Oddities, curiousities and strangness in history [2]

As a former cashier I am definitely in favor of getting rid of the penny. The fact that it costs more to produce than its face value is a pretty good reason too IMO.

I'd love to see us round everything to the nearest dime, but I think any change in currency would also have to carry over to pricing for card and online transactions, otherwise there'd start being holes in the "legal tender" thing. And in that case I'm afraid we'd see a lot of tiny little 1 and 2 cent transaction fees that we normally don't even think about start adding up quickly into extra dimes and dollars....

Why can't electronic transactions stay the same? I mean what's the "legal tender" thing?

That's OK if you're doing transactions in something like bitcoin, which is a virtual currency that's not directly tied to actual hard cash. But debit cards for example are considered "digital equivalent" currency (or something like that) so they have to represent the actual physical cash you put into the account in some form or other. So if you can't deposit $10.01 (as an example) how can you justify withdrawing it?

I'm afraid that's about as deep as I can go. You should ask Blue or google "digital vs virtual currency" if you really want to go down that rabbit hole!

All official U.S. Currency remains valid currency. The Mint has put out over 90 billion pennies since 2000, so I don't think we'll run out of them any time soon.

Basically, you can deposit 1 cent pieces into your bank account even once the Mint stops making them and stores stop using them. Therefore that argument doesn't hold water. Pennies would, ideally, stop being used in daily transactions and stop being made by the Mint, but they will remain valid currency.

Good point. It would make as much a dent in the penny supply to stop making them as it would make a dent in the gun supply to stop selling them. Both are innumerable and damn near indestructible.

just found out who the original Indiana Jones is. he was called Walter B Harris.

"It was said that only three Christians had ever visited the walled city of Chechaouen: one was poisoned, one came for an hour disguised as a rabbi, and the other was Harris."

what a guy.

Let's not forget that Richard Burton (the real one, not the actor) was the first Christian to visit Mecca, in disguise.

yep I wonder if people still have adventures like they did.
It actually reminds me of a fantastic Agatha Christie book, probably my favourite by her, called They came to Baghdad. its fabulous.

Read it (on your recommendation over a year ago), loved everything except the sort of Bond-like conspiracy mishmash at the end.  The main character is unforgettable: wish she had gotten a series like Miss Marple.  Too bad Christie didn't write more stories from the point of view of youngsters, she does them so well.

halfwise wrote:Read it (on your recommendation over a year ago), loved everything except the sort of Bond-like conspiracy mishmash at the end.  The main character is unforgettable: wish she had gotten a series like Miss Marple.  Too bad Christie didn't write more stories from the point of view of youngsters, she does them so well.

oh I didn't know you had read it, its quite thrilling, and as you said it is let down by the ending a bit. I think it tails off and feels rushed at the end. I would have liked that story to gone on longer, or at least another book with the same characters. Actually the reason I liked Babylon Berlin so much was the female lead who reminds me of the spunky yet vulnerable 1920s heroine type.

spunky irrepressible heroines are where it's at, so long as they don't magically develop force powers out of nothing. GOOD writers work with the tools they've got, and cocky youth gives one plenty to work with if there's any decent imagination.

{{{ Ok buckle in this might take some preamble!

For a few decades now 'rogue' archeologists, alien hunters, Atlantis seekers, flood believers and the like have been claiming that the earth was struck by comet fragments in 11,000bc.
It was an idea central to Hancocks theories on Egypt and Spinx being much older and pre 11,000bc (citing seeming water damage on ts body) and that the pyramids, though constructed later mark out the date 11,000bc (as that is when they would have been most perfectly aligned with the celestial points).
Likewise it was the central premise of Lomas and Knights book Uriels Machine- which believed the Book of Enoch to record a journey Enoch made north to the UK and specifically Maes Howe and the Orkney religious complex- where he was shown in a stone circle the path of the comet and warned that it was going to strike near his lands as well as instructed on how to make stone circles so they could monitor the comet and other space stuff themselves.

Now I have always felt many of these works had a deal of merit in them even if it was only to highlight how flimsy the evidence often is that official archeology relies upon for dating certain things.

But the main stumbling block to giving to much credence to these theories was the comet bits that struck. As we didn't seem to have them in our records- until now!

'Evidence from a historic site appears to confirm the date of a comet strike that killed thousands.

The event also wiped out many large animal species, and triggered a mini ice age.

