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Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

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Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#61

Post by smusamashah »

OnACoffeeBreak wrote: post #26

Matt Parker ("Stand up Maths" channel on YouTube) gave a very informative and entertaining lecture in 2010 titled "Clutching at Random Straws" [0], which, among other things, covered something similar. From the subtitle of the video: "Did aliens help prehistoric Britons find the ancient Woolworths civilisation?" The answer is "no". Given enough data points, you can find all sorts of patterns. 0: https://www.youtube.c…

Thanks for the link. Gist was that with enough data, lots of patterns are inevitable.

He gave example from some text taken out of bible with spaces removed. That's lots of letters on one screen, and from those letters he was able find his name, date and topic of the talk, when joining letters at equal distance.

Finding unbelievable patterns is not as amazing as we think.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#62

Post by dhosek »

voidUpdate wrote: post #3

> Did the builders knew the earth was round? Yes. This has been known since ancient greek times, and Aristotle calculated the size reasonably well. Maybe not every labourer knew or cared but the architects almost certainly did

One of the incorrect things about Columbus that I was taught in second grade was that he had trouble getting support for his voyage because his would-not-be patrons thought the earth was flat. In fact, they refused to fund him because he thought the earth was much smaller than it was and they had the correct size of the earth.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#63

Post by lloeki »

onion2k wrote: post #57

I'm not a civil engineer so I don't know for sure, but I'd guess you can't just throw a cathedral up just anywhere you want. The land has to be the right composition, you need to have good enough transport links to get the raw materials to where you're building it, you need local talent to actually build it, it can't be in the sea . It'd be surprising if these buildings were exactly aligned. Presumably people could e…

Tell that to the people that decided that Strasbourg should have a cathedral: the whole area is a freaking swamp (water table + sand and clay). Not to fret, they punched 15cm x 1.5m tree trunks into the ground, as if you were standing on a thousand toothpicks.

Local myth has it that the second spire wasn't build because it would topple over.

Probably many more examples like this one exist. "I don't care. Figure it out. You're the expert."

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#64

Post by randomtoast »

robertlagrant wrote: post #54
randomtoast wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my question was not right then. But my question was how likely is it that 7 randomly chosen points fall within a given 50 km band across europe. Because I want to test the hypotheses that the 7 cathedrals fall randomly in line that we see. And that one random point falls in that band is not 1.

Yes, but I suppose even if you have 7 that line up, they may not fall in your band. To remove that constraint, so it's just any band, I think it should be more like: given a cathedral is in a particular place, how likely is it that six other cathedrals fall in a 50km wide band aross Europe.

Okay, GPT4 said there a just 189 non-overlapping 50km bands (horizontal, vertical, and diagnoal) in Europe and then continued to calculate the chance to land those 7 points in any of the 189 bands and gave a result in the order of 10^-12.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#66

Post by chippy »

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #23
chippy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all dedicated to the same saint, St. Michael.

Which isn't really all that special. In England alone, there are 816 churches named after St Michael. He's pretty popular. It'd be a lot more spectacular if they were all named after someone much more obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E...

That's right. I would actually expect there to be a few more than 7!

And if we extend the search to all placenames dedicated to St Michael quite a bit more!

It's not pure coincidence but it is a kind of observation error as highlighted in other comment. Increasing and decreasing the variables and measurements effects the odds.

Basically you can get a line between many things on earth, but 1) the dimensions of that line cannot be chosen if you also want to choose the things that define it or 2) the dimensions can be chosen but the things that make it up cannot.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#67

Post by nabla9 »

Maken wrote: post #18
logtempo wrote: post #13

Are they aligned because they are famous, or are they famous because they are aligned? Or are they aligned because if I pick 7 famous monuments aligned I can draw a line, look over my shoulder and say "ho look, if we draw a line it match!" From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches: St. Michael's Church (disambiguation) Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel (es), San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico World Heritag…

But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.

>.. are aligned.

Only on Mercator projection that is younger than many of the sites on the line.

Oder of things:

1. There were bunch of monasteries (not cathedrals), not aligned on any direct line.

2. Mercator invented a projection.

3. Someone looked at map using Mercator a projection and invented story about ley lines.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#68

Post by smeej »

Archelaos wrote: post #22
smeej wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I think I'm more annoyed at this point with the myth of the ignorant Medievals than I am with the myth of the flat earth itself. Even knowing the earth is round, if I were going to put things in a "straight line" geographically, I'd do it with the reference most people would actually use and see: a 2D map.

> most people would actually use and see: a 2D map The expert used spherical mathematics. This was quite widespread knowledge required to build proper sun dials and in the Late Medieval period for long distance navigation. Some were able to use analog computers, called "armillary spheres", for the calculations, which were known since Antiquity.[1] [1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillary_sphere

Most people aren't experts. If I'm setting up a bunch of churches in a line to make a point, I'm doing it to make a point to the vast swath of common people in them, not the handful of experts.

Re: Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

#69

Post by mikehotel »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #41
logtempo wrote: post #13

Are they aligned because they are famous, or are they famous because they are aligned? Or are they aligned because if I pick 7 famous monuments aligned I can draw a line, look over my shoulder and say "ho look, if we draw a line it match!" From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches: St. Michael's Church (disambiguation) Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel (es), San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico World Heritag…

See: ley lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line?wprov=sfla1

Also: Alignments of random points https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points
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