This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
As a Stonemason, this shit always bothers me. Recent example was an article on stone henge. "Scientists still mystified as to how the stones were stood so that to caps were level!"
Mfr! Give me a straight piece of wood, a length of string and a rock, I will make you a basic level. Don't want to lift the stone in and out multiple times to adjust the level? Get logs and cut them to the same length as the upright stones. It's not fucking rocket surgery!
Trying to picture how you do this with those. Brain is stuck on hanging rock from wood with string which feels like I'm going the wrong way
I swallowed my rock, can I be excused?
No you have to act as the string now so start dangling.
Drafting* class taught me that you can build any structure with just a T-square, a compass, a pencil, and some basic math.
*As in the precursor to Computer-Aided Drafting. My school was cheap and didn't let us use AutoCAD till the 2nd semester.
But anyway, place the straight piece of wood across a gap. One end of the string goes around the middle of the wood, the other end hangs down where you tie the rock. You can visually tell with decent enough accuracy if the rock is hanging closer to one side (not level) or just straight down (level). If you can't tell, get a longer string.
some basic math.
The pyramids at gizeh predate most of that. They predate algebra by some 800 years.
Of course, despite Pythagoras not being born for some 2000 years, they DID have Rope stretchers to create square angles. They also had square levels and plumb bobs for making straight blocks and level surfaces.
You don't even need maths, just rope and gravity.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematics
"From 3000 BC the Mesopotamian states of Sumer, Akkad and Assyria, followed closely by Ancient Egypt and the Levantine state of Ebla began using arithmetic, algebra and geometry for purposes of taxation, commerce, trade and also in the patterns in nature, the field of astronomy and to record time and formulate calendars."
The first "true" pyramids were not built until ~2613. Prior to that it was all step pyramids, which are much less complex - just put a bunch of consecutively smaller squares in a stack. Even then, Djoser was started in ~2670, several hundred years after the "introduction" of basic math. Just because we don't have extant physical mathematical texts surviving from that time doesn't mean they didn't know how to do math.
The thing is, its not about a single rock being precise. Its a 2 million ton monument that we are told is a tomb that was built in like 20 years. Thats about 1.7 million pounds per day, every day. It would take our trucks a fucking insane amount of time just dragging it into position, how did they have the time to cut it as well? For a tomb??? Somehow I feel we are not being told the whole story here...
No, it's totally about a single rock being precise. That's the name of the game son. If you don't get the first stone precise, you can't get the second one in precise. And there's loads of different ways to move stone without trucks. I work in a conservation setting, and we use modern machinery as little as possible. If these scholars would bother asking anyone with actual experience in the field they'd get some answers to their questions.
Also what's with the Ancient Aliens bs at the end there?
Only idiots listen to Joe rogan
Some episodes are good, the one with Dave Mustaine for example
If you want to run your fingers through liquid shit trying to find the scattered diamonds, I'm not gonna stop you - but is it really worth it?
As a Megadeth fan it was surprisingly good. I'm not a regular viewer. Joe isn't smart but I think he can be a good interviewer
He establishes a good rapport with guests. But sometimes he uses that to lull people into agreeing with some of his fucked up shit.
He asked Coffeezilla (guy who does journalism about online scams) about trans rights. Coffeezilla rightly responded something like "I don't know this isn't something I'm an expert in." The look on Rogan's face was like, Eh I guess I didn't get you on that one.
And it's weird how he tries to create controversy. He's already the #1 podcaster, why is he doing these underhanded tricks to stir up controversy to gain notoriety?
It was a better show when he was just a dumb guy talking to smart people. That was a lot of fun. Don't know why he didn't just stick with that.
Before the move to Spoopify it was legitimately one of the best podcasts. Rogan has always been a moron and the juxtaposition of that against actual smart guests was so much fun. Then professionally offended fuckwits decided his opinion was worth ... anything ... and it all went downhill from there.
I never regarded him as very smart but he did have interesting guests and good banter, typically. A while before the Spotify buy I thought the quality worsened a lot and he would keep letting his politics shine through too much.
I liked when Bill Burr said he (Joe) couldn't rollerskate because his knuckles would drag on the ground in regards to Joe speculating on Covid without any real qualifications.
Yup. I used to watch on YouTube occasionally when he had someone interesting, and occasionally Rogan would ask an interesting question.