Analysis of symbols carved onto stone pillars at Gȍbekli Tepe in southern Turkey – one of the world’s most important archaeological sites – suggests that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth around 11,000BC.

They ushered in a cold climate that lasted more than 1,000 years.
Engineers studied animal carvings made on a pillar – known as the vulture stone – at the site.

By interpreting the animals as astronomical symbols, and using software to match their positions to patterns of stars, researchers dated the event to 10,950BC.

The dating from the carvings agrees well with timing derived from an ice core from Greenland, which pinpoints the event – probably resulting from the break-up of a giant comet in the inner solar system – to 10,890BC.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh suggest the images were intended as a record of the cataclysmic event, and that a further carving showing a headless man may indicate human disaster and extensive loss of life.

Furthermore, symbolism on the pillars indicates that the long-term changes in Earth’s rotational axis was recorded at this time using an early form of writing, and that Gȍbekli Tepe was an observatory for meteors and comets.- University of Edinburgh

"It appears Göbekli Tepe was, among other things, an observatory for monitoring the night sky. One of its pillars seems to have served as a memorial to this devastating event – probably the worst day in history since the end of the ice age.”- Dr Martin Sweatman School of Engineering


I have speculated on here before about just why there was this sudden craving, seemingly globally, to study the heavens in our earliest recorded history, and the comet strike always seemed a very good reason to do so- you would want to know if it might happen again. And from the South America to Middle East to the complex astronomical circles of Scotland observatories spring up all over the place following this event, or at least following humanities recovery from it. (It might also explain the choice of monumental stone monuments and buildings- at last they might survive- it seem sot me possible people weren't building in stone because they were primitive (the workmanship alone belies this) but as a deliberate choice to build stuff that would survive future similar events).

It seems that official archeology might have to relook at some of those claims made about Enoch, the Spinx and the layout of the pyramids recording that date now we now the event itself was actually real.

It almost certainly explains the flood stories form around the globe too. And the aliens.

Ah yes the aliens- namely folk like Enki,often cited as being from the planet Niburu which had been devastated by a disaster of some sort, and they came here to get resources for taking home.
The description in the tablets of Enki (sort of a early autobiography written in cuniform) describes things thus-

'The words of the Lord Enki, firstborn son of Anu, who reigns on Nibiru. With heavy spirit I utter laments: laments that are bitter fill my heart. How smitten is the land, its people delivered to the Evil Wind, its stables abandoned its sheepfolds emptied. How smitten are the cities, their people piled up as dead corpses. How smitten are the fields, their vegetation withered, touched by the Evil Wind. How smitten are the rivers, nothing swims anymore, pure sparkling waters turned into poison.'

Now this passage is taken by the 'Annuki and Enki were aliens' theory as Nibiru was his home planet. Nibiru was in fact however a location in what would become southern Sumeria at the river delta- a marsh basically with a scared pool of water called the Nibiru around which a shrine was made, then a temple, and then a settlement (its been excavated and extensively recorded)- it never became a city as they were located elsewhere when they sprang up, but it was maintained long into the beginnings of recorded history as a sacred temple and even rebuilt a few times after it had fallen into ruin for its symbolic political uses- so we can rule it being a planet out.
And rather than Enki describing the state of his home planet it seems to me the tablets are recounting the state of the region in the years after the comet struck, with the Evil Wind being a result of the changed weather patterns that followed the comet strike. It fits pretty well with what the Gob Tepi stones record, it fits with what the book of Enoch says he was warned of whilst being shown the comet moving 'between the portals and gates'- (the gaps between the stones in a circle used to calculate the comets path).
This confirmation of the comet strike may well reshape an awful lot about what we think we know of the origins of human civilization- it seems likely to me that we did not start living in towns and cities post 11,000 so much as we were interrupted in doing so by that event.}}}

{{As a further thought on all this, more a ramble I fear- if the book of Enoch is to be taken as an account of Enoch being warned of the impending comet by astronomers using the circles- then logically he had to be warned before the comet struck, and with enough time for the journey home and to warn folk about it and prepare.

This leads to all sorts of interesting new possibilities- according to Enoch the astronomers (Nephlim/Watchers in the book) came to him and took him north to teach him about the circles and give him the warning.
Which would mean the circle he went to had to exist pre 11,000bc- which is considerably earlier than the current thinking for them of between 6500bc and 4000bc. But then its hard to date stone and circle sites are notorious for having a lack of well anything- pottery, bone ect, especially stuff that can definitely be placed at the same time as the circle being built (you arent allowed to eat or drink at your computer- even in 6000bc!!)- the circles are more often dated by assuming who built them, as places people live are messy and so more easy to find stuff you can date.

