Analogies and Conjectures
Analogies and Conjectures Abstracts Piped from Yahoo! Pipes
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
© Dr M D Magee
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
AW! Analogies and Conjectures Abstracts
Abstracts from each page on the Analogies and Conjectures directory of the AskWhy! main website.
Akhnaten, Thera and Monotheism: Act of God by Graham Phillips
Akhnaten believed that Aten was the only god and went so far as to proscribe the others. Phillips claims that Akhnaten’s downfall was because of his rigid monotheism, had from the Jews, and passed to Christianity. Christians and Moslems like to say they are monotheists, but in what respect are they? What Christian today believes in only one god? In the monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the old beardy fellow on the throne is surrounded by masses of lesser gods, forming his heavenly court. This is monotheism? Modern Jews, Christians and Moslems, contrary to Phillips’s theory, have never been monotheists and the theory collapses. Indeed they are just like the Egyptians before Akhnaten who believed in many gods. They also had them arranged in a taxonomy with Amun-Ra at the top as the supreme god.
Transatlantic Trade in Cocaine and Tobacco: Was America a Phœnician Colony?
The landing of these Phœnicians in Brazil seemed to be accidental, but other seafarers may have landed intentionally centuries before Columbus, and brought with them architectural ideas like pyramids and monumental stone structures like Egyptian ones. Others exploring the Amazon have found allegedly Phœnician inscriptions but they cannot be confirmed as genuine. If the Phœnicians, those hallowed inventors of the alphabet, did in fact discover America, is it not improbable that the lost and controversial Paraiba Stone should be the only written evidence of their passage on these shores? The story of transatlantic trade in ancient times as told by Channel 4 (UK), Michel N Laham and Mark McMenahim
Dating the Eruption of Thera: Minoan or Greek
The eruption of the volcano of Thera. Signs of a large tsunami appear in the Ionian and Sirte abyssal plains, and on the slopes of the Calabrian Rise and the Mediterranean Ridge. Some pumice strata in Cyprus date c 1200 BC. Analogous deposits have been found at Amnisos, Anaphi, and on the coast of Palestine. Navigation will have been impossible with the floating pumice on it. No remains of settlements dated from 1500 to 1200 BC have been found on Santorini. It suggests that the later collapse (around 1200 BC?) was more catastrophic, with the settlements that must have formed in between times, when the tuff had consolidated and sprouted some vegetation, being literally washed off the island. The whole of the contents of the caldera, a mud of sea water and tephra, frothed up and over the rim carrying ash and large rocks from the collapse of the magma chamber.
The Name of God
In ancient transliterations of the name into Egyptian hieroglyphics, Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary gives two transliterations that occur in Egyptian glyphs—IA or YA, and IAA or YAA. In ancient transliterations of the name of Yehouah into cuneiform script, which unlike Hebrew script, had written vowels, reads Yahweh. In the Murashu texts, Aramaic texts written in cuneiform script on clay tablets found at Nippur, the first portion of Jewish names recorded there appear as YAHU and never as YEHO. Transliterations of Yehouah also occur in ancient Greek texts where it variously occurs as IA, IAOUE, AWOUEI, IAW, IWE. Greek witnesses agree that Yehouah begins with YA. The pronounciation of Yehouah can be recovered as YAHUWEH sometimes abbreviated as YAHWEH, YAHU or YAH. The origin of the name of God.
Guy Fawkes: Was there a Gunpowder Plot?
Lord Monteagle, dubiously Roman Catholic and a newly created peer about to take his seat in the House of Lords, well known to the conspirators, arrived unexpectedly at his house in Hoxton, where he has not been for a year. While dining in company he received a letter—written by Robert Cecil? Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, was too clever by half. A limping hunchback, he was ambitious, unscrupulous and bitterly anti Catholic. An expert manipulator, while chief Minister of England, he accepted annual bribes from the king of Spain. He knew how to play on men’s weaknesses. The Gunpowder Plot was of personal and political benefit to him—it confirmed his standing with king James I, for he appeared as saver of the king’s life. It discredited the Roman Catholics at home. It checked foreign protests against persecution of Catholicism. A Jesuit historian, Father Francis Edwards, looked at the evidence
Puzzles of History
What acid had the manufacturers of these ancient batteries used? After the War, Willy Ley and Willard Gray of the GE High Voltage Laboratory at Pittsfield, Massachusetts, built models of these ancient cells and found that they indeed did work well as acid cells when such simply available acids as lemon juice, vinegar or copper sulphate solution were used as an electrolyte. The cells produced 1.5 to 2 volts, as would be expected. Questions about strange and anachronistic finds in history
Who Was Kaspar Hauser?
