I must have been sleeping that day in my history of science class

[TZ]

Because apparantly astrology is the root of all science....:eyes:

[realisticphish]

1. little known fact

Darwin chose to visit the Galapagos Islands because his star reader told him it was a good time

[mr blur]

2. "You will meet a 150-year-old dark turtle - he will change your life"

OMG!1! It came true!!1

[Warpy]

3. Well, in a way it is, giving rise to astronomy

and astrophysics and all the hard sciences that pointed out the constellations were an illusion and their interference in daily life was hooey.

Alchemy gave rise to chemistry and shamanism with the use of plants to medicine.

Intelligent and capable people who aren't afraid of work moved beyond the old superstitions and into science. The rest are simply left in the dust, inhabiting woo stores and moaning about the closed mindedness of their betters.

[Orrex]

4. You're right, but the way it's repeated as a 'gotcha!' tactic gives me a pain

The implication is always that astrology should be respected today because it was first, as if first makes it the current best.

That's like saying "I'm taking Mitochondrial Eve to the prom."

[bluedawg12]

6. The pigeon entrails tell me they will be proven right.

And Mitochondrial Eve is a slut, she's been to the prom with nearly every man who ever lived. :rofl:

[Deep13]

11. We may as well say we should respect doctors who still bleed patients...

...because early pioneers like Galen did.

[TZ]

12. Errr

Bleeding or phlebotomies are commonplace for people with a condition similar to mine see...Polycythemia Vera ...they have too many red white cells and platelets...

[Deep13]

14. Sorry. But they used to bleed for "fever" ...

... which in those days meant anything.

[realisticphish]

15. when i was a kid

I always wondered what old doctors had against "humor"

[onager]

17. Yep. That's what killed George Washington.

Fascinating story. A Google will give you all the...er...gory details, since Washington was attended by 3 doctors who kept careful records.

You could almost say Washington killed himself. He was a big advocate of bleeding and apparently thought it would cure just about anything. He also seemed to believe it was a cumulative cure--if a little bleeding didn't fix the problem, obviously the solution was MORE bleeding. On his deathbed, he was demanding the doctors keep bleeding him even when they didn't want to.

Basically, he came down with a bad cold, fever and sore throat after going horseback riding in winter. He might have survived all that, though his throat swelled to the point where the doctors performed a tracheotomy so he could breathe, IIRC. Add the weakening caused by all that bleeding, and he must have been in a condition where he couldn't survive much of anything.

[JitterbugPerfume]

5. that certain forum

is nuttier than a fruit cake today

[CreekDog]

7. If you were an Indigo you would realize your folly

:evilgrin:

[TZ]

8. lol

I was probably sleeping in class cause "CreekKitty" kept me awake half the night..;)

[CreekDog]

9. Ahem

Too many syllables in that cat name! :spank:

[realisticphish]

13. if she were an indigo

she would never have been wrong in the first place :D

[Deep13]

10. Modern science began principally with two investigations.

One was the telescopic investigation of the universe. The other was the exploration of how the human body worked. And the anatomists were at least as reviled by the religious establishment as the astronomers.

[onager]

16. From your former resident of Alexandria, Egypt...

When I was in Alexandria, I found quite a few offbeat books about the place. A couple of these were collections of academic papers from international historians, archeologists, etc.

A few things dredged up from memory, since I'm still moving back into my house and books are packed away everywhere:

--When Alexander The Great conquered the Persian Empire, he acquired more than a thousand years of Babylonian astrological records. I've seen this mentioned on 'woo sites, with the usual gaping studpidity about how Alexander used this data to acquire Otherworldly Powers, bla-bla-bla. The records apparently ended up in the ancient Alexandria Library, where they were used by Greek astronomers in scientific studies of the universe.

--The first anatomical studies of the nervous and circulatory systems were done by doctors at the Alexandria Library. They operated on living patients--condemned prisoners provided by the Ptolemaic rulers.

--In the fourth century BCE, Erastothenes of Alexandria not only proved the world was round, but calculated its circumference to within 50 miles. He did this by simple observation: driving a stake into the ground at Alexandria and measuring its shadow. A helper did the same at Cyrene (Aswan), a couple hundred miles away. On a flat earth, both measurements would be the same. They were not, and the difference in the measurements provided the starting point for calculating the circumference.

To paraphrase someone smarter than me (a category including most doorknobs): Without stuff like religion and superstition constantly interfering, we might have had the Internet in the 15th century.

[bluedawg12]

18. OK, I'm still stumped by why two stakes measure differently

on the surface of a sphere like earth.

But this quote rocks, it's a new one for me: "Without stuff like religion and superstition constantly interfering, we might have had the Internet in the 15th century."

I looked at some ancient Roman surgical instruments and they are pretty much the same as today as far as scalpel and forceps and saw. They also did open craniotomies to decompress epidural hematoma's. I guess the legions had some pretty interesting war wounds. :P

Yeah, the telescope, microscope and plain old human anatomy dissections were a turning point.

Come to think of it Isaac Newton did pretty well by inventing Calculus.

