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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | Could you check, comment etc? |
I'll try to have another look into it over the next few days, but when I first looked it seemed that pretty much all the evidence for magnetic reversals comes from research done in Hawaii on volcanic rocks. I don't think there's much evidence at all for it happening universally across the globe. I'm not even sure anyone's bothering to look.
I could be wrong though.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I'm not even sure anyone's bothering to look. |
This would be the most interesting possible result. Since measuring the orientation of the magnetism would be absolute and overwhelming proof of Continental Drift in general, and the exact whereabouts of the current plate boundaries in particular, this is a Holy Grail.
There is only one reason you stop bothering to look for the Holy Grail and it's not, as you might think, because you no longer believe in it. It's because the search itself is revealing the fact that nobody should believe in it. Which will never do if you're a professional Grail Hunter.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| N R Scott wrote: | | This is impressively logical! I might leave some comments under some of these videos pointing this out ..though I'll feel a little bad given how much they seem to have invested in the idea. |
I wrote a long post about it yesterday but it got MULCHED by the Internet as I went to post it!
I agree with you. They will not want to accept the truth.
Plumbing also explains why the cities of the time appear so deserted. They were. Its modern sewage systems that made the high-rise apartment complex possible.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| N R Scott wrote: | | How certain are you that any of the poles actually shift |
100%!
| (or even that the poles exist in the way we currently understand them) ? |
That's a different question.
I've got this notion that there were essentially two polar axis. How that works is proprietary at this time :-)
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N R Scott
In: Middlesbrough
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From what I can tell it seems that the reversed magnetised rocks are always just reversed in reference to the other rock layers they're found alongside. Given that rocks can reverse magnetism while cooling I would guess that all the reversals are just due to differences in the circumstances of the way they've cooled, and/or the chemical make-up of the particular layer.
Personally I'm doubtful that there's an overall pattern, other than the fact that rocks tend to magnetise in line with how the surrounding geography is magnetised. It's hard to find specific examples of people measuring the magnetism of a rock in reference to its place on the earth though. It seems hard to find real world examples, and when there are examples it seems like pretty much anything goes.
I found this reply to a question about the poles on one webpage;
..your question is relevant to what actually happened around 1952-5. By that time it was generally accepted that the Earth's magnetic polarity sometimes reversed. Geophysicists then examined ancient lavas and found their magnetization sometimes pointed at a considerable angle to the north-south direction. The interpretation was that the magnetic poles were not always close to the rotation poles (as they are now), but wandered all over the Earth.
That interpretation ran into trouble when the polarity deduced from different continents for the same period seemed to disagree. The solution came only around 1963-7, when it was realized that continents and their components "drifted" around the globe, due to "plate tectonics"--so that India, for instance, was once an island south of the equator. Thus if the magnetic direction on some continent deviated from north-south, most of the effect came from a rotation, not of the magnetic axis but of the continent itself. |
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/magnQ&A6.htm#q94
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This is hilarious. In 1952-3 Continental Drift was considered utterly fruitloop by every single academic Earth Scientist. Therefore the poles had to have shifted. By 1963-7 (or shortly thereafter) Continental Drift was accepted as self-evidently true by every academic Earth Scientist. (Not to believe it was considered fruitloop.) So it had to have been the rocks that shifted.
Now they have discovered that neither of their paradigms are supported by the magnetic evidence they have decided .... wait for it ... not to bother with magnetic evidence. If any academic Earth Scientist asked for funds to carry out a proper survey he would be thought a fruitloop. Not because anyone is particularly opposed to 'more research is needed' but because everyone knows it's the road to professional suicide. Say, like a historian asking for funds to search for the Holy Grail.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Did the Justinian plague really take place and if not, who invented it?
The source is Procopius, a Greek-Byzantine historian, who wrote a description of the plague though his account has been shown to be modelled on that of another Greek historian, Thucydides, aka "the father of scientific history", writing a millenium earlier.
Not much is known about 'Procopius' apart from a pseudo-sounding tenth-century compendium
| Apart from his own writings, the main source for Procopius' life is an entry in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopaedia, written sometime after 975, which tells everything about his early life. |
This Suda enclopedia, as Wiki reveals, has an account of a plague event that occurred four hundred years ago. It comes as no surprise then that its 'ancient sources' are anonymous/lost
| It is an encyclopedic lexicon, written in Greek, with 30,000 entries, many drawing from ancient sources that have since been lost, and often derived from medieval Christian compilers. The derivation is probably[2] from the Byzantine Greek word souda, meaning "fortress" or "stronghold", with the alternate name, Suidas, stemming from an error made by Eustathius, who mistook the title for the author's name. .... Much of the work is probably interpolated,[3] and passages that refer to Michael Psellos (c. 1017-78) are deemed interpolations which were added in later copies |
Whatever the derivation, the term Justinian plague is something of a misnomer since orthodox history claims it lasted, on and off, for two hundred years, the sixth to the eighth century or middle period of the Dark Age.
Anyway, the effects of the Justinian plage are said to have been so widespread that it even killed people in Anglo-Saxon Britain. Not that there's any British record, even four hundred years later, but that can be explained by illiteracy with the Romans safely out of the way
| Saxon sources from this period are silent, as there are no 6th-century English documents | |
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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Some 'selected entries' from the Suda encyclopaedia were translated into Latin by none other than Robert Grosseteste, 12th century philolospher-scientist and Bishop of Lincoln. His most famous follower was Roger Bacon.
