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The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

bbc.com

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Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#21

Post by psychoslave »

akssri wrote: post #2

[flagged]

That's regrettable yes, as any centrism. But people interested in epistemology certainly are aware of major contributions to sciences by Indian thinkers.

Biased coverage is unfortunately rather widespread in more general media. And rise of nationalisms don't help in the matter. Which is true for western and eastern countries by the way.

Regarding a case of several millennia of prior art, there is Pāṇini, who employed metalanguage long before the idea become of interest in western side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81%E1%B9%87ini

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#22

Post by metalman »

srean wrote: post #10
akssri wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Depends on the details of how you define calculus. Archimedes was doing integration, Descartes was evaluating slopes and tangents of algebraic curves. Isaac Barrow had a good grasp of fundamental theorem of calculus -- that differentiation and integration are inverse operations. Brook Taylor did Taylor series before Newton. Newton and Leibnitz get credit because they placed calculus as a general technique that is imm…

The current state is such that we can, with great authority, give an exact measure of each "years" length, with every one bieng unique. You touch on but dont quite state that math is a usefull game, but miss that reality does not use math consistantly, and we force arbitrary units and measures onto what we are trying to understand, but are still clueless as to what the nature of reality is, and how it works. Testable theorys are thin on the ground now,Newton and his peers, past,present,here, and there, would be and are, unsatisfied with the meager conclusions we have, sure we can sincronise, and our tools and toys are wonderfull, but the universe remains,theoretical.

unless you bump your toe on part of it.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#23

Post by srean »

andrewinardeer wrote: post #12

Where I live, I find it wild that there is a 5.75-hour difference between the summer and winter solstices, nearly a quarter of a whole day.

So roughly your latitude is 40 degrees ?

Now if you disclose your local time offset from GMT, say, Palantir can send a drone carrying roses.

Of course this is meant as a joke, but wanted to emphasize how easy it is for location information to leak. And if one really doesn't care about collateral deaths how easy it is to exploit location data.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#25

Post by srean »

metalman wrote: post #22
srean wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the details of how you define calculus. Archimedes was doing integration, Descartes was evaluating slopes and tangents of algebraic curves. Isaac Barrow had a good grasp of fundamental theorem of calculus -- that differentiation and integration are inverse operations. Brook Taylor did Taylor series before Newton. Newton and Leibnitz get credit because they placed calculus as a general technique that is imm…

The current state is such that we can, with great authority, give an exact measure of each "years" length, with every one bieng unique. You touch on but dont quite state that math is a usefull game, but miss that reality does not use math consistantly, and we force arbitrary units and measures onto what we are trying to understand, but are still clueless as to what the nature of reality is, and how it works. Testable…

It's the other way around.

It takes my breath away how consistent the mean length of a day is and how accurately we can measure it. So accurately that if it deviates by mere tens of milliseconds, and it does, we can notice it.

It boggles my mind that a hunk of rock made up of differing densities, with so much of salty water sloshing around, Moon exerting her brakes, bombardments by extraterrestrial matter, Earth still remains so consistent. Of course, this is not surprising if one does the math.

Yes math and physics are different. It's the the fact that math can model the physics so accurately at all that it's breathtaking.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#26

Post by noosphr »

franze wrote: post #6

my modern equivalent(I needed last year for surfing (after i needed to cut a surf trip short as it became night)) https://daylight.franzai.com/

Ha, amazing, I build the same 24 hour clock with night time for daily planning.

You can use an js SVG animation to have it run in real time: https://tomchen.github.io/animated-svg-clock/clock.svg

I have no idea why we stuck with the 12 hour clocks once we stopped using sundials and variable hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unequal_hours

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#27

Post by matusp »

voidUpdate wrote: post #3

How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times

1. Go out every morning to work in your field. 2. When the Sun rises, make a note on the same fixed piece of wood, e.g., a fence. 3. Observe the leftmost and rightmost positions, these are your solstices. 4 You can now use your fence to identify and predict solstices.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#28

Post by noosphr »

jcims wrote: post #19
voidUpdate wrote: post #3

How did ancient cultures know when the solstice was? If you didn't tell me it was the 21st, I don't know how I'd be able to tell you other than by carefully measuring the sunrise and sunset times

Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature. I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I re…

If you can I strongly suggest going to a Bortle 1 site and staying there for a month, preferably in winter.

The sheer amount of _stuff_ in the sky is mind boggling, the silence is deafening.

That we spend all of human existence until little over a century ago living like that is something I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#29

Post by dkga »

akssri wrote: post #2

[flagged]

I don’t know if it’s related to Western-centrism or not, but I recall thinking it was weird that my English-speaking colleagues do not know the formula to solve second-degree polynomials as the “Bhaskara formula”, as we call it in Brazil.

By the way, Wolfram’s website has an interesting summary of the history of this formula.[0]

[0]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/QuadraticEquation.html

Re: The ancient monuments saluting the winter solstice

#30

Post by srean »

noosphr wrote: post #28
jcims wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I bet you would have at least a reasonable intuition about it if you were among them. It's pretty remarkable how much our distractions and 'being indoors' all the time dulls our senses to nature. I started doing astrophotography about three years ago. I'd always been interested in 'space' but never really spent hours upon hours out at night over the course of months actually just studying the night sky. I re…

If you can I strongly suggest going to a Bortle 1 site and staying there for a month, preferably in winter. The sheer amount of _stuff_ in the sky is mind boggling, the silence is deafening. That we spend all of human existence until little over a century ago living like that is something I have a hard time wrapping my head around.

https://share.google/v6DtkBoWsfDWakBwO
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