[onager]

19. The fault is with my lousy explanation.

Here, I will leave this to a professional...

Eratosthenes knew that on the summer solstice at local noon in the Ancient Egyptian city of Swenet (known in Greek as Syene, and in the modern day as Aswan) on the Tropic of Cancer, the sun would appear at the zenith, directly overhead. He also knew, from measurement, that in his hometown of Alexandria, the angle of elevation of the Sun would be 1/50 of a full circle (7°12') south of the zenith at the same time.

Assuming that Alexandria was due north of Syene, he concluded that the distance from Alexandria to Syene must be 1/50 of the total circumference of the Earth. His estimated distance between the cities was 5000 stadia (about 500 geographical miles or 950 km). He rounded the result to a final value of 700 stadia per degree, which implies a circumference of 252,000 stadia.

The exact size of the stadion he used is frequently argued. The common Attic stadium was about 185 m, which would imply a circumference of 46,620 km, i.e. 16.3% too large. However, if we assume that Eratosthenes used the "Egyptian stadium" of about 157.5 m, his measurement turns out to be 39,690 km, an error of less than 1%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

You're right about the ancient Roman armies. If you haven't yet, you might like to check out some of the books by Stephen Dando-Collins. He is writing a history of each Roman legion, mostly using ancient sources. I think he has covered 4 of the legions so far.

I really enjoyed his book Cleopatra's Legion while I was living in Alexandria, since it dealt with the conquest of Egypt. It really showed just how close Julius Caesar came to total disaster in Alexandria. The author explains how Caesar nearly drowned in a battle at the Pharos Lighthouse, which I had never heard before.

I also never knew that, while Roman soldiers could retire after 25 years, they didn't have to. Many stayed in the army until they were long past modern retirement age. IIRC, at one time the Tenth Legion had a large number of soldiers who were over 60 years old. They also got soft on garrison duty, which came to a screeching halt when a new General arrived to whip them into shape. And that General was quite elderly himself.

[bluedawg12]

20. Eratosthenes - what an elegant little experiment.

Sounds like a forerunner to theoretical physics, where most of the research is done by reasoning and the eventual measurements are merely confirmatory. Not bad for an "ancient."

How did we get from such great potential to where we are today, debating over greenhouse gases, as if there were much mystery about man's impact on the planet? Yesterday John Boner (repig) arguing on TV that cows fart CO2! Not methane, but Co2?

Thanks for the tip on the legions. Fascinating stuff.

I wonder, what was the feel of Alexandria today? Was it modern? Or did it have any of the flavor of the ancient world? Was it Moorish? A mixture of old and new?

.........

Here's a tid bit from the "Sacred E-Book Wiki" :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria



In ancient times, Alexandria was one of the most famous cities in the world. It was founded around a small pharaonic town c. 334 BC by Alexander the Great. It remained Egypt's capital for nearly a thousand years, until the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 641 AD when a new capital was founded at Fustat (Fustat was later absorbed into Cairo).

Alexandria was known for the Lighthouse of Alexandria (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), the Library of Alexandria (the largest library in the ancient world) and the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa (one of the Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages). Ongoing maritime archaeology in the harbor of Alexandria, which began in 1994, is revealing details of Alexandria both before the arrival of Alexander, when a city named Rhakotis existed there, and during the Ptolemaic dynasty

[onager]

21. Alexandria today...

Unfortunately, is just another drab Middle Eastern city, full of crumbling high-rise apartments and stunningly ugly half-built government construction projects.

Fortunately, its location on the Mediterranean gives it a certain amount of natural beauty that even the worst architecture from the Despot School can't totally ruin. If Alexander The Great or Cleopatra suddenly came back to life, they would still instantly recognize a few landmarks, like the beautiful "curve" of the Eastern Harbor and Pharos Island.

(Fun Fact: the biggest building in the city is Alexandria University's School Of Engineering. Egyptians don't like to talk about the origins of that building. It was a gift from Mussolini in the 1930's. That's fairly obvious walking around the damn thing. It's built in that overpowering big-n-ugly Fascist style that deliberately tries to make the viewer feel insignificant.)

I was about to babble-on about Alexandria, but I'm still moving into my house and can't post at my usual tedious length.

But thanks for the photo of the cute little sphinxes. They guard Pompey's Pillar in Alexandria, and always made me smile for some reason when I saw them. The el-Choquafa (or Kom el Shoqafa) catacombs are nearby. According to local legend, the Catacombs were discovered when a donkey fell in a hole. The poor critter had a long fall (the equivalent of 3 stories, underground!). But he survived with only a broken leg, and was instantly retired from day labor and honored by the citizens for the rest of his life.

Another Fun Fact: after he defeated Cleopatra and Marc Antony at the battle of Actium, Octavian was in a bad spot. His army hadn't been paid for months and was on the point of mutiny.

He came to Alexandria to seize Cleopatra's treasury, which he hoped would pay the army for a year. He found enough treasure to pay the whole Roman army for 20 years.

[bluedawg12]

22. Thanks for taking the time for a virtual tour.

The fun facts are a bonus! :hi: