fmetrol Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I cannot vision you climbing the ladder to
> overseer. What you have just written is so wrong.



Saying is wrong is different from proving it is wrong. You have chosen the former. No bearing on the discussion.


>
> If you are familiar with Alexander Thom you will
> know the anguish he went through trying to fathom
> out the ingenious feats of our ancestors.


He wasn't "fathoming them out"... he was imagining them and then seeking to superimpose his fanciful fictions onto our ancestors. Completely different story. His first flaw was putting ALL the data from ALL the megalithic sites into ONE pot.

They weren't all built by the same people.

Bogus data set.


> It was
> his instruments that had to be checked for
> accuracy daily not theirs.


Pfft. When you are starting with a conclusion (that the "Megalithic Yard" actually existed) then you can find just about anything. Measurements are not evidence of intent. And maybe the MY was something he "discovered" after looking at all his measurements. So what? This concept that discovering a coincidence somehow proves intent really, really needs to be stomped out. Dry measurements are not evidence of intent beyond the intent to create something of a specific measurement.



> If he swaggered out on
> the moors with a piece of string and a tape
> measure then he would have found exactly what you
> have just been describing ... nothing.


Shame, really. Had he used the tools of the ancestors, he would have been much more likely to find something meaninful. But, what he did find is what is actually there...nothing. Remember, we're talking about what THEY did, not what WE can imagine. The Megalithic Yard is complete hogwash. Hunting for a coincidental measure that fits "a lot" of the data is so methodologically flawed it's not even worth discussing. In fact, I would say that given sufficient points in the data set (and Thom gathered thousands of them) it would be IMPOSSIBLE to not find a common unit that fit a majority of the points.

And for the record... his "calibrated daily accurate" instruments were sometimes off by as much as a FOOT!

Quote

Analysis of Thom's data has raised numerous questions regarding his approach, and professional archaeologists treat his ideas with scepticism. Thom's measurements of some circles have been found to be up to 0.3m out and for other broken or sub-circular monuments he studied, the precise diameter is open to question. Local variations have been identified in measurement data from different parts of the British Isles suggesting that there was no centrally decreed 'yard,' and it has been argued that body measurements such as the cubit would have been more likely to have been used.

Anthropological studies of modern stone-using tribes suggest that Neolithic Britons would not have had a numbering system complex enough to create advanced geometric forms using such surveying techniques and that elliptical enclosures are the results of attempts to mark out circles by eye or to align a long axis on astronomical features.[citation needed]

The lack of any serious corroborating evidence from continental Europe should also be mentioned, as well as the fact that some similarities of the sizes of structures may have been a result of similarities of function.

Until such a time as a Neolithic measuring rod is excavated, the theory remains unproved.

[en.wikipedia.org]

>
> If ever anyone has cautioned us correctly on the
> way measure can be laid down, or rather how it
> cannot be laid down, it was he.

So what? He was still wrong about his grand conclusion.


> It has nothing to
> do with measuring rods, in fact it was too good
> for measuring rods.


Oh please. Offer an evidenced theory to the contrary, or let it go as the coincidence it clearly is.



>
> No ... not laser beams or reflective devises, just
> what was always available to them.



Irrelevant. You are selecting bits and bobs of accidentally accurate measurements and pretending the ancient engineers could tell the difference...and that they then ENCODED the errors to mean something even more "meaningful".

Nope. Didn't happen.

When you have a range of measurements you will find things that are spot on exact. The fact is, they probably thought ALL of the measurements were "exact". The range is nothing but the collective group of errors... sometimes multiplied by themselves because they are cumulative. This leads to artifactual patterns that people like Thom later interpret as "intentional" and the result of "a new and surprisingly exact metrology". It's nothing of the sort.

If you actually do a statistical analysis of the number of POSSIBLE data points, you'll probably find the Megalithic Yard (or the Giza Metrology) is nothing but a statistically predictable event. In fact, this analysis was done for the Megalithic Yard, by Kendall and Broadbent. They said it was a one in a hundred shot that it was a coincidence.

But then again, they were using accuracy claims that weren't really accurately reported, were they?

And come on... seriously... the MY is the average height of a man. The half-yard is the average length of a man's forearm. Look at the range of error on these measurements, and you'll probably find the range of men's arms.

And, in a few sites, some of them are "exact". Once again, it's a range. Some of them MUST be exact. It proves nothing, though, about the abilities of the ancient lithic peoples to accurately measure distances.


But maybe THIS is the part you find most intriguing, with regard to Egypt?

Quote

Ancient Egyptians
Knight and Butler also put forward a connection between the Ancient Egyptian measurement of the royal cubit and the megalithic yard. A circle with diameter of one half royal cubit will have a circumference equal to 1 MY.

Suddenly, Pi becomes a mandate. The pyramids at Giza and Meidum become "significant" because they "encode" 22/7.

Sorry. Still meaningless conicidence.




>
> I seem to recall we discussed this before.


You may be right. I don't pay attention to who writes the post as much as I do to what is being claimed.


It's kind of like Peer Review in that way...lol.


Anthony

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him think.