"Neat" Pictures

[Lucius]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

I'd trust the Mayans more if there were more of them still around.

 

How many do you need?

 

There are between five and seven million ethnic Maya in Central America.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary still confuses Popol Vuh with Vox Populi

[SteveZilla]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

I think he means the civilization as well as the genetics. There are plenty of "ethnic Romans" still around, but no Roman Empire.

[RPMiller]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Guy built and actual War Machine (Iron Man) suit...

http://imgur.com/gallery/K65oF

 

 

Ahem...

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php/40283-A-Thread-for-Random-Videos?p=2323029#post2323029

 

And the post right before it for completeness. BTW, that armor cost $4000 to build.

[Greywind]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

And all it'll take is an arrow to the knee to show how ineffective it is.

[ClassifiedTSBBR]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

 

So who is Elvis's tag-team partner (since it's obviously not JFK)?

 

tax:

[Lucius]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

I think he means the civilization as well as the genetics. There are plenty of "ethnic Romans" still around' date=' but no Roman Empire. [/quote']

 

Latin's a dead language

It's plain enough to see

It killed off all the Romans

 

Lucius Alexander

 

And now it's killing the palindromedary

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

 

Don't recognize Iron Man or Hawkeye in that one.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

The Mayan civilization had collapsed pretty thoroughly by then; although Mayans were still around (they hadn't been outright culturally exterminated as would happen to the Aztecs after them) they were no longer able to maintain an urban lifestyle. It's theorized that something they did altered their ability to grow enough food to support the cities and states by making agriculture more difficult to sustain. When people realized that they couldn't get food if they continued to live in the cities, the cities were abandoned.

 

So whatever happened to the Mayan civilization, they probably did it to themselves, unintentionally.

 

We don't know nearly as much about the Mayans as we do about the Aztecs, but we know considerably more about them now than we did even twenty-five years ago.

 

Just for the record, the Aztex were not exterminated, culturally or otherwise. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and many of their neighbours, is still spoken by 1.5 million people today. Many proud Mexicans trace their descent to the Aztecs, and we have the usual assortment of books, statues, oral histories, art and whatnot.

 

Michael is right, in general, about current interpretations of the end of Classical Mayan civilisation, which sees it as a "typical archaic state collapse" rather than the consequence of some all-or-nothing exogenous event such as a big drought. (That being said, those who like the drought hypothesis like it a lot.) Where more nuance is required is to note that Mayan city states and literary culture survived in many parts of their former range. Thus, the Spanish encountered Mayan city states in northern Yucatan, in the Guatemalan highlands, and the Pacific highlands of southern Mexico. Note that I could put scare quotes around "Mayan" there. We usually use some kind of linguistic method of classifying these disparate groups as Mayan, but they didn't speak mutually intelligible languages. Culturally, we'll do things such as taking the Popol Vuh, which was written in the K'iche' Kingdom of Q'umarkaj and extrapolate it to the cities of the Yucatan. Some Mayan city states remained independent of Spanish rule into the 1690s.

 

The question, when we talk about the Mayan post-Classic collapse, is actually confined to the Central American lowlands. This is the main objection to exogenous theories. The issue isn't why the Mayan cities of the southern lowlands were abandoned at the end of the 800s. The issue is why they never came back. What changed to make city living a bad idea in these particular areas? Hence the temptation to talk about some kind of social-evolutionary model in which the function that the Classical cities embodied was usurped, perhaps by rotating markets.

[Susano]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Don't recognize Iron Man or Hawkeye in that one.

 

Aha! Now I know where I saw Hawkeye! He's one of the chefs from Ratatouille! Still not sure who Iron Man is.

[MisterVimes]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

There is pretty strong evidence that global climate change may have contributed to the Mayan food crisis. At the same time, temperatures in Europe dropped significantly and contributed to farmland building up around centralized cities and larger communal buildings. The Mayans used an irrigation method that would absorb heat from sunlight and create a vapor barrier over crops when temperatures cooled at night. Evidence suggest that the cooling of Europe was balanced by a drought that made the Mayan irrigation method unworkable.

