Plato wasn't there, why should he be anymore of an authority than anyone else?
IMO, and that of quite a few other people, Plato wasn't particularly interested in the truth of it anyway, but more interested in expouding certain of his ideas.
Given the effects of the Santorini eruption on an island like Minos, is it not likely that the flood caused by the eruption on Santorini, that probably had some fairly devastating consequences to the Minoan Civilisation, got conflated with the eruption? It was a long time before Plato, in the Greek Dark Ages, and came to him from a decidedly secondhand source.
I could be wrong, "Atantis" could be somewhere else, inside or outside the Mediterranean Basin, but I'd like to see some pretty good evidence, as the Santorini Hypothesis (that is all it is until we find a "Welcome to Atlantis" sign there or somewhere else).
I just get pretty tired sometimes of all these sensational "We've found Atlantis, no really, we have, we just haven't actually looked for any evidence yet, and what there is is circumstantial at best, but it is there, really it is" type stuff.
Why do pretty smart people seem to turn off their critical faculties whenever some new loon comes along with a new Atlantis, or a Chariots of the Gods type book? I did, admittedly, study this at uni, but its not that hard to the flaws in the ideas of Hancock and Von Daniken, you just have to look at it crtically, if it was some new bollocks about cold fusion or superconductance that wasn't backed up by amything more than a notion and some circumstantial evidence most of you would be circling around it like Frat boys around a drunk cheerleader, waiting to see who could get the first bite in;)
Why can't these people get it through their heads thaty Atlantis, as recounted by Plato in Timaeas and Critias, is allegorical.
It has as much objective reality as More's Utopia and Butler's Erehwon. It even had the same purpose, to illustrate a philosophical point and "demonstrate" Plato's idea of an ideal society.
It just happened that Atlantis was a handy cultural peg to hang it off, somewhat like Avalon and Lyonesse is today for some people.
There have been numerous candidates for Atlantis, but the outstanding one, IMO, is Santorini.
That island, part of the of the Minoan civilisation, blew its top somewhat spectacularly, and was probably a contributory factor to the collapse of the Minoan, Mycenaean and Hittite empires, who just happened to be trading partners with the Egyptians at the time.
The Egyptians, being anal-retentive record keepers kept some records of this, and these, in garbled form, are probably what inspired Plato to use the island as the home for his ideal civilisation.
Given the effects of this massive explosion on the weather (shitty crops practically guaranteed throughout the region), which would have negatively effected the economies of the Mycenaeans and Hitties.
The loss of contact with the Minoans (who were in a decline at the time anyway, so this probably played a large part in finishing them off) would likely have pushed them over the edge as well. Both of those regions (the Anatolian Plateau and southern Greece) being somewhat marginal environments to start with, having low annual rainfall, poor and shallow soil, and high summer temperatures).
This probably would have made it into the Egyptian annals as something along the lines of "those Greek and Turkish bastards haven't turned up so far this year to hawk their tat, no great loss, but a bit of a pain in the arse. Also we have been having some really shitty weather this last year, on the plus side, the surf was wicked last summer. Wonder if they are related? - Amememhat"
This also would quite likely have been mythologised to a certain extent from the tales of survivors.
No need for the tortured logic and papering over the cracks here, it all depends on fairly well understood factors, a big fuck off explosion, the fragility of civilisations based on gift-giving economies and ties of obligation, especially in somewhat marginal environments, and a bit of garbling and mythologisation over the years.
Mix an ambitious philosopher looking for a name to hang an idea off, and Viola! a ready made myth for people to chase incessantly, and for con-men in the mould of Von Daniken and Hancock to make a good living off.
Personally I got started out with Linux by getting
Linux: The Complete Reference 4th ed[1] (it has since been updated). Lots of useful info, explained clearly, without talking down at you.
I also found Essential System Administration (Frisch pub:O'Reilly) to be great for learning how to do stuff, and to use as a general reference
RUTE is also worth a read, and is available online. and there is always the man pages and tldp
Show a non-geek firefox (no, not the movie, they'll never forgive you)
So far every person I have shown firefox to has installed it and started to use it, even my cousin's kids. The older one even thinks that Linux is cool, which came as a bit of a shock to me;)
Gah, the trials of living in a pleasant climate? how do you cope?