But I've never valued his opinion much. Why would I? He's an ex-MMA fighter with a microphone, he's unlikely to have a unique perspective vs the hordes of people with actual credentials online. I'm not saying being an MMA fighter is bad, just saying it doesn't qualify you on any topic other than MMA.
He was never really an MMA fighter. He may have done some low-level amateur fights or whatever, but his background is comedian and actor. Newsradio... one of the best sitcoms ever, though not because of Rogan (he was just an everyman kind of character) but because of Phil Hartman.
He's just a big fan of MMA. Though he probably has been punched in the head a fair amount in amateur fights.
Ok he’s finally triggered me. As an engineer, no. We absolutely can build pyramids. At least technologically. Financing it isn’t happening. But we can build pyramids on the size of the great pyramid without modern technology even. It’s impressive sure, but it’s not like people of the past were idiots, they just had less tools at their disposal, and better tools are great for inventing even better tools.
As you said financing it isn't happening, but it would be hilarious to quietly build a 1:1 replica on The Moon. Conspiracy Theorists would have aneurisms trying to sort everything out.
You'd need a huge tarp painted to look exactly like your building site, so that it just appears fully built one day.
Yeah I'm so tired of hearing that "We can't build the pyramids even with the technology of today" because that's just a bullshit statement with nothing supporting it. It is just to try to dismiss actual reality in order to prop up "It was aliens obviously" that has zero evidence.
Right wingers have nothing but bullshit statements with nothing supporting them. They operate on the principle that they can produce bullshit faster than reasonable people can debunk it.
I saw a documentary where they built a scaled down pyramid with a smaller workforce in a few months with ancient technology. The numbers scaled with the numbers that are the consensus of archaeologists for the size of the workforce and amount of time needed to built the Great Pyramid.
So not only could we do it with modern technology, we could do it with ancient technology. We just don't want to spend the money on that because it makes more sense to build other things.
Meanwhile on YouTube some dude in nowhere America has a set of videos showing how he can lift, rotate, leverage and pivot massive stone blocks and an entire house using stone-age technology... ropes and wooden levers... by himself!
Rogan appeals to people who want to hear that the world revolves around them. They believe and want to confirm that if they haven't figured it out no one else has. They are literal morons, but too stupid to know it. They are extremely satisfied when Rogan panders to their narcissism.
There was a documentary I saw once where they used the best estimates for how long it took the Great Pyramid and how large the work force was and then scaled it down. Like if it took a work force of X people Y number of years to build the Great Pyramid, then a few dozen guys would be able to build a two storey tall pyramid in two months with the same technology.
So they did that. And despite being inexperienced with the ancient technology and having to figure out how to push these massive stone blocks on rollers and make the corners around a spiral ramp winding around the pyramid, they got their little pyramid done on time. The math all checks out on people being able to build the pyramids provided they had a large enough workforce and enough time to do it.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it's because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them. But it required no special technology. Just a lot of dudes pushing heavy blocks on rollers up a ramp over many years.
Yes the Pyramids are impressive but it’s because it took a lot of work over a lot of time to build them.
That's the impressive thing. Their society had enough spare food that they could "waste" trillions of calories this way. It's hundreds of thousands of people doing nothing productive (for the survival of themselves or for others) for years on end. And, it happened thousands of years BCE.
Until just a few hundred years ago, 90% of people worked in jobs related to farming. So, to support 100,000 people building pyramids, they would have needed something like 900k farmers. That's a million people dedicated to this project for a full generation.
My boyfriends grandmother loves to watch shows like ancient aliens and stuff. Normally I just ignore them as background noise, but sometimes I'll catch something, shake my head and move on.
One time though she was watching the one with William Shatner, unexplained mysteries I think it's called. And the person Shatner was talking too said "and there is no way we could build the pyramids today" and Shatner just said nodded and then said "why?" The guy mean mugged the shot outta him and they cut to a commercial. When it came back they were talking about something else. Really made me laugh.
But like fr though, bass pro shop built a pyramid, we build crazy skyscrapers and have hundreds of building styles all over the world, I'm sure we could build a pyramid today if we had too.
Checkmate.
Their advanced technology: slaves
From what archaeologists have discovered, the builders were paid laborers.
They found stone tax records from the workers
Pyramids are the easiest structure to build. You stack rocks. Want them to look nice, cut the rocks into bricks.
And all you need is lots of money, lots of labor, and some clever engineers, which are all things the ancient Egyptians had in spades.
It's really not that hard.
Well, it's very hard, it's just not impossible.