Posted on 12/17/2004 2:43:44 PM PST by blam
And tossing the young girls into cenotes. We toured one in Vallidolid (sp.), I do believe.
Ahh...the arrogance of modernity. Who says this is the only way of doing acoustical design?
Yes, that is what I bumped. :)
When you live in the outdoors, the stars and the sun are your principle source of entertainment and companionship. It's no surprise that primatives all over the planet put sticks in the ground to track the shadow of the rising/setting sun and come up with the equinox. Virtually all of them did it. Total no brainer.
But making the claim that these folks understood the wave nature of sound and pre-computed how it would change on echos is another thing entirely. I don't doubt the effect was accidental. The Computational Fluid Dynamics that would be required to pre-compute that kind of thing is a very difficult thing to do today. There is no such software package called "WinCFD", so every such computation requires significant software customization.
Aircraft "T" hangars with corregated steel walls do the same "chirping" echo, no doubt accidental too. Virtually all of them do it. Go to an airport, like Falcon Field in Mesa AZ, and stand between two rows of hangars and clap your hands. It not only chirps once, it will reflect several times if you clap loud enough. Sounds pretty wierd.
>>> As for bringing a good harvest, that was assured by tearing the still beating heart out of young girls
Yes, I saw the sacrificial table. It was eery!
bump!
>>>>But by all means, let's have a team of highly-paid, overeducated scientists go around the world clapping on the stairways of the ancients to see if it sounds like a bird or a duck. Now that's science baby!
Not science, :) Grant money access :P
>>>>The Computational Fluid Dynamics that would be required to pre-compute that kind of thing is a very difficult thing to do today. There is no such software package called "WinCFD", so every such computation requires significant software customization.
Woosh!
::that was the sound of big words zooming right over my head::
Ok. I can't retort that. Sound was an accident then.
They had numbers but no math. Odd concept, but they never progressed much beyond addition / subtraction. Calculation of angles was never part of their building technique other than the obvious corners of buildings. I forget if they even had the concept of a zero or not.
Like the wisper spot in the Rotunda of the Capitol in DC. Totally unexpected, discovered after completion by accident.
I'm still impressed by the pyramids though :)
My thoughts, too, as I was reading the article.
"They knew many things that we don't today."
Name one.
LOL... Good one.
What if? What if it were accidental the first time, and when the Mayans discovered what it would do, they had to show everybody else how cool it was by building a lot more pyramids? Kind of a prehistoric, "Hey ya'll, watch this!" :-)
Like, that the world is going to end in 2012. Bet'cha didn't know that!
Seriously, asking me to name something that we don't know today is by definition impossible. But I imagine many ancient cultures knew things of one sort or another that we don't today.
"Declercq's calculations show that, although there is evidence that they engineered the pyramid to produce surprising sounds, they probably couldn't have predicted exactly what they would resemble."
Understatement of the year nominee. :') I'll ping the list after I get home.
Of course this research will go far in advancing the condition of present day homo-sapiens.
"asking me to name something that we don't know today is by definition impossible"
I wasn't trying to be obnoxious, just making the above point in the simplest terms.
"But I imagine many ancient cultures knew things of one sort or another that we don't today."
It's possible they might have "known" or witnessed the mating rituals of some extinct species or the medicinal uses of extinct plants. But to say they "knew" more is, like you say, impossible.
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