Cargo pockets would work though.
Maybe PDAs should come with suggected attire for users? they could point out that socks and sandals look bad all the time then, which would be a bonus;)
Thats a valid point, even if they devices were built top survive being sat on they'd be pretty bloody uncomfortable.
This is why tailors invented inside jacket pockets, then the destruction of your pda is the least of your worries when you reach for it in an airport or bank;)
At least half of these are already in Perl at the moment, its not that hard to read, better than trying to figure out if someone really wants to test, ie numeric or string equality from context if the operators are the same.
If you can remember what the operators do then it makes it explicit, which is good, you just have top memorise the operators, which could be a pain in the arse.
Sure, you can use it to write nasty code that is impossible to read, but you can do that in practically any language that isn't completely tedious to use.
I use perl because I like the flexibility, and it makes sense to me, if you don't like the way Perl works, use something else, like Python or Ruby, its not as if anyone is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to use Perl.
If they are making the archive available in a lossy format then this shouldn't be too much of a problem really.
Broadcasters who want to use BBC content are going to be wanting broadcast quality media, which effectively means mpeg2 (mpeg4 isn't quite there yet), as will anyone who wants a decent copy for home.
Or they use a dual-licensing apporach, a la MySQL, one license if you want broadcast rights, or a higher quality, and a Open type license for personal use?
Is the text of the license they are proposing available anywhere?
Well since they have ceded the cutting edge and speed advantage to AMD's 64-bit CPUs they have probably been finding it harder to sell their chips on clock cycles alone.
before someone hacks the fucker so they don't have to pay
And I really hope Boeing have had the good sense to isolate the system from everything remotely critical, else it could out a whole new spin on War-flying
Yeah, cool tech, but how will it be used?
on
The Face Detector
·
· Score: 1
As a universal panacea to protect all right-thinking people from terrorists, anti-capitalists and whatever else the state and the corps that support it decide is unacceptable behaviour for consumers?
David Blunkett(UK Home Secretary) will love it, despite the fact that it will be pretty much useless for preventing anything, unless you have a universal database of the facial characteristics of everyone living in or entering the country (through illegal as well as legal channels).
What he says does basically amount to a Damocles Sword hanging over businesses selling Linux based solutions, make money, but not too much, else we'll walk away and find a new toy to play with. And Bruce, with ESR, are the business friendly Open Source activists.
Ok, I can see this is good, because it means that OS will finally, hopefully, become completely irrelevant (I'm being an optimist here).
But how are IBM going to persuade the ravening hordes of MS Office users that their web-based apps will fail to suck?
Hotmail et al have had cross platform web-based email apps for years, and do they fail to suck? No, because while you can get at your email from where-ever you are, on whichever system, they are still nasty buggy and slow, and lack the features of even the worst (OE) traditional email apps.
How will IBMs web-based Word fail to suck? to win users from Word and OOo Writer etc it not only has to be as good as them, but it has to be better than web, and NOT rely on the web-based gimmick and the "OOh, shiny!" factor (which only lasts for a fortnight aat most anyway) to win over and reatin users.
Yeah, Its a bit of a standard plug tour. Though he didn't say anything particularly contraversial in this article, unlike in the one he did for computerworld,
with its "if linux gets too commercial the developpers will throw their toys out of the pram and do a Cartman"
I dunno, maybe some of them actually enjoy being butt-raped by a splintered broom handle, which seems to be the nearest thing to having a record deal with an RIAA label, unless(even if?) you happen to be a major superstar
Yeah, an awful lot of people back then were made to look very silly when Schliemann found the Tell that is reckoned to have been Troy (it might not have been though, there is no way to know for sure until we find the fuck off great big "Welcome to Troy" sign in the outskirts, which is unlikely to happen, given the techniques of Schliemann and those that followed him[1]).
The tale of Atlantis does seem to be partly based on fact and partly allegorical, so there is some basis to the tale, as Plato got the tale from Socrates[1], IIRC, who got the story from the Egyptian records. However Plato's Atlantis probably bears as much similarity to the "real" Atlantis as More's Utopia or Butler's Erewhon have to any real world location.
