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Easter Island heads have bodies

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Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#81

Post by dfc »

tripzilch wrote: post #36
dfc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting? We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT! If tha…

Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations.

Did you really know all of those?

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#82

Post by dalke »

ibisum wrote: post #57
dalke wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"if you apply both to the same subject" Where's the scientific thought? If the world was covered with an ocean any time soon (call it the last million years so we can include every human culture) then there would be obvious physical traces, and salt-intolerant species, including plants, would have died.

The oceans move, was his point. I would investigate the science, but the science-fiction of a language called Protong is far more intriguing and worthwhile a pursuit. While I will always respect the mainstream desire to discern the truth, a fiction about Easter Island may be just as valid.

Whenever I see "may" I have to remember that it's essentially meaningless, and your text is equally valid changing it to "may not", as in "a fiction about Easter Island may not be just as valid."

First you say "apply both to the same subject" and now you say that's fiction may be "just as valid."

Szukalski's fiction is 30 volumes of text. You pick out that "the oceans move"? (By which you mean "cover the Earth", not continental drift or tides.) What about that human culture comes from a people on Easter Island, after Noah's flood? How is that fiction at all valid? Races derive from crossbreeding of species, again, after the flood? How is that at all valid?

If it's hard to pick the valid fiction from the invalid, then what's the point? Isn't it like looking up the date by randomly picking a day from this year's calendar?

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#83

Post by phpnode »

electromagnetic wrote: post #68
lisper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A Google Images search for "Easter Island" reveals many heads with above-ground bodies, and a few heads buried up to their noses. That some of the bodies are buried up to the neck should come as no surprise to anyone.

What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you have to access the head. So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their intended state. What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they…

I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and blocks of wood and a lot of man power.

Who knows why they were buried, perhaps their religions and customs changed over time and they buried certain heads as a mark of denigration or respect.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#84

Post by lurch00 »

dfc wrote: post #15
lurch00 wrote: post #11

This still a tech news aggregator? This is something that should be on reddit, not hacker news...?

Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

So I read the FAQ and guidelines. As far as I can tell the things you mentioned are not specified.

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

So did a blog post with 3 pictures and a paragraph of text satisfy your intellectual curiosity? What did you actually learn from this single site? Sure, the pictures are purrdy but it's hardly good content. IMO it matches the off-topic, more than the on-topic. "Moai statues have bodies, more pictures at 11!" An intelligent site aggregator without the bullshit fluff is too much to ask for I guess. I'll be over at lamernews.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#85

Post by [deleted] »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #51
GeneTraylor wrote: post #26

Whenever I see an easter island head, I can't help but draw parallels between our global civilization and theirs. The eastern islanders consisted of around a dozen tribes, each competing for resources with others. It's thought that all of these statues were put up in a race by chieftains, competing with one another to put up the biggest, most refined and the best statue. I wouldn't be surprised if they competed in th…

> However what they failed to realize was the inescapable fact that they were living on a small piece of land in the middle of a vast ocean. Their first problem was that they and their palm trees were too big for the island. A big body size means a low population count, and that means that range of random fluctuations overlaps with zero: extinction. This is why island species evolve towards dwarfism: the Flores "hobb…

[deleted]

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#86

Post by randallsquared »

GeneTraylor wrote: post #71
randallsquared wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you get those resources here, or us over there? There are a number of high-startup-cost, low-running-cost schemes for putting stuff in LEO, and as someone once said, LEO is halfway to anywhere in the solar system, energy-wise. Some possibilities are laser launching, space elevators, launch loops, and electromagnetic guns. Some of these have much higher startup costs (to be effective for human launching, a g…

I've actually thought about this a bit, and I think that a really interesting design for a launch gun would be to encase the payload in a cover composed of diamagnetic material and then pump liquid nitrogen through channels made inside the material. The material would become perfectly diamagnetic and it will repel all fields, so you can easily levitate it and use it's tendency to go from a stronger to a weaker field…

I haven't paid much attention to these areas in a while, but I would start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#87

Post by dfc »

lurch00 wrote: post #84
dfc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

So I read the FAQ and guidelines. As far as I can tell the things you mentioned are not specified. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some inte…

That picture was not the least bit awe inspiring to you? That someone along time ago moved huge masses of stone and created something like that?

Its not just me though, apparently a lot of other people liked it too, and it made it to #2 on hn:classic. Why continue this argument? Even in their hayday the big tech aggregators (/. , kuro5hin, etc) had posts that were not OMG, ROFLScale! I wrote a webserver in Clojure+Assembly that runs on my thermostat!

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#88

Post by gbog »

slevcom wrote: post #74
gbog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their unhealthy way of life.

I smell a troll.

Ok, it may be "trollish" to say that the American way of life is unhealthy and bad for the environment and to express disapproval when this country spread its bad habits around the world. It is true nonetheless.

(Or maybe you think it is OK to eat 1kg of meat/day, own 1 car/person, drive 2h/day, eat burgers and watch TV?)

So facing this issue, two solutions:

1- Human being should be able to consume more, and therefore there need to be less of them.

2- Human being do not need to consume that much to be happy and, therefore, their demographics is not that much of an issue.

I let you choose.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#89

Post by lisper »

phpnode wrote: post #83
electromagnetic wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I wonder is, were these buried statues left like that by the islanders. I mean to get the hat on the statue, the statue has to both be stable and you have to access the head. So was the easy method of doing this burying the statue? If so how fast did the islanders die off that they couldn't dig out the statues back to their intended state. What's scary is what these peoples last days must have been like if they…

I seriously doubt the easiest way to get the hat on is by digging a massive hole, burying the statue, using the ground around it as a ramp, maneuvering the head into position and then somehow either raising the statue in position or digging out the ground around the hole so that it no longer looks like a hole. I think it's more likely the statues were laid flat, their hats attached and then raised with ropes and bloc…

My bet would be natural silting and settlement. Easter Island was deforested at some point in its history. New groundwater patterns and a few hundred years could easily sink a few stone statues up to their eyebrows.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#90

Post by tripzilch »

dfc wrote: post #81
tripzilch wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting? We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT! If tha…

Wow! I just finished reading though the list of common misconceptions. If you were aware of all of those misconceptions am extremely impressed. That list covers an enormous body of knowledge. To be honest I would not have imagined that anyone would know all of those details, congratulations. Did you really know all of those?

I don't know, it's a while back that I read the article.

I should check again, I suppose (or hope) the ones I don't know about, at least I know I don't know about? :)

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