But it occurs that its possible the circles might have been as ancient and mysterious and as distant form them as they are to us. Most of the beliefs we know of associated with the circle is all about places of the living and places of the dead- archeologists only attach astronomy ect as a rite to these stones because its clear the stones serve an astronomical function. But its possible the bronze age people just re-appropriated them without that knowledge, and incorporated them into their own beliefs about lands of the living and lands of the dead and did not do anything astronomical with them (this could help explain the Orkney complex which is definitely not 11,000bc but more 5,000bcish, built between two circles- they just used the stones as sacred sites.
We assume if these people built the circles then they knew about the astronomical stuff because they built it that way to do that- but if they just reappropriated them several thousand years after they were first built, then there is no real evidence to support them using it for astronomy.

Also if Enoch is right then the people of the stones plotted the likely trajectory of the comet, worked out where roughly on the planet it would hit and then sent some folk there to warn them- Enoch it seems was sent back with them to confirm what they were saying and to learn the secrets of doing so.
This implies both very early travel by sea over a large distance, navigation to be able to get where they thought the comet was heading, and the time to do so in before it hit (not to mention the problem of languages when explaining whats going on). All pre 11,000bc. Which seems a tall order- but I dont see how Enoch can have recorded a warning about what seems to be a real event in 11,00bc without all that and without the circles, or at least 1 predating 11,000bc.

The Book of Enoch, the versions we have are way, way later composed about same time as the OT (about 3000bc), and was for centuries thought a lost book, but it was recorded in the past before the Jews got it, and for a very good reason- it was thought to be a sacred text and to contain hidden wisdom (which is one way of saying no one understood a word of it or what all the pillars and gates and portals and objects moving between them meant) and it tended to be classified with apocalypse religious texts like Revelations because of the impending end of the world style disaster being outlined to Enoch.
But to record what it appears to- the 11,000bc comet strike, it has to be way older in origin than its date of being written down in 3000bc}}}

It's all very well to say a comet struck in 11,000 BC and had a lot of cultural ramifications, but to say they could predict such things in advance using stone circles strains credulity. The only way you know a moving object is going to hit you is that it doesn't seem to move; it just grows. You don't need an observatory for that.

Of course the earth does follow a curved path and over the course of roughly 2 weeks you might see a comet the earth traverses 15 degrees of sky. From drawing sketches on paper I still don't see much angular change. But if there were, it would change with trajectory, and how large a database of comets impacting the earth do people have to figure this out from?

So saying these astronomical observatories (at the very least astronomically aligned) were used to predict comet impacts simply doesn't wash.

Gȍbekli Tepe was an observatory for meteors and comets- Edinburgh University

{{{ And if Gobekli Tepe was then no reason the circles arent too. The maths for how it works is I think to be found in Uriels Machine- though its been years since I read it- I think its in there. }}}

To say it's an observatory is not the same as saying it's a predictive apparatus for impact. I have no problem with the idea that people suddenly got interested in the heavens and started building circles to help get a bearing on that. My difficultly is with the idea that they could predict non-regular events like comet strikes. They may have thought there was a possibility they'd figure it out but....that's very different from actually figuring it out.

{{Well they recently discovered a tablet that seems to strongly suggest that Summerians had trigonometry, so who knows what else they had, and I reckon a comet strike and 1000 years of of shit might set them back a bit, so who knows what they knew before it hit. }}

“It’s a trigonometric table, which is 3,000 years ahead of its time,” said Daniel F. Mansfield of the University of New South Wales. Dr. Mansfield and his colleague Norman J. Wildberger reported their findings last week in the journal Historia Mathematica.
The tablet, known as Plimpton 322, was discovered in the early 1900s in southern Iraq and has long been of interest to scholars. It contains 60 numbers organized into 15 rows and four columns inscribed on a piece of clay about 5 inches wide and 3.5 inches tall.
One of the columns on Plimpton 322 is just a numbering of the rows from 1 to 15.