The Santorini Hypothesis seems, to me, to be the most likely hypothesis, being the straw that broke the camels back and finally destabilised the trading circle of Mycenae, Minos, the Egytians and the Hittites. Given that the Minoans had been in decline for a long time before hand the eruption probably managed to finish off what remnants were left, and the loss of this trading partner dealt a fatal blow to the Myceneans(thus starting the Greek Dark Ages) and the Hittites.
The Egyptians, being the only one of these civilisations to avoid a decline and survive until classical times, and also being anal retentive records keepers, would have recorded these events. Given that the Santorini event would have sent waves all the way to the Egyptian Mediterranean coast, it is not inconceivable that they would have conflated the freak waves with the sudden breakdown of their trading network, thus a civilisation sinking beneath the waves.
Plato's Atlantis was pretty much made up, and the reason that he located it in the Atlantic rather than the Med is because, to the Greeks and even the Romans, the Atlantic was the edge of the world, so halfway between this world and the next, a suitable setting for the unlikeliest things to occur (see many Roman quotes about their then new colony of Britannia).
So any "evidence" contained in Plato's account of Atlantis is tenuous at best, as he was not telling a story to entertain and tell of the great deed of the Heroes of Old, as Homer was (oral traditions and epics such as that often have some basis in fact, such as the Irish epics and the Epic of Gilgamesh), he was telling the story to make a philosophical point, just like the rest of his dialogues.
Oh, and to the spods who ask why it is called Atlantis if it was not in the Atlantic, its simple, the ocean was named for the place in the story rather than the other way round.
I, personally, suspect that Sarmast is either another Von Daniken (a scummy chancer fleecing the fuckwits) or Berlitz(who is so full of shit that its surprising he hasn't had a rectal prolapse), but, without reading his Book(why no peer reviewed scientific paper I wonder, Schliemann submitted his shit for review, even though most people thought he was nuts), I couldn't conclusively try to blow him out of the water.
[1] Not, as I said before Aristotle, I always get those two mixed up for some reason
Yeah, tell me about it, I did have paragraphs when I wrote it, but, not having had enough coffee this morning, I forgot to tell the browser that I wanted it posted in POT rather than HTML
1) Bunch of Paleo/mesolithic[1] hunter gatherers end up on an island just off the north african and spanish coasts, develop agriculture about 3000 years before anyone else, yet strangely forget to tell anyone about it, and indeed fail to influence any of the other tribes in the region that they may have had contacts with, as they are obviously horribly insular pigfuckers, then disappear without trace[2] but somehow manage to be known to the Egyptians some 7500 years later, so they can tell Aristotle, who can then tell Plato so he can make some nice stories about them.
or
2) Graham Hancock, is a lying wanker with all the credibility of David Icke (I, for one, welsome our Subterranean Lizard Overlords), and a Von Daniken-esque habit of changing the "evidence" to fit with his theories.
Which is more likely?[3]
[1] My specialism never was stones and Bones, it doesn't really get interesting until the Neolithic
[2] Not to mention the odd lack of populations pressure that should have forced at least some of the members of this culture to leave their island paradise and strike out on their own elsewhere (Mu perhaps, or maybe Shangri-La?)
[3] Theres a reason that Hancock is shunned by people with clue, the fact that he is a complete cunt has nothing to do with it, the fact that he is rather hard of thinking, and has problems with understanding elementary logic and the scientific method does
Slashdot Mirror
Good point, I just have two issues with the that.
;)
Plato wasn't there, why should he be anymore of an authority than anyone else?
IMO, and that of quite a few other people, Plato wasn't particularly interested in the truth of it anyway, but more interested in expouding certain of his ideas.
Given the effects of the Santorini eruption on an island like Minos, is it not likely that the flood caused by the eruption on Santorini, that probably had some fairly devastating consequences to the Minoan Civilisation, got conflated with the eruption? It was a long time before Plato, in the Greek Dark Ages, and came to him from a decidedly secondhand source.