The mystery of Kaspar Hauser solved by Jeffrey Masson. Who was he? Why the pressing need to rid the world of this stranger? Was the reason dynastic? Jeffrey Masson’s theory (Lost Prince: The Unsolved Mystery of Kasper Hauser) is that he was righfully the Prince of Baden, son of the Grand Duke Charles of Baden by his first wife. The wife of the founder of the dynasty shut him away in the dungeon so that her own son could succeed—as he did.
Is the Pope Human? Bayes Theorem and the Prosecutor’s Fallacy
The chances of the datum being due to the hypothesis that the Pope is an alien, P(D|A), must be zero, if there are no aliens or infinitesimally small (1 in 6 billion) if one of the humans is admitted as being an alien. Even if both P(D|A) and P(A) are not zero, they are both very tiny numbers multiplied together. The result therefore is effectively zero, even if the two factors are merely small. If either factor is actually zero, the product is zero. In any of these cases, the probability that the Pope is human approaches closely to 1 (certainty). Juries, justice and probabilities
The Mystery of Prisoner 7: Was he Rudolf Hess?
The captive did not retain any pretence of being Alfred Horn for long, quickly admitting that he was Rudolf Hess come to negotiate a peace with Britain through the auspices of the Duke of Hamilton who was related to the British royal family, and had contacts with the government. Hamilton was, in fact, serving in the RAF. The pilot of the Messerschmidtt was held for four years by the British then produced at Nuremberg to stand trial as Rudolf Hess for his crimes. Found guilty, he ended up in Spandau prison in Berlin where he was Prisoner 7. A wartime mystery, the flight of Rudolf Hess ended up with a prisoner who did not match the original.
SHC: Spontaneous Human Combustion
Various none supernatural explanations have been put forward for supposed SHC, yet according to John DeHaan of Fire-Ex Forensics in Vallejo, California, “some trained fire investigators still believe in it”. Experiments using pigs and even human bodies nail the myth. With cases of SHC found indoors, there is often little sign of fire elsewhere in the room, aside from a greasy residue left on furniture and walls. A misconception is that a human body cannot burn in a confined space without igniting its surroundings or running out of oxygen. Most rooms will have enough oxygen. DeHaan has shown that a fire fuelled solely by body fat typically releases just 40 to 80 kilowatts of heat—no more than a large waste basket fire—which would not necessarily ignite nearby objects.
Vampire: Myth of the 20th Century
Bram Stoker wrote a “serious” tragedy about vampires, and the twentieth century, which demythologises everything, was ready to begin the long process of acceptingand thus defusingthe most powerful subterranean myth of all. By the 1970s and 1980s we got round to really funny films about vampires, not burlesques, which refuse to take the myth seriously, but comedies which accept the myth head on, and still laugh at it. Stoker was the man who brought the myth to the surface of the real literary world and caught the wave, while Polanski’s comic film treatment of vampirism should really be set next to The Life of Brian, a satire on an equally powerful myth, that of Christianity. Essay mainly by R W Johnson on the myth of the vampire.
The English Patient and the Lost Oasis of Zerzura
László Almásy, the real English Patient, has a copy of G C MacCauley’s 1890 translation of Herodotus’s History as a source of information for his exploration of the Libyan desert. He wanted to find the lost oasis of Zerzura! By the early 1930s, only the innermost section of the Libyan desert remained unmapped. Emir Mahmoud had sent parties to find the lost oasis but none ever did. Would Almásy fare any better? In 1932, a young English baron, Sir Robert Clayton joined Almásy’s quest. Using motor cars and a light aircraft to survey the Gilf Kebir plateau, they found two valleys in the plateau from the air but they could not reach them in their Fords to confirm they were wadis of Zerzura. The party eventually ran out of petrol and water and had to return to Cairo.
Frederick Ignatius Baines’ Archive
Archive of the sermons of Frederick Ignatius Baines
Frederick Ignatius Baines’ Archive
Sample from the Archive of the sermons of Frederick Ignatius Baines
The Black Death or Great Pestilence: Was it Bubonic Plague?
A disease spread through Europe from 1347 to 1351. Called at the time the Great Pestilence, Victorians called it the Great Plague and the Black Death. A terrible epidemic, it killed one in three people—25 million. Victims got a fever and boils, swollen lymph nodes, pain and blotches on the skin, finally vomiting blood and dying, all within three days. Bioterrorism has put plague into the spotlight. It is listed by the US Centers for Disease Control as a category A pathogen. It ravaged Europe several times in the past two millennia, such as at the time of the Great Fire of London. Alexandre Yersin, in the late nineteenth century, decided the cause was bubonic plague or Yersinia pestis, a bacterial disease of rodents carried to humans by fleas. But its symptoms and pattern of spread were inconsistent with our experience of plague. Fleas are inactive in winter when many cases of plague occurred.
