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[Cyan]

Garbage article that makes no effort to understand what Neil's actually trying to accomplish with this show. That last page where they complain that wolves get more credit than Africans... ugh. The episode was about evolution! The thing with the wolves was a (very effective) demonstration of artificial selection that led into a discussion of natural selection and not trying to imply that Africans aren't as good as animals Jesus effing Christ get a grip.

 

[TedNindo]

I wonder if articles like this are just the result of plain observations or the result of searching for things to be offended about to fuel articles.

 

[thespot84]

Surely you've been on the internet long enough to know what to expect from Youtube comments?

Of course, and I'd even studied in college with people for whom the notion of 'white privilege' governed their very existence, but I would have never taken them to be revisionists to such a degree as I saw surrounding the article I posted, so I was a little surprised that it seems to be a somewhat common school of thought (if you can call it thought)

I wonder if articles like this are just the result of plain observations or the result of searching for things to be offended about to fuel articles.

It's almost certainly the latter. The title serves as linkbait and the contents fuel for more clicks through vehement arguments in the comment section.

 

[thespot84]

double post sorry.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

Are any of you familiar with Graham Hancock? He wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods a long time ago that was very interesting (havent read!)

BBC Two's Horizon TV series broadcast a programme, Atlantis Reborn, on 4 November 1999 that challenged the ideas presented by Hancock. It detailed one of Hancock's claims that the arrangement of an ancient temple complex was designed to mirror astronomical features and attempted to demonstrate that the same thing could be done with perhaps equal justification using famous landmarks in New York. It also alleged that Hancock had selectively moved or ignored the locations of some of the temples to fit his own theories (see below).[13]

Hancock claimed he was misrepresented by the programme, and he and Robert Bauval made complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission against the way Horizon had portrayed them and their work. Eight points were raised by Hancock, two by Bauval (one of which duplicated a complaint of Hancock's).[14] This included the complaint that:

The programme had created the impression that he [Hancock] was an intellectual fraudster who had put forward half baked theories and ideas in bad faith, and that he was incompetent to defend his own arguments. Adjudication: [The Commission] finds no unfairness to Mr Hancock in these matters.[15]

The BSC dismissed all but one of the complaints. Overall, the BSC concluded that "the programme makers acted in good faith in their examination of the theories of Mr Hancock and Mr Bauval".[16] The complaint which was upheld was that

The programme unfairly omitted one of their arguments in rebuttal of a speaker who criticised the theory of a significant correlation between the Giza pyramids and the belt stars of the constellation Orion (the "correlation theory")

which the Commission did find to be unfair. That speaker was the astronomer Edwin Krupp. Krupp argued that Bauval had fudged the maps of Orion and the Pyramids by placing them upside down in terms of stellar directionality in order to make the theory work.[17] The BBC was not obligated to do more than broadcast an apology for the single point of unfairness but made a decision to modify the Orion sequence to demonstrate that the overall argument of the film remained intact. In Atlantis Reborn Again shown on 14 December 2000, Hancock and Bauval provided slightly lengthier rebuttals to Krupp and argued that the ancient Egyptians had made the Pyramids correlate in the most obvious and intuitive manner with the three stars of Orion's Belt, that Orion could only be seen at the highest point in the sky by the Egyptians looking in a southward direction and a work of symbolic and religious art.

According to Hancock himself, professors at Cambridge had been out to get him because his theories went against what the professors had been teaching for many years.
One of Hancocks biggest offenders is study of Sphinx statues. According to some geologists who studied them, he claimed that these Sphinx statues might have been erected possibly hundreds and hundreds of years before the egyptian high culture with pyramids due to that they examined in the stone that the statues had signs of extremely heavy rainfall for a very long time which geologists claims have not happened in Africa 1000-2000 years before what we believe is the beginning of the egyptian civlization.


So if the egyptians we know and love didnt made these, then who did? was there a culture before that? Every single year they keep backtracking. Earlier and earlier there is signs of sophisticated human developments.





The big one I can't understand is the battery from Iraq. I don't get how that is possible. It just doesnt make sense.

 

[injurai]

"Bu-bu-but the wheel and bow where invented X years ago by Y. You're a bigot and I encourage everyone to revel in your inadequacies."

Is what I'm hearing from this article.

 

[thespot84]

The big one I can't understand is the battery from Iraq. I don't get how that is possible. It just doesnt make sense.

Could you elaborate? i'm not familiar?

Clearly though, as I've learned on the discovery channel, the answer is right in front of us:

 

[Reuenthal]

Are any of you familiar with Graham Hancock? He wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods a long time ago that was very interesting (havent read!)





According to Hancock himself, professors at Cambridge had been out to get him because his theories went against what the professors had been teaching for many years.
One of Hancocks biggest offenders is study of Sphinx statues. According to some geologists who studied them, he claimed that these Sphinx statues might have been erected possibly hundreds and hundreds of years before the egyptian high culture with pyramids due to that they examined in the stone that the statues had signs of extremely heavy rainfall for a very long time which geologists claims have not happened in Africa 1000-2000 years before what we believe is the beginning of the egyptian civlization.