The other three columns are much more intriguing. In the 1940s, Otto E. Neugebauer and Abraham J. Sachs, mathematics historians, pointed out that the other three columns were essentially Pythagorean triples — sets of integers, or whole numbers, that satisfy the equation a2 + b2 = c2.
This equation also represents a fundamental property of right triangles — that the square of the longest side, or hypotenuse, is the sum of the squares of the other two shorter sides."- NY Times

{{And then there's this-}}

For people living in the ancient city of Babylon, Marduk was their patron god, and thus it is not a surprise that Babylonian astronomers took an interest in tracking the comings and goings of the planet Jupiter, which they regarded as a celestial manifestation of Marduk.

What is perhaps more surprising is the sophistication with which they tracked the planet, judging from inscriptions on a small clay tablet dating to between 350 B.C. and 50 B.C. The tablet, a couple of inches wide and a couple of inches tall, reveals that the Babylonian astronomers employed a sort of precalculus in describing Jupiter’s motion across the night sky relative to the distant background stars. Until now, credit for this kind of mathematical technique had gone to Europeans who lived some 15 centuries later.

“That is a truly astonishing find,” said Mathieu Ossendrijver, a professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, who describes his archaeological astronomy discovery in an article on Thursday in the journal Science.

“It’s a figure that describes a graph of velocity against time,” he said. “That is a highly modern concept.”
Mathematical calculations on four other tablets show that the Babylonians realized that the area under the curve on such a graph represented the distance traveled.

“It anticipates integral calculus,” Dr. Ossendrijver said. “This is utterly familiar to any modern physicist or mathematician.”

The Jupiter thing is pretty cool. Babylonian and Egyptian trig is pretty well known. But note that Jupiter is an object with a repeatable pattern. Comets that actually strike the earth are not. But it doesn't take a genius (or a rock circle) to figure out that if something is getting brighter and doesn't seem to be moving across the sky, it's gonna hit you. Telling it apart from a nova is something else, and it takes telescopes.

I just don't see that building stone circles will help a culture predict comet strikes.

{{They didn't predict it. According to the Book of Enoch it 'appeared' in one of the 'portals' and they followed its movement for some time as it traversed several 'portals' before they came to the conclusion it was going to hit- at least that's what they tell Enoch.
So basically it appeared between two stones in a circle they were already using to track other things, planets, sun, important stars ect and they tracked this new things movement across the sky over a period as it moved across the gaps between stones until they came to the conclusion it was going to hit- we know they had good maths, and we know the stones have all sorts of notches, stick out bits and other things on their edges, many which align with various stellar things and many we dont have a clue what they were for still, so we cant be sure how good the circles were, but I'm willing to bet the answer is 'pretty damn good'.

edit add- the tricky bit of course is Enoch being there and this tale being Middle-eastern. In the Book the Watchers go to get Enoch because they have worked out where its likely to come down and his people are in the firing line. That means pre 11,000bc they didn't just see it and track it, they could calculate at some point its likely destination on a globe. }}}

That sounds like prediction to me. And it's exactly what I'm talking about - lots of things go through 'several portals' without hitting the earth. All of them, in fact. They had nothing to base hitting the earth on unless they had a complete and accurate model of the solar system plus orbital mechanics since such a comet is not part of the solar system. I don't think so. And I repeat that if something is going to hit it doesn't move against the star background except due to Earth's orbit, which limits the total motion to about 15 degrees at most over the course of weeks. Tracking no motion is easy, tracking slight motion wherein if it's too large or too small it would hit the earth (and even knowing where) based on knowledge of a type of event that only happened every few generations at best beggars imagination.

{{ I have no idea what a 'the break-up of a giant comet in the inner solar system' would look like from the ground nor 'a swarm of comet fragments' heading for us so I cant really comment on tracking it, but I reckon you'd certainly notice it, especially if you were already tracking stuff up there.
Given for them that isn't 'space' up there but the realm of the Gods, which is supposed to be calm, peaceful, serene and so ordered you can set your stone circle by it, it must have been particualry worrying.

Another thing I'm curious about is this bit - 'indicates that the long-term changes in Earth’s rotational axis was recorded'- not being maths minded (as Im sure you've noted Halfy!) but how do you go about doing that? In 10,000bc? }}}

I don't see how you'd get long term changes without observing for a long time, unless you had a complete and correct theory of orbital mechanics. However I think the tradition of the north star being a different star is easy enough to keep in generational memory.

{{How long term is long term? If they are part of the inscriptions on a 10,000bc monument then how far back from then would you need to go to start? }}