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Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

washingtonpost.com

61–70 of 77 posts

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#61
post #33

"spans 385,000 to 172,000 years ago (plus or minus about 50,000 years on either end)" do journalists now get paid by word?

are you implying they should have said "spans 435,000 to 122,000 years ago" ?

why not? if that is exactly what they are saying.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Elven?

The implication is that the Elves lived in cities in the forests (perhaps like Guatemalan rain forests), Depending on if you are more of Tolkien fan or a Pratchett fan, Dwarves are more mountains/rocky types. And of course there are neither Dwarves nor Elves (in the fantasy fiction sense) around today.

Not really seeing any connection beyond the jungle part. Mayan world and religion doesn’t appear to share much with Tolkien: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_religion vs https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elf_(Middle-earth)

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#64
post #44
post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

One question: doesn't the definition of a Yojana vary a lot, with differences across texts and times? I am also very curious about Ancient Indian math, but I think we should also question how results were calculated. For instance, 108 is a sacred number in Hindu and Buddhist cultures. Some people say it was chosen because the ratio of distances of the Sun and the Moon to Earth is 108 times their respective diameters,…

Make a wooden disc and a stick whose length is 108 times the diameter of the disc. Attach the disc to one end of the stick and hold the other end near your eye. Observe that the disc has the same apparent diameter as the moon, eclipsing it. You could do the same with the sun through light clouds or mist, but be careful, obviously. There are indications that some ancient peoples, such as the builders of Stonehenge, were sufficiently interested in astronomical observation that they might have done a measurement like that and noted the result.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#65
post #26
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38482/was-the-s...

Accepted answer: > This looks very much as if the units may have been converted to obtain the desired result. Indeed the different conversion factors but similar result in your second link increase the likelihood that there may cognitive bias involved > For example, your distance conversions lead to 1 yojan being 29.2608 kilometres. Compare this with Wikipedia's 12–15 km and your second link's 9.09 miles (about 14.5…

You didn't go through the links yourself? Entire arguments rests on the premise that second as a unit of time was not defined until recently.

I am no way supporting glorification of past but inventing arguments to discredit the past is equally distasteful to me.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#66
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying people need to take Ancient Aliens at face value, but the show is great when it comes to forcing you to think about how the ancient world really might have been. I often think the narrative we get in public school history is really just the compromised, politically acceptable version of history. Shows like Ancient Aliens at least get us to ask some questions.

How do you think that ancient indians figured out the speed of light, recorded it for posterity, but forgot how to actually calculate it?

Why did Europe go into the dark ages after several years of incredible advancement and prosperity?

We've gotten used to the idea of steady gains and prosperity, but there are cycles that include book burning, knowledge destruction, and civilizational declines. Ancient Aliens forces the viewer to ask what civilizations were even doing with odd constructions and what purpose they served; the only difference is they suggest that extra-terrestrials were involved. Extra terrestrial involvement may seem outlandish to some, but the question of why any civilization was doing what it was remains.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#67
post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years. I suppose it is in our nature to beam i…

Pride in the past or present is a personal choice. Facts about the past/present should not be twisted or ignored for that sake.

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years. I suppose it is in our nature to beam i…

Sadly this shows literacy has nothing to do with critical thinking and where the most literate of us should yield a higher standard on consuming fake whatsapp forwards, this shows that it is not always the case. In Ancient times we also invented flying ( pushpak viman) and there is a Shiva temple buried under the Taj Mahal called Tejo Mahalaya? Somewhere in India if we dig deep, we will find fossilized versions of a…

Why should critical thinking be an effect of literacy? There are people who are not literate by western standards, but pretty sharp(Michael Faraday) and those who are literate but not that clever

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#69
post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

All well and good, except the Rig Vedic people no longer exist today, nor do their civilisation or thought. Only we do. We need to move forward not look back in nostalgia. It is the same as modern Westerners looking back on ancient Greeks and Romans. There's not a whole lot of good all of this is going to do to the present and future except in so far as there are valuable lessons to be learned. WE must not make the m…

The problem with completely ignoring the discoveries of the past are that we may miss out some solutions to current problems. No harm in learning things from the past

Re: Very old, very sophisticated tools found in India

#70
post #2

The fourth verse of the Rigvedic hymn 1:50 (50th hymn in book 1 of rigveda) is as follows: तरणिर्विश्वदर्शतो जयोतिष्क्र्दसि सूर्य | विश्वमा भासिरोचनम | taranirviśvadarśato jyotishkridasi sūrya | viśvamā bhāsirocanam || This means “Swift and all beautiful art thou, O Surya (Sun), maker of the light, illuminating all the radiant realm.” Exlpaining this verse in his Rig Veda commentary, Sayana, who was a minister in the…

Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years. I suppose it is in our nature to beam i…

> Isn't it an irony, that the parent posts this long comment, supposedly to glorify the ancient texts of the East, attempting to assert an innate superiority of the scientific thought achieved in the past by their culture and yet s/he uses a device invented more or less in the West using science ( math, physics, chem) developed by western minds in no more than last 300-400 years.

No, math/physics/chem are no more Western than air/water/sun is. The west was on its quest to conquer the world, so we felt the immense need and desire to twist history projecting a Western superiority, it was much easier to sell to the world - we had all money extracted from plantations and new found world to market aggressively. A lot of ideas known to West originated in East, westerns commercialized them and spread them far and wide, later we also made active efforts to destroy the pieces of evidence too. The only downside was that not all pieces of evidence were available to us at that time, so you'll still find them if you look hard and are lucky enough.

Disclaimer: I am a western.

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