I could be wrong, "Atantis" could be somewhere else, inside or outside the Mediterranean Basin, but I'd like to see some pretty good evidence, as the Santorini Hypothesis (that is all it is until we find a "Welcome to Atlantis" sign there or somewhere else).
I just get pretty tired sometimes of all these sensational "We've found Atlantis, no really, we have, we just haven't actually looked for any evidence yet, and what there is is circumstantial at best, but it is there, really it is" type stuff.
Why do pretty smart people seem to turn off their critical faculties whenever some new loon comes along with a new Atlantis, or a Chariots of the Gods type book? I did, admittedly, study this at uni, but its not that hard to the flaws in the ideas of Hancock and Von Daniken, you just have to look at it crtically, if it was some new bollocks about cold fusion or superconductance that wasn't backed up by amything more than a notion and some circumstantial evidence most of you would be circling around it like Frat boys around a drunk cheerleader, waiting to see who could get the first bite in
Nah, you can also appeal on stuff like points of law, or excessive damages, usually.
;)
I don't think any legal system that isn't institutionally corrupt is particularly swift when it comes to appeals and stuff.
Bleak House isn't entirely fiction you know.
"The Wheels of Justice grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small"
Why can't these people get it through their heads thaty Atlantis, as recounted by Plato in Timaeas and Critias, is allegorical.
It has as much objective reality as More's Utopia and Butler's Erehwon. It even had the same purpose, to illustrate a philosophical point and "demonstrate" Plato's idea of an ideal society.
It just happened that Atlantis was a handy cultural peg to hang it off, somewhat like Avalon and Lyonesse is today for some people.
There have been numerous candidates for Atlantis, but the outstanding one, IMO, is Santorini.
That island, part of the of the Minoan civilisation, blew its top somewhat spectacularly, and was probably a contributory factor to the collapse of the Minoan, Mycenaean and Hittite empires, who just happened to be trading partners with the Egyptians at the time.
The Egyptians, being anal-retentive record keepers kept some records of this, and these, in garbled form, are probably what inspired Plato to use the island as the home for his ideal civilisation.
Given the effects of this massive explosion on the weather (shitty crops practically guaranteed throughout the region), which would have negatively effected the economies of the Mycenaeans and Hitties.
The loss of contact with the Minoans (who were in a decline at the time anyway, so this probably played a large part in finishing them off) would likely have pushed them over the edge as well. Both of those regions (the Anatolian Plateau and southern Greece) being somewhat marginal environments to start with, having low annual rainfall, poor and shallow soil, and high summer temperatures).
This probably would have made it into the Egyptian annals as something along the lines of "those Greek and Turkish bastards haven't turned up so far this year to hawk their tat, no great loss, but a bit of a pain in the arse. Also we have been having some really shitty weather this last year, on the plus side, the surf was wicked last summer. Wonder if they are related? - Amememhat"
This also would quite likely have been mythologised to a certain extent from the tales of survivors.
No need for the tortured logic and papering over the cracks here, it all depends on fairly well understood factors, a big fuck off explosion, the fragility of civilisations based on gift-giving economies and ties of obligation, especially in somewhat marginal environments, and a bit of garbling and mythologisation over the years.
Mix an ambitious philosopher looking for a name to hang an idea off, and Viola! a ready made myth for people to chase incessantly, and for con-men in the mould of Von Daniken and Hancock to make a good living off.
Much as I like a good MS bashing session, haven't we seen this before, kind of recently as well?
Personally I got started out with Linux by getting Linux: The Complete Reference 4th ed[1] (it has since been updated). Lots of useful info, explained clearly, without talking down at you.
I also found Essential System Administration (Frisch pub:O'Reilly) to be great for learning how to do stuff, and to use as a general reference
RUTE is also worth a read, and is available online. and there is always the man pages and tldp
The older one even thinks that Linux is cool, which came as a bit of a shock to me ;)
You're pretty new around here eh?
Quite, but I was more surprised that a 15 yr old completely non-techy girl had even heard of linux, let alone held an opinion on it
Show a non-geek firefox (no, not the movie, they'll never forgive you)
;)
So far every person I have shown firefox to has installed it and started to use it, even my cousin's kids. The older one even thinks that Linux is cool, which came as a bit of a shock to me
Gah, the trials of living in a pleasant climate? how do you cope?
;)
Cargo pockets would work though.
Maybe PDAs should come with suggected attire for users? they could point out that socks and sandals look bad all the time then, which would be a bonus
Thats a valid point, even if they devices were built top survive being sat on they'd be pretty bloody uncomfortable.
;)
This is why tailors invented inside jacket pockets,
then the destruction of your pda is the least of your worries when you reach for it in an airport or bank
How long before we start to see PDAs with hard-drive based storage?
Then the only limit on the software will be the processor speed and battery life.
Who wouldn't want a system like that that you could fit into your back pocket?
At least half of these are already in Perl at the moment, its not that hard to read, better than trying to figure out if someone really wants to test, ie numeric or string equality from context if the operators are the same.
If you can remember what the operators do then it makes it explicit, which is good, you just have top memorise the operators, which could be a pain in the arse.
Sure, you can use it to write nasty code that is impossible to read, but you can do that in practically any language that isn't completely tedious to use.
I use perl because I like the flexibility, and it makes sense to me, if you don't like the way Perl works, use something else, like Python or Ruby, its not as if anyone is pointing a gun at your head forcing you to use Perl.
If they are making the archive available in a lossy format then this shouldn't be too much of a problem really.
Broadcasters who want to use BBC content are going to be wanting broadcast quality media, which effectively means mpeg2 (mpeg4 isn't quite there yet), as will anyone who wants a decent copy for home.
Or they use a dual-licensing apporach, a la MySQL,
one license if you want broadcast rights, or a higher quality, and a Open type license for personal use?
Is the text of the license they are proposing available anywhere?
Yeah, its called mozilla
Well since they have ceded the cutting edge and speed advantage to AMD's 64-bit CPUs they have probably been finding it harder to sell their chips
on clock cycles alone.
Agreed, it would be a really bad idea, but when has that ever stopped anyone before?
That said, Boeing definitely aren't stupid, and the systems are, I suspect, unlikely to be able to talk to one another anyway.
That doesn't stop someone in marketting thinking that it would be a super whizbang idea though
before someone hacks the fucker so they don't have to pay
And I really hope Boeing have had the good sense to isolate the system from everything remotely critical, else it could out a whole new spin on War-flying
As a universal panacea to protect all right-thinking people from terrorists, anti-capitalists and whatever else the state and the corps that support it decide is unacceptable behaviour for consumers?
David Blunkett(UK Home Secretary) will love it, despite the fact that it will be pretty much useless for preventing anything, unless you have a universal database of the facial characteristics of everyone living in or entering the country (through illegal as well as legal channels).
Ok, I paraphrased slightly, so sue me ;)
What he says does basically amount to a Damocles Sword hanging over businesses selling Linux based solutions, make money, but not too much, else we'll walk away and find a new toy to play with. And Bruce, with ESR, are the business friendly Open Source activists.
At least with RMS you know where you stand.
Ok, I can see this is good, because it means that OS will finally, hopefully, become completely irrelevant (I'm being an optimist here).
But how are IBM going to persuade the ravening hordes of MS Office users that their web-based apps will fail to suck?
Hotmail et al have had cross platform web-based email apps for years, and do they fail to suck? No, because while you can get at your email from where-ever you are, on whichever system, they are still nasty buggy and slow, and lack the features of even the worst (OE) traditional email apps.
How will IBMs web-based Word fail to suck? to win users from Word and OOo Writer etc it not only has to be as good as them, but it has to be better than web, and NOT rely on the web-based gimmick and the "OOh, shiny!" factor (which only lasts for a fortnight aat most anyway) to win over and reatin users.
