number, he didn’t count them.

    I don’t get the bird suicide story.And a tourist resort to watch birds dying?
    That’s awful.
    I suspect it is not really suicide but rather a disorientation that causes it.

    If anyone can explain to me in words of one, that is(1) syllable how the Aymaran people can talk back to front they way they are supposed to do, please tell me.But don’t tell me if the explanation is too complicated.I am trying to stave off senility, not bring it on.

    Bullet sponges!!!! How absolutely awful!

    Thanks Greg.

    shadows

    1. Looking backwards to the future
      It is not just the Aymara people. One of my NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) teachers told me that the Maori also visualize the (temporal) future as spatially behind and the (temporal) past as spatially in front. It means that they can see the past, their tradition, as the basis of their culture, hence it is in front of them, and that they cannot see their future, hence it is behind them. Does that make sense? This type of organization of the mental space may be common to other traditional cultures.

      When we in the West say that something is “in front of us”, does it mean temporally or spatially? The fact that Westerners put the past behind them, mentally, makes us progressive rather than traditional. This is a generalization. There may be traditionalist Westerners who organize their mental space as tradional cultures do.

      One way is not superior to the other, just different.

      1. language maybe ?
        This is tricky. If you think of what you can see as “in front”, and what you can not see as “behind”, that seems to imply a difference in what you know. It doesn’t seem to be temporal in the way we talk about it. Saying that the future is “in front” suggests that there is movement, which is what most cultures are assuming. Even the cultures that view the world as cyclical assume that there is movement, and that this is the meaning of “time”.

        So perhaps the difference is in semantics, or simply translation. What is “in front” is what is what you can see, as opposed to where you are going. So these cultures, perhaps, do not recognize time as either linear or cyclical. Perhaps they assume it is not moving.

        Of course there are many people who prefer to live in the past, but that’s not the same topic.

  2. Coincident Starcharts

    Like clouds, groups of stars can represent anything. I’ve seen Scorpio and I could pick hundreds of other icons to call that group. I think that the odds of the Greeks and an American Indian tribe naming a star group “scorpion” are immense. This would be an incredible coincidence. A more likely explanation is that contact, either direct or indirect, must have occurred.

    Scorpio

    Bill

  3. Future behind us

    I don’t find that the Andean culture belief that the future is behind us at all surprising. These people also used the yupana, a small Fibonacci-abacus and a base 40 numbering system, to make calculations. We have not deciphered the knotted strings of the khipu, a hidden written language that follows a seven-bit binary code.

    Was their way of thinking superior to ours? Are their thought processes a remnant of some great civilization? Were they the inventors of the tzolkin, the Maya calendar? Is the future behind us?

    Bill

    1. here is a link on a knotty subject (ty bill)
      Here is my link on khipu, from the Khipu Data Base Project and an excerpt.
      http://khipukamayuq.fas.harvard.edu/

      We began querying the KDB by asking “Are there khipus in which the sequence of cord total values match?” We were able to discover several previously unknown matches, that is, pairs of khipu in which portions of the sequence of total cord values are the same. In analyzing these exact matches, it became clear that there were larger portions of each khipu that were very similar though not exactly equal. This led us to investigate non-exact matches. For instance, using the database, we can ask questions such as “Show all khipu with cord total sequences in which a value on the first khipu is within 1 of the value on the second khipu.” (This would find, for example, a correspondence between 10–16–4–5–5 and 9–17–3–6–6.) Or, “Show all khipu with numeric sequences in which a number on the first khipu is within 10% of a number on the second.” Using this approach, we were able to find several other khipu with significant similarities. It should be emphasized that these searches will find matching cord value sequences in any position on any khipu; that is, a sequence near the beginning of one khipu may appear in the middle of another. Reversed sequences can also be found. We have also examined proportions between succeeding numbers in a sequence, and expect that as more khipu are entered, many more such matches will appear.

      —————————–Truth is stranger than fiction.

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