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Is Atlas Holding Hipparchus' Lost Star Map?
cr0kin0le writes "The Farnese Atlas at the Naples National Archaeological Museum may be holding a celestial globe which accurately depicts the long-lost star catalog of Hipparchus, according to a physics professor at Louisiana State University."
Probably an american thing.
Remember this is the country that ground to a virtual halt at the sight of half a breast.
How do you stop your kids from seeing their own genitalia?
I bet they sneek a peek at it when they take a piss.
Reading this story, the most amazing thing to me was to think of the Chaldeans of Babylon laboriously making observations over at least half a millenium, before Hipparchus came along. Beats the story of Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton.
Probably not. They all use stock photos, even the Greek.
Remember the saying "Never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by stupidity"? Yeah, works for sloth too.
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
Most people then didn't have a working knowledge that came close to matching it, either.
Guess that explains the Simpsons. What about the other 290 million?
Ok, Homer turns to drink once in a while, but in which episode(s) did Bart rob a bank, Lisa become a pregnant crack addict and Marge become a whore?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It worries me that if (as seems likely), the NYT can publish an altered photograph without indicating that it's effectively a montage - what else might have been changed?
You know what I miss? Leeches.
And what wonders can we see (Mars, Titan, Venus, etc etc, everything seen by the HST, CXB, etc etc) which they could never have imagined?
And our children 100 generations from now, what will they know that we cannot imagine?
Hell, I will never have children, but if I did, I know they, just ONE generation from now, would know far, far more about the universe than I can possibly imagine. I hope I live to see some of it myself.
No, the prudish Americans are a tiny minority - bordering on a myth, really.
...They also have a lot to say about the relative value of light-skinned blonde daughters versus black-skinned kinky-haired daughters....
The media props up this mythical form of being in order to Disney-fy the airwaves and make anyone who lives a normal flawed human lifestyle feel like a depraved piece of shit. This helps to prop up those capitalist endeavors that rely on a cowed populus, such as the snack industry, the advertising industry, and the defense industry.
The underlying aim of the media is to teach ordinary Americans that they are in constant danger of being demonized as outsiders. They are told they can escape this alienation by joining the mass-consciousness. All they need do is practice the dubious virtues of jingoism and an unquestioning submission to authority and they will be accepted, loved, and embraced by the status-quo.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I presume you put blindfolds on them when they shower in case they should happen to look down without asking first?
I think the outraged reaction to the Janet Jackson things was funnier. After all, the primary purpose of breasts is to be presented to young children. How is someone who spent much of the most delicate period of their post-birth brain development with a breast the size of their head shoved in their face going to be adversely affected by a glipse of nipple?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
This map also reminds us that astrology is complete bullshit since due to equinox precession ("wobbling" in the article) zodiac signs have changed once since the Romans and twice since the Egyptians devised occidental astrology. Makes the system of prediction wrong in principle...
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Urm, whilst it may be illegal to do those things in _some_ contries in Europe, (in the first case Germany and the second France (i think)), but that does not mean that its illegal to do so all over Europe.
...
In the first case it may e considered in bad taste everywhere though
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They could do it, too. Nowadays there's so much light pollution. To go to a dark place during a night with a clear sky will give you quite a sight. Everyone should be able to experience that.
Freedom and Decency -- Here's a sentence pulled from the middle.
The Farnese Atlas is an interesting example of [1] lost knowledge being rediscovered, [2] ancient wisdom forgotten during the Dark Ages, and what do we get?
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
But the problem is Chinamen are oriental mongoloids. The majority of people in Asia are in fact Caucasian. Saying "Asian Americans" more likely refers to Russians, Arabs, Turkic peoples, and Indians than orientals of any type.
Just as a Scotsman is a man from Scotland, a Chinaman is a man from China. If it is the racial category that concerns you, "Asian American" is about as inaccurate as you can possibly get.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
I mean, why were these guys so obsessed with sculpting wieners?
They hadn't invented dick jokes yet? But seriously, when you're depicting the human body, why not make it anatomically correct? The hands are sculpted realistically, so why not the rest of the body. Don't forget that in the classical world, before thousends of years of christian puritanism, nudity was no big deal. Why were they obsessed with long hair? Why were they obsessed with feet?
In this case I'm afraid you're the one obsessed with "wieners", they tend to (excuse the phrase) jump out at us, simply because we don't often see them depicted in everyday life.
Browsing at +1, the topic contains 181 comments in 3 threads. The majority (like, 175 comments) are in "What's up with the modified statue", discussing a frigging fig leaf. /., what else did you expect")
# of comments saying "Cool that we found this ancient star map", or otherwise even remotely related to astronomy: zero.
(yeah, I know, "this is
So I'll say it: Cool that we found this ancient star map. Pity we don't have Hipparchus' complete works, though.
Agreed. Truly dark sky sites are very hard to come by these days. The real problem, IMHO, is that, because they're so hard to come by, very few people no what a truly dark sky looks like! Thus, like the grandparent, they think a field an hour from a major metropolitan area constitutes a dark sky site.
The secondary effect of this is that astronomers have a hell of a time convincing people that light pollution is a problem, because a) they don't understand *why* it's a problem, and b) they don't understand the sheer magnitude of the issue. The only bright side (no pun intended) is that the astronomers have economic forces in their corner (you can save money if you stop radiating half of your artificial light out into space).
The media seems to love controversy in France as much as America it seems.
I would compare this to my Father-In-Law's opinion. He is Peruvian and learned English after coming to America. When the issue came up about a state language in Florida, he was strongly for kids being forced to learn English. I thought that was strange at first, but he said that they'd never get a good job if they didn't. I have to agree, if his daughter and I didn't speak the same language, we would never have met. There are times to self express and other times to not. But does a Burka really help these kids in school? It seems to me that they can respect or not their own religion with or without it. But with it, they are seperated from others.
Of course, as an expression of modesty, it may be important to them. But personally, I see it as a way that has kept women as second class citizens in their culture--I may be ignorant, but that is my impression. I just think as kids, these people need to get to know each other before they get the chance to exclude eachother. Heck, I have a hard time being comfortable around neocons. Imagine if we had real differences?
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