Slashdot Mirror
Stonehenge Version 2.0 Completed
Antarctic Lemur writes "The Stonehenge project previously mentioned has been completed near Wellington, New Zealand. This newer version utilises multiple ancient astronomical technologies (scroll down) and the BBC reports it is wired for sound."
nothing, thats why they had to make this new one.
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Generating profits from tourism, for one.
Eh, well, a sequel is just never as good as the original...:(
Let me understand ... one of the dominant pastimes of the slashdot communal consciousness is playing computer games, and you have the audacity to ask What is it good for??
Well, if nothing else it's an excuse to go visit the big room with the blue ceiling. And since Kiwi summers are during winter for the vast majority of us, it sounds like a great time to enjoy their version of the big room while our neighbors are up to their tits in snowbanks.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
digital storage and the internet are quite a bit more reliable than the library at alexandria. yet, digital storage may exist long after we've lost a means of retrieving and decoding the data. it'll give the next era of cavemen something to do for a few millenia, anyway.
It is a well-known fact that hippies, wiccans, and other undesirables congregate around the orignal Stonehenge in England, which is seen as a source of cosmic mystical power and other such mumbo-jumbo.
Sir, I invite you to take a World Religions course at your local community college. It might open your eyes a bit.
There are "undesireables", by which I hope you mean "people who use the name of the religion without understanding" in every religion.
As far as I am aware, no wiccans have ever gone to war and slaughtered entire civilizations over their religion. So whatever you may or may not believe in, saying that someone is undesireable because they prefer to visit a place of spiritual importance to them, is well, quite ignorant, and I am suprised you were modded up for it.
~Rebecca
Yes.
If "working" is defined as "does what it was originally intended to do", we may or may not be 100% certain of that, ever.
The people of that era believed in Magic, in terms that specific rituals could coerce the divine to take action. If that was ever possible, it required Druids (no, not your D&D character), and we have lost a key element of the ritual.
However, what we do know is that it had religious signifigence to ancient celtic people, and still today, there are people that will make a pilgrimage to Stonehenge for religious purposes.
Whatever your personal beliefs, that it still has value to people even close to its original purpose so long after, is absolutely astounding.
~Rebecca
The problem is too many people too many people don't "get" a good metaphore.
Unfortunately it was ever thus. There are some really ancient monuments on Malta and Gozo which are far more impressive - the Maltese one even has some of the carving still visible. Last time I was there I was really upset and embarrassed because I had to tell a group of US tourists to stop climbing on the stones. They had no idea how to behave on archaeological sites, or that they were doing damage.
At one time it was seriously suggested that the real Stonehenge be closed off to the public and replaced with a concrete replica. Perhaps this is the answer to all valuable ancient monuments: make accurate replicas for tourists, ban the general public from the real sites and only allow access to people who can prove, perhaps by taking some sort of test, that they have a bona fide interest in the subject and understand that monuments must be treated with care for their own protection.
That's probably because Wicca didn't exist before the 1950s. Actual pagans, i.e. the people who lived in Europe prior to spread of Christianity, were just as brutal and violent as anyone else. The pagans of the British Isles and Scandinavia were very much a warrior society, hardly the vegetarian tree huggers that make up modern 'pagan' groups.
Huh? do you have some source reference to back this up? I would probably imagine the opposite to be true, just thinking of the masses of extremely fanatically religous, uneducated people around the world disproves your argument.
Did you guys ever stop and think maybe there are dumb people who believe in God, and dumb people who don't believe in God?
Or are you so diluted by your own beliefs that you can't understand that someone with different views than yours on this subject can still be intelligent and educated?
Sure, there are dumb people on both sides of the God argument. There's also intelligent and educated people on both sides of the argument. I've had great discussions with very intelligent and educated theists (including Jesuits at University)
Where the difference lies is that there are few "atheists by faith", it is religion that requires faith, which almost by definition, is the abscence of verifiable proof or reason. It requires a measure of self-delusion, an otherwise consistently intelligent and rational person (e.g. Einstein) can still compartamentalize to the point of deluding himself that some supernatural (a loaded word on its own right) being exists. A good book to read on this subject is Wallace Matson's "The Existance of God", in which after very careful consideration of all arguments pro and con, concludes that one cannot reasonably believe in a deity, and that all discussions on the subject end up in the discussion of blind faith. One of my favorite phrases (and one I live by) is: "You cannot checkmate a man who refuses to play chess", if you refuse to follow the rules of logic and reason I cannot win a logical and reasonable argument with you.