So if the egyptians we know and love didnt made these, then who did? was there a culture before that? Every single year they keep backtracking. Earlier and earlier there is signs of sophisticated human developments.





The big one I can't understand is the battery from Iraq. I don't get how that is possible. It just doesnt make sense.

Your quote seems to say if I am understanding it correctly that the commision did not find it unfair to characterize him as a fraud in that program and that they acted in good faith with only one of the complaints against the program being held.

There is a very long list of people who say dumb shit about human history and past civilizations to sell a book. Stonehenge, Ancient Egypt, China reaching the Americas, Atlantis, anything. You would find someone selling a book. However, I don't know enough about this guy but it seems to be that from your quote.

 

[Kurdel]

Are any of you familiar with Graham Hancock? He wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods a long time ago that was very interesting (havent read!)

Wow thank you for making me read that.

Orion Corrolation theory is really easy to disprove with any who has fucking eyes.

Did you read the section "Criticism" on Wikipedia?

Krupp also pointed out that the slightly-bent line formed by the three pyramids was deviated towards the north, whereas the slight "kink" in the line of Orion's Belt was deformed to the south, and to match them up one or the other of them had to be turned upside-down.[10] Indeed, this is what was done in the original book by Bauval and Gilbert (The Orion Mystery), which compared images of the pyramids and Orion without revealing that the pyramids’ map had been inverted.[11] Krupp and Fairall find other problems with the claims, including noting that if the Sphinx is meant to represent the constellation of Leo, then it should be on the opposite side of the Nile (the "Milky Way") from the pyramids ("Orion"),[9][10] that the vernal equinox c. 10,500 BC was in Virgo and not Leo,[9] and that in any case the constellations of the Zodiac originate from Mesopotamia and were completely unknown in Egypt until the much later Graeco-Roman era. Ed Krupp repeated this "upside down" claim in the BBC documentary Atlantis Reborn (1999)

Any other hypothesis out of this guy needs to taken with a grain fo salt imo.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

Your quote seems to say if I am understanding it correctly that the commision did not find it unfair to characterize him as a fraud in that program and that they acted in good faith with only one of the complaints against the program being held.

There is a very long list of people who say dumb shit about human history and past civilizations to sell a book. Stonehenge, Ancient Egypt, China reaching the Americas, Atlantis, anything. You would find someone selling a book. However, I don't know enough about this guy but it seems to be that from your quote.

You're right there is. He said that, but he also felt that he was being targeted by BBC by acedemics who wouldn't look into new theories because it threatened their established science and would discredit all their work. I think both sides sound plausible, and the truth may lay somewhere in between.

Wow thank you for making me read that.

Orion Corrolation theory is really easy to disprove with any who has fucking eyes.

Did you read the section "Criticism" on Wikipedia?



Any other hypothesis out of this guy needs to taken with a grain fo salt imo.

Sure but this link is just wikipedia, which is also just a grain of salt right?


My point was just that, even the experts get caught up in their own politics and in the defense of all the nut jobs everyone discredits almost everyone. I only heard this guy on a few podcasts, and he did sound convincing while acknowledging and adressing many of his own problems along the way.
A form of humility and transparancy about ones own mistakes at least to me, goes a long way to seem more credible.

But who the hell knows? I havent even looked into the geological findings or done research at all on this. I just thought it was interesting hehe^^

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

Could you elaborate? i'm not familiar?

Clearly though, as I've learned on the discovery channel, the answer is right in front of us:

I don't know a lot about the Baghdad Battery, but it's fascinating stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyOIds77P08

 

[thespot84]

You're right there is. He said that, but he also felt that he was being targeted by BBC by acedemics who wouldn't look into new theories because it threatened their established science and would discredit all their work. I think both sides sound plausible, and the truth may lay somewhere in between.

I find it just as probable if not more so that someone proposing a wild theory that gets rejected would then resort to blaming the establishment. There are certainly cases of the opposite, such as the obstetrician who struggled to get doctors to wash their hands prior to deliveries, but my guess these are the exceptions to the rule.

 

[Game-Biz]

I think it's reasonable to say that white people (and especially white men) have unreasonably dominated society for hundreds of years. This is the part that conservative people are often uncomfortable talking about.

However, because of that precise condition, it's also true that white people (especially white men) have had a disproportionately large impact on society and science. Not because they're better, but because they've been in the positions of power which allowed them to make these sorts of discoveries in the first place. The truly poor and disenfranchised aren't likely to be discovering laws of planetary motion. This part tends to make liberal people uncomfortable.

This does not mean that no non-white-male has ever made a serious contribution, nor does it mean that all white people have always been ruthlessly controlling. They're generalities, with plenty of exceptions in all directions. Astronomy is a fairly young science, and has existed during an era when white people have held disproportionate power; consequently, yes, white people have contributed disproportionately to astronomy, because they've been in the best position to do so.

Yep, what you wrote is pretty obvious, but we forget the obvious sometimes. It's no mystery why some of the greatest minds have been white when you consider the social issues. I'm not seeing anything "pro-white" or racist about this show, and it does not need to give time to any race for fairness either. They want to show some key figures in science and their major contributions and how they were made and discovered; not to give a broad overview of the history of science from the vast number of cultures from our world's past.