The (modern) translators say
| he wanted to make the Suda available and comprehensible to his contemporaries, so he annotated and glossed his translations. |
They also acknowledge his was the first translation from the Greek.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Much of the work is probably interpolated,[3] and passages that refer to Michael Psellos (c. 1017-78) are deemed interpolations which were added in later copies |
Ding-a-ling-a-ling. If they had the original they would know they were interpolations. So we know they haven't got the original. If they had a pre-Michael Psellos copy we would know they were interpolations in that copy. So we know we haven't got a decent Procopius reference earlier than, say, 1100 AD. Procopius is acknowledged to be our chief source for a whole bunch of 'early medieval' European history.
I am not saying that early Medieval European history is a Norman era invention but I am saying that we have no contemporaneous or near-contemporaneous record of any plague in Justinian's time. If historians would only abide by their own rules we might start making some headway.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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We often inveigh here about folk memory and place name theory and other dubious aids that historians turn to when the contemporaneous written record is not available (or has been made up) but it's not just our history that can be made to read any which way you/they like it. Here's an engrossing account of a Thai experience from a painfully honest chap trying to get it right. I should mention, since it's relevant, that I only came across it serendipitously because I've got a Google Alert out for mentions of 'Unreliable History' for my own book's purposes.
http://www.newmandala.org/unreliable-histories/
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I suppose I had better inveigh against this wretched Britain's Viking Graveyard (Channel 4) since they're all going on about it over on the Twittersphere. Just to kick the matter off, the title is grotesquely misleading since 'Vikings' never got anywhere near the middle of Mercia. This is the Danish army they're talking about but you'd never get it commissioned, never mind shown, if it was called 'Britain's Danish Graveyard'. Like the one behind Clement Danes church in London. Who knows, maybe they'll discover that one one day. It's in the A-Z.
| Evidence of their occupation has all but disappeared |
The Vikings never occupied anywhere and clearly the Danes didn't make much of a footprint. But he doesn't really mean it, there's a whole industry up in that there Jorvik.
| For forty years a vicarage garden in a sleepy Derbyshire village has harboured an extraordinary archaeological mystery |
There's a few keywords to look out for here. Sleepy and harboured are sheer hocus pocus. All villages are sleepy and they all have archaeology. The rest translates as 'Forty years and they still haven't got a clue because the paradigm is wrong.' But note that vicarage, it's not just any garden. More when my bile returns to normal levels.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The blessed Mark Horton describes what started all this, forty years ago, when he were nobbut, and they found a mound nearby
| It was a mass grave consisting of at least 264 individuals |
Well, given that it's under a mound near, but a bit away from, the local church, my guess would be that these are people removed from the church graveyard and re-buried elsewhere. Something which is entirely routine because church graveyards are a) small b) in constant demand for current burials so c) subject to the normal practice of removing former inhabitants and placing them (reverently) in a mass grave a bit away from the churchyard itself. But, look, I am writing this in real time so I might be wrong.
| But we made one fabulous discovery after another. |
OK, it looks as though I was wrong.
| Intriguingly many of these people bore battle scars. Who were these people? |
Well, they can't be people killed in battle and buried afterwards in a mass grave, can they? Why not? Because every single one of them would bear the scars of battle, wouldn't they? You don't die on a battlefield from natural causes and you don't get buried afterwards in a mass grave unless you've just died on the battlefield. I'll be back after I find out how Mark and his minions account for this massive but as yet unacknowledged anomaly.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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The Viking programme is worth watching if only to witness the lead archaeologist bedazzled by some Viking artefacts found in a field. She was assured by the shifty-looking metal detectorist they'd all been 'in the same field' a short distance away from Repton (she suddenly decided that the place-name, Foremark, was Viking, a clue that had previously been overlooked). One of the artefacts was a seemingly exact replica of the Thor hammer that had been found in a Repton warrior grave, to the archaeologist's delight. I've never before felt embarrassed on behalf of archaeologists.
So the team started digging in another field, one that hadn't ever been ploughed up, hoping to find more artefacts. They found an iron ploughshare which was too early for their requirements but then they found a lead gaming piece which they immediately claimed was a smoking gun. Apparently one gaming piece = a Great Heathen Army in archaeological terms.
In the 1980s the archaeologists had been unable to verify the Repton burials were Viking because of the variations in date but now they've got round this obstacle by declaring the rate of decay is slower in people who eat a lot of fish. They don't say if this theory has been blind tested. Or maybe it only applies to Viking burials.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I hope you haven't stolen too much of my thunder, I have to watch two Baggage Wars a day as well as keeping up with archaeological programmes. And write the current book. But it does occur to me that if these people are entitled to an hour on Channel 4 we are surely entitled to one of those five minute Right-to Reply slots they used to have at the end of Channel 4 News. In fact, better still, why don't we buy up the commercial breaks in the programme itself? "The claim you have just heard is complete and utter etc etc."
I believe I have just invented not only a whole new genre of programming but a brand new income stream. Instead of stealing my thunder, Hatty, you might want to attend to this as part of your assigned administrative duties.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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He says the two "chieftan bodies", i.e. the ones commanding the "soldiers" buried under mound lie under "this great Saxon building", indicating presumably today's Repton parish church. If so this would be the only great Saxon building in the world as far as I know (Hatty?). However, since the bodies were buried alongside the wall of the church, the church must have been built before the bodies were buried. This is going to raise a lot of problems if they do turn out to be of 'Viking' age. I watch on.
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