Sayonara

I suppose the average person would rather have a good mystery than the burden of objective analysis.

Why settle for teuthologists when we can really complicate matters? http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/087923556X/qid=1073517061/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-0526842-3316012?v=glance&s=books

Unfortunately the documentary was one of those ones that gives evidence for both sides and won't commit to either. The data this guy had for the pyramids though was off by a relatively large degree. The temples he was studying were part of a huge cluster of such buldings, and he just picked out groups of them that vaguely matched Sigma Draconis, the plough etc. This was essentially the same method as the city experiment. The point is, his evidence wasn't evidence. It was a claim that needed evidence.

Oh I forgot to say... I know these documentaries about things like the nazca lines go all mysterious and say "oooooh we can't explain it." It's actually not true. We can explain things like that - there is no mystery we don't have any explanations for. Explanations are easy. The only hard bit is proving which explanation is the right one. Don't be misled by "popular science"

There was this research a while ago (check out google, I bet there's loads about this on the web) that suggested certain sets of Egyptian pyramids, and some of the temples of other cultures, were perfectly aligned to match constellations on highly significant dates. A bunch of counter-researchers looked at configurations of buildings in New York (or some American city) -- obviously a randomly assembled collection of buildings -- and found it was a simple matter to find hundreds of matches in the same fashion, for the same constellation dates. The moral: it's easy to see a pattern where none exists. Get some evidence. A map of the alleged pattern would be a good start.

Squid, cuttlefish and octopus belong to the Cephalopoda (literally "head foot"), and the suffix "-phile" means "one who loves". Therefore Cephalophile = a very messily derived "one who loves cephalopoda". Maybe it should be "cephalopodaphiles"

Same answer applies. There is no pattern. Your "facts" are just flat out wrong, and I frankly don't care which popular science TV show they came from. I gave you a link to highly authoratative information on henges earlier on and you clearly did not read it. If you had any real scientific interest in how an ancient civilisation would make straight lines, you'd be either thinking about it real hard, or doing research, instead of sitting there repeating "no, it's impossible! Impossible!". May I also point out that surveying equipment does not "let you make straight lines". It increases point-to-point geometric accuracy over long distances. Go to Nazca with a surveying team and see what they tell you about the accuracy of those simple shapes. All you need to make a straight line is some string, or a big stick that you can stand in the ground. You can even do it with shadows ffs.

If he can't apply the rules of angular momentum, acceleration due to gravity, Newtonian motion etc to an object in orbit, what makes you think he can apply them to a bucket on a rope?

I'd use a Rancor. It's not really applying engineering, but it works anyway.

They just mentioned this on Radio 2. Coincidence...?

Bappy HirthdAY :barf:

Star Trek: Voyager, Season 3 Episode 160 - "Rise"

Wow - a whole forum full of cephalophiles I'll have a look later when I'm at home

Hi Cookie

Can't wait!

Rad managed to get both "their" and "they're" in "there".

Mark, it was in there to start with. Refsmmat, go look up "irony". Any more of these shenanigans and you'll all be going to bed without supper. PS - "Cotton".

Here you go Steve, I give you... "The Camera Pill": http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/3202715.stm

It's that bloody simple, but for some reason we're supposed to take "ALIENS MADE THEM DO IT" as the only reasonable explanation. This is what Occam's Razor is for people.

Nobody made a straight line: 1) Group A builds a henge in Location 1, 2) Group B builds a henge in Location 2, 3) 3500 years pass, 4) Someone points out that if they draw a direct line between locations 1 and 2 it is straight, and we're all meant to be surprised. The henges in Britain are not "arranged in a complex geometric pattern" other than one that has been artificially superimposed by someone such as yourself.

Even if you got it into a descent path, you'd have no means of compensating for atmospheric motion in order to keep it on target. BECAUSE IT'S A ROD.

That book is great

Look: Your date for "the henges" is 1000 years before the earliest known examples, you say they are all over Europe when they are in fact unique to mainland Britain, and you seem to have trouble with the concept of geometry being scale-independent. So unless you're going to back all of this up with a source, as I have done, stop right there.

The henges don't make a pattern. If they match anything at all, it's normally the junction of several ley lines. I'd hardly call the Druids or the early Pagans "civilisations" either but I don't think that precludes them from being able to employ any kind of knowledge.

What pattern is thousands of miles wide? When you mentioned "big civilisations" you seemed to be talking about the henges. If not, your paragraph was weird. As far as making long, straight lines goes, I don't see why geometry won't do.