[Susano]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

There is pretty strong evidence that global climate change may have contributed to the Mayan food crisis. At the same time' date=' temperatures in Europe dropped significantly and contributed to farmland building up around centralized cities and larger communal buildings. The Mayans used an irrigation method that would absorb heat from sunlight and create a vapor barrier over crops when temperatures cooled at night. Evidence suggest that the cooling of Europe was balanced by a drought that made the Mayan irrigation method unworkable.[/quote']

 

I blame the space aliens.

[austenandrews]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Aha! Now I know where I saw Hawkeye! He's one of the chefs from Ratatouille! Still not sure who Iron Man is.

The villain from Up.

[MisterVimes]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

I blame the space aliens.

 

The Hstory channel was quite clear on that point.

[Dr. Confoundo]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

The villain from Up.

 

Good call - from one of the flashback scenes as a younger man.

[Lord Mhoram]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Aha! Now I know where I saw Hawkeye! He's one of the chefs from Ratatouille! Still not sure who Iron Man is.

 

The villain from Up.

 

Thanks. Never saw the Rat movie*, and I've only seen Up once. He was vaguely familiar but didn't know where.

 

* not meant as a dismissal or insult I just can never spell "Ratatouille"

[MisterVimes]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Brad Bird (Pixar) and Joss Whedon are the directors of my two favorite superhero movies: Incredibles and Avengers. Perfect mash up.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

The villain from Up.

 

Creature of arrogance Howard Muntz is, it sort of fits.

[Michael Hopcroft]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Thanks. Never saw the Rat movie*, and I've only seen Up once. He was vaguely familiar but didn't know where.

 

* not meant as a dismissal or insult I just can never spell "Ratatouille"

 

After we saw Ratatouille together my Mother asked me what I could compare it to. I told her to watch Pinocchio, another movie in which an outsider (the puppet) finds himself discovering what it means to live in the human world. In Pinnochio's case, it is through a guided tour of the Seven Deadly Sins through which he finally learns the qualities that matter most in making someone truly human. When he finally learns that, and makes the sacrifices that calls him to make, is when he finally graduates and becomes a "real boy". In Ratatouille, our rodent protagonist experiences first-hand the best and worst in human nature -- often from the same people.

[Xavier Onassiss]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Lord of the Rings according to Frazetta

 

[MisterVimes]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

I love that shot.

[Zeropoint]

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It would be hard for Eowyn to pass as a man with those legs showing like that.

[Sociotard]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

"Gosh, George, you sure wore a funny looking breastplate today."

[Susano]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

The villain from Up.

 

Ahhh.... yes, of course.

[tkdguy]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Old D&D Character Sheet

[Bazza]

Re: "Neat" Pictures

 

Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Spica are in a roughly "straight", evenly spaced arc, and if the three objects are supposed to be Venus, Saturn, and Spica that would make sense because Spica is often (if inaccurately) portrayed as being that blue. But the angle with respect to the horizon is wrong for 30 degrees north. You would need to be much further south (like 50 or 60 degrees S) to get the shallow angle between the "stars" and the horizon as portrayed. At Giza the arc joining the objects is much closer to being perpendicular to the horizon than close to parallel with the horizon as shown, at least when the objects are rising (which is what this must be with Spica being highest in the sky as shown).

 

So move those pyramids to the coast of Antarctica and you can get the image in real life in about 6-7 months!

 

EDIT: I didn't even look at the site itself, whether the pyramids are arranged so that one could position one's self right to get the objects "over" the pyramid peaks. That's a geography question, not an astronomy one.

The colours may be because of the "zoomed out" nature used by the software program.

 

And you are saying that if you stood at the side of the pyramids matching the photo and stood there for 24 hours that you would not see the three planets line up as in the photo?

 

(of note: I only used that time as it was just past midnight. I could have picked a different time during that day--5th Dec 2012)