 

[Game-Biz]

I wonder if articles like this are just the result of plain observations or the result of searching for things to be offended about to fuel articles.

Searching for things to be offended about. I mean we all think it's a stupid article, but we're still talking about it and clicking the link. It's a cheap and fast way to get clicks and money. The author of this probably doesn't give two shits.

 

[kess]

Now there are other issues about scientific inovvation and institutions but Byzantium was not a place that was against secular science due to religion any more than Europe or the Islamic world was.

I'm not debating that the Byzantines retained a culture of learning and maintained excellent records, but that a once progressive scientific culture lay dormant for the better part of a century, and was likewise surpassed.

 

[Anony]

They did explain some of the origins of the 'euro-centric' science in the last episode (chinese and arabic sciences)
The thing about that is, if you look at the scientific development timeline, even though some of the science had been discovered earlier, nothing was really done with it
it was not until it was rediscovered/discovered during the age of enlightenment (in Europe, where most of the scientific minds gathered) that what we call modern science gain momentum

 

[AlphaDump]

I think what he is doing is promoting the concept of exploration, critical thinking, testing hypothesis, and logical arguments born via evidence. It isn't about being 100%, but narrowing down the best arguments.

If i were a science teacher, i'd be playing his show every week in my class.

 

[Reuenthal]

I'm not debating that the Byzantines retained a culture of learning and maintained excellent records, but that a once progressive scientific culture lay dormant for the better part of a century, and was likewise surpassed.

The Byzantine decline had far more to do with the loss of key teritory which were also intellectual centers such as Egypt and Syria. It did not become less progressive scientific culture (it continued to have declines and rises intellectually but in general in most byzantine teritory you still had secular institutions of learning, higher literacy than other teritories and the same culture) though it did have some idiotic religious wars (not unlike what you would also find in west and east of Byzantium at times). What is interesting is that Byzantium became more progressive scientific culture in many regards during the Palaeologan Renaissance that happed at 1261 - C. 1360, only a few decades before the complete fall of Byzantium.

The story is more complicated than Byzantine culture becoming worse over time from a superior first. And it is more complicated than being surpassed due to cultural superiority of others.

 

[Fallout-NL]

I think the point that the writers and Neil is trying to make is that Science is not bound to any race/culture or religion. Truth transcends all human boundaries and divisions and is available to all that seek it.

This is aimed at the American audience and at a low level that may struggle with the belief of evolution than followers of the scientific model, evidence based decision making who have already have a grasp of this basic concept.

Yup, exactly.

 

[thespot84]

I don't know a lot about the Baghdad Battery, but it's fascinating stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyOIds77P08

Frankly I trust wikipedia a lot more than a youtube video of a guy in a trance claiming to intuit some 2000 year old history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

While curious nothing in there is particularly convincing that the battery was, in fact, a battery.

Electrochemical processes, specifically oxidation reactions, have been used for millennia in mining and ore refinement, but the point is that regardless of WHAT they were doing, they had know way of knowing HOW it happened. (stuff like this)

While possibly, though unlikely, a battery, it's not of much interest since it didn't seem to be adopted or have a noticeable effect on human's grasp of technology (no evidence of electrical knowledge again until the 1700s). Some mad mesopotamian made strange things in his basement and we found them 2000 years later. That's not science, unfortunately.

 

[Aaron]

The Roman Empire had steam power. Some gadgets and toys recovered from the time period ran on steam, but since their inventors never considered the far reaching applications, and saw them only as a novelty, it's more of an interesting footnote than the basis of modern technology.

 

[IceCold]

Frankly I trust wikipedia a lot more than a youtube video of a guy in a trance claiming to intuit some 2000 year old history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baghdad_Battery

While curious nothing in there is particularly convincing that the battery was, in fact, a battery.

Electrochemical processes, specifically oxidation reactions, have been used for millennia in mining and ore refinement, but the point is that regardless of WHAT they were doing, they had know way of knowing HOW it happened. (stuff like this)

While possibly, though unlikely, a battery, it's not of much interest since it didn't seem to be adopted or have a noticeable effect on human's grasp of technology (no evidence of electrical knowledge again until the 1700s). Some mad mesopotamian made strange things in his basement and we found them 2000 years later. That's not science, unfortunately.

Exactly. Just like that steam powered spinning thing that the ancient Greeks did. It was a neat novelty for them but they were never able to make something useful out of it. This doesn't mean they invented the steam engine though.

edit: Goddamn Aaron. Beaten.

 

[Giolon]

I'm sorry, did this article just follow a week after a good portion was spent explaining how all of our numbers and several math systems and related words (Algebra, Algorithm)come from Arabic, and highlighted the Arabic culture's gathering of knowledge from all around the known world in the early 1000's, which itself followed after explaining how astronomers in China discovered shit relating to astronomy that wouldn't be rediscovered for another 500+ years?

What in the shit are these people on and what show are they watching, because it's not the new COSMOS...