"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

where the past comes alive
August 15, 2002 - 8:20 pm

i just watched the most fasinating show on the history channel about our ancestors and inventions that include:

first analog computer - made by the greeks. it predicts the path of the stars, both future and past with great accuracy.

damascus steel - we can't make the steel that crusaders used in their swords.

bagdad battery 1st centrey a.d. - ceramic pot, copper tube and iron bar, just add acidic liquid like grape juice and you got a battery.

library of alexandria - burned and destroyed by invaders. it's thought that this set the development of society/culutre/civilization back by about 1,000 years. think about that. what we have now, we'd have had in the year 1002.

the show then went into the construction of such things as the pyramids. allegedly taking 30 years each to make, but we've no idea exactly how or by who. no evidence of slaves. each block is 200 tons, that's 500 average sized family cars. modern cranes would take hundereds of years to build one pyramid and that's just to get them to the site. nevermind how exactly they are built.

nevermind that the sphinx shows water erosion and it hasn't rained there since about 10,000 b.c. or 5,000 years before the sphinx is said to be built.

i get hooked on this stuff.

the coral castle in florida, ok not ancient, but how'd he do that?

oak island in nova scotia, agian not all that old, but what's the deal here?

machu puchu in peru with it's own 200 ton stones 5,000 ft high in the andes mountians. the stones fit together with out sort of mortar, we need mortar today.

the nazca lines and animals in chile. how did these people who couldn't fly make art you can only see from the sky? did they have hot air balloons like some pots would suggest? the lines cover an area of 200 square miles. the lines are straight and done without any sort of known engineering instraments. did you know they also did brain surgery? some skulls have been found with multiple holes, some partially healed or completely..so the patient lived for some time afterwards. over 100 such skulls have been found.

easter island and those giant stone heads.

stonehenge, even though it doesn't fit the defintion of a henge.

pyramids being build indpendently of each other in egpyt, china and central america.

caucasian corpses, mummies really, being found in the outlaying western provinces of china. these date to long, long before the greeks and any trip by marco polo.

the ruins in boliva. the name is pronounced like "tee-o-wan-nah-co" and it's 400 ton blocks of stone 12,500ft above sea level...where you can hardly grow food. no way to support any sort of labor force. the used molten metal like modern braces to hold the blocks together. it has a statue that seems to be holding a book, even though the civilzation predates written language.

i question how much progress we've really made. are we better now than before? we can do some great things...great doesn't always mean good. any good modern invention humans seem to come up with, theres two bad ones.