Yeah, Its a bit of a standard plug tour. Though he didn't say anything particularly contraversial in this article, unlike in the one he did for computerworld, with its "if linux gets too commercial the developpers will throw their toys out of the pram and do a Cartman"
I dunno, maybe some of them actually enjoy
being butt-raped by a splintered broom handle,
which seems to be the nearest thing to having
a record deal with an RIAA label, unless(even if?)
you happen to be a major superstar
Up with this errant pedantry I will not put
Yeah, an awful lot of people back then were made to look very silly when Schliemann found the Tell that is reckoned to have been Troy (it might not have been though, there is no way to know for sure until we find the fuck off great big "Welcome to Troy" sign in the outskirts, which is unlikely to happen, given the techniques of Schliemann and those that followed him[1]).
The tale of Atlantis does seem to be partly based on fact and partly allegorical, so there is some basis to the tale, as Plato got the tale from Socrates[1], IIRC, who got the story from the Egyptian records. However Plato's Atlantis probably bears as much similarity to the "real" Atlantis as More's Utopia or Butler's Erewhon have to any real world location.
The Santorini Hypothesis seems, to me, to be the most likely hypothesis, being the straw that broke the camels back and finally destabilised the trading circle of Mycenae, Minos, the Egytians and the Hittites. Given that the Minoans had been in decline for a long time before hand the eruption probably managed to finish off what remnants were left, and the loss of this trading partner dealt a fatal blow to the Myceneans(thus starting the Greek Dark Ages) and the Hittites.
The Egyptians, being the only one of these civilisations to avoid a decline and survive until classical times, and also being anal retentive records keepers, would have recorded these events. Given that the Santorini event would have sent waves all the way to the Egyptian Mediterranean coast, it is not inconceivable that they would have conflated the freak waves with the sudden breakdown of their trading network, thus a civilisation sinking beneath the waves.
Plato's Atlantis was pretty much made up, and the reason that he located it in the Atlantic rather than the Med is because, to the Greeks and even the Romans, the Atlantic was the edge of the world, so halfway between this world and the next, a suitable setting for the unlikeliest things to occur (see many Roman quotes about their then new colony of Britannia).
So any "evidence" contained in Plato's account of Atlantis is tenuous at best, as he was not telling a story to entertain and tell of the great deed of the Heroes of Old, as Homer was (oral traditions and epics such as that often have some basis in fact, such as the Irish epics and the Epic of Gilgamesh), he was telling the story to make a philosophical point, just like the rest of his dialogues.
Oh, and to the spods who ask why it is called Atlantis if it was not in the Atlantic, its simple, the ocean was named for the place in the story rather than the other way round.
I, personally, suspect that Sarmast is either another Von Daniken (a scummy chancer fleecing the fuckwits) or Berlitz(who is so full of shit that its surprising he hasn't had a rectal prolapse), but, without reading his Book(why no peer reviewed scientific paper I wonder, Schliemann submitted his shit for review, even though most people thought he was nuts), I couldn't conclusively try to blow him out of the water.
[1] Not, as I said before Aristotle, I always get those two mixed up for some reason
Yeah, tell me about it, I did have paragraphs when I wrote it, but, not having had enough coffee this morning, I forgot to tell the browser that I wanted it posted in POT rather than HTML
So the two options are:
1) Bunch of Paleo/mesolithic[1] hunter gatherers
end up on an island just off the north african and spanish coasts, develop agriculture about 3000 years before anyone else, yet strangely forget to tell anyone about it, and indeed fail to influence any of the other tribes in the region that they may have had contacts with, as they are obviously horribly insular pigfuckers, then disappear without trace[2] but somehow manage to be known to the Egyptians some 7500 years later, so they can tell Aristotle, who can then tell Plato so he can make some nice stories about them.
or
2) Graham Hancock, is a lying wanker with all the credibility of David Icke (I, for one, welsome our Subterranean Lizard Overlords), and a Von Daniken-esque habit of changing the "evidence" to fit with his theories.
Which is more likely?[3]
[1] My specialism never was stones and Bones, it doesn't really get interesting until the Neolithic
[2] Not to mention the odd lack of populations pressure that should have forced at least some of the members of this culture to leave their island paradise and strike out on their own elsewhere (Mu perhaps, or maybe Shangri-La?)
[3] Theres a reason that Hancock is shunned by people with clue, the fact that he is a complete cunt has nothing to do with it, the fact that he is rather hard of thinking, and has problems with understanding elementary logic and the scientific method does