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Old 06-20-2007, 02:03 PM   #221
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afdave

Define "advanced knowledge"
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Old 06-20-2007, 04:03 PM   #222
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I award Red Dave the FatherMithras reward of awesome.

That´s all.
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Old 06-20-2007, 05:17 PM   #223
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Originally Posted by FatherMithras View Post
I award Red Dave the FatherMithras reward of awesome.

That´s all.
If nominated, I will not run.

If elected, I will not serve.

However, send the award money to my PayPal account!

RED DAVE
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Old 06-20-2007, 07:21 PM   #224
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Dave,
I asked you this at RD.net yesterday and you have not acknowldged it.

Here it is again at IIDB.
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Dave,
Reread my signature below.

Now, why did it take over 4000 years (Daveyears or Rohlyears, I'm pretty lost on this whole Egyptian accounting thing at the moment) for someone to decipher the Pyramids and discover all the fascinating trigonometric and astrologic knowledge?

It seems kind of sloppy for the builders to hide all this stuff in a pyramid so that the discoverers (19th century Egyptologists wackos) who finally interpret the hidden meaning already have all the knowledge that was hidden in the first place.

What good was that?
Who were these pyramid builders hiding the information for?

That whole Egytology episode was pretty weird. Good sig though....

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And the GP was not a tomb. This is a fanciful theory with no support whatsoever. It was an astronomical observatory and repository of scientific knowledge. And it was very likely NOT built by the Egyptians. - afdave1
And to add to that observation.

What NEW knowledge was gleaned from the Magic Pyramid that was not known before Smythe published his work.
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Old 06-20-2007, 08:20 PM   #225
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Oh boy, here we go again!

First afdave trotted out this "Aryan non-egyptians (Shemites) built the pyramids to store advanced knowledge, because the black Egyptians (Hamites) were too stupid" nonsense over at ATBC, where he got his ass handed to him on a platter. Then he moved his circus over to RD.net, where he repeated the nonsense and got his ass handed to him even worse. When Dave got tired of looking like a fool there for all the questions he couldn't answer, he set off to find a new audience for his bigoted preaching at IIDB.

Sorry Dave, this is the Internet, ya know? Your history will follow you, and you can't erase it.

To the IIDB regulars - be kind to Dave. He's has a rough year, being publicly embarrassed and run off two other boards.

Now where's the 'popcorn' smilie? :grin:
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Old 06-20-2007, 11:11 PM   #226
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This is incredibly fun, watching Dave's antagonists chase him across multiple discussion groups. You can run, Dave, but you can't hide—except on your own blog, where you've blocked comments.
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Old 06-20-2007, 11:52 PM   #227
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Originally Posted by afdave View Post
Failed to mention my Deluge Date above. ~2750BC from the averaged literary sources (from Smyth). With a growth rate of ~2%, the ~600 years from 2750 to 2170BC gives a population of ~1 million ... plenty to build the GP. There is evidence to support this slightly higher than normal population growth rate in the immediate post-Flood world.
Dear me Dave, would you please show us your math for this growth rate?

You see, not that I am an expert in population dynamics or anything, but I do have do deal with them some at work and none of the software I use can give me your numbers with anything close to 2%. Are you using a simple Malthusian exponential growth rate formula? Because, er, that isn't reality. Reality requires inputs of calorie requirements, competition for resources and quite a few other things. And, on top of that, you would need a few data points. Are you claiming that Chinese architecture from the period is not really from the period?
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Old 06-21-2007, 01:01 AM   #228
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.....Hi Dean-- You appear to be very knowledgeable about Petrie's work at the Pyramid so I am curious to hear what you have to say about Davidson's analysis of Petrie's work. As I said earlier, I have no interest in Davidson's prophetic inferences ... only his analysis of Petrie's and Smyth's measurements. I want to know if the GP embodied advanced scientific knowledge or not, and it appears with what I know now that it did indeed. But I am happy to be corrected on this if I can be shown that it is wrong.
Dave, I am sure Dean will deal with this far more effectively than I can, but for the umpteenth time, the pyramid-inch is a fiction, 'found' by Smyth as a piece of the self-fulfilling evidence needed to prove the baggage of pre-formed theories he went to the Great Pyramid determined to establish. You can check out a brief introdution to the history of English measurement (including the inch) here:

http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/custom.html

(BTW, you may be interested to know that the French used to measure in inches. The French word for inch is 'pouce'. Do you know what this means and what it says about the derivation of the word as a measure?)

So Davidson's measurements may agree with Smyth, but so what? No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney. In the diagrams you posted, Davidson's 'New Construction' plan is anyway out-and-out wrong: he assumed the concavity in the core structure would be repeated in the casing, for which assumption there is no evidence whatsoever as what casing remains is quite flat; see:

http://www.catchpenny.org/concave.html
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Old 06-21-2007, 03:11 AM   #229
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Originally Posted by afdave View Post

This diagram is from Davidson, D., The Great Pyramid, 4th ed., London, 1927, Plate XVII.

Hi Dean-- You appear to be very knowledgeable about Petrie's work at the Pyramid so I am curious to hear what you have to say about Davidson's analysis of Petrie's work. As I said earlier, I have no interest in Davidson's prophetic inferences ... only his analysis of Petrie's and Smyth's measurements.
The diagram you have included says nothing about the relevant measurements of Smyth. You brought Smyth's measurements up as support for your mid- 22nd century BCE date for the pyramid's construction. His "evidence" for this is based on alleged symbolism that he claims is inherent in the lengths of the internal passages, and is nothing to do with the external dimensions of the pyramid.

For a detailed discussion of what is wrong with these measurements, I suggest reading this thread, where WILLOWTREE gives the case for Smyth's numerological claims (including that date for the pyramid's construction) and I analyse and refute them.

So even if Davidson's diagram was correct, it would provide no support for Smyth's dating of the pyramid, and therefore no support for your case that there was a 600 year gap between the flood and the building of the pyramid.

Having said that, Davidson's diagram is not correct.

Petrie's methodology is as follows:

1) Take the current corner-to-corner dimensions of the pyramid (8991") as accurate. Ignore the slight concavity of the sides, since this most likely due to a few millenia of slight subsidence.

2) Add on 34" at each side for the width of the casing stones (this width is taken from the few casing stones that still exist).

3) Therefore, the original width of the pyramid (with casing stones) was 9059 (8991 + 2x34) inches.

Davidson's methodology, on the other hand, is:

1) Take Petrie's corner-to-corner measurement as accurate.

2) Assume that the 36" of concavity of the sides is not due to subsidence, but is a deliberate design feature put there by God (as hypothesised by Smyth).

3) Add the 36" of concavity to the 34" thickness of the casing stones to arrive at a value of 70".

4) Add this 70" to the corner-to-corner width of the pyramid, to arrive at a final corner-to-corner measurement of 9131".

5) Multiply this 9131" figure by 4 to arrive at a figure for the perimeter of the pyramid that can then be claimed to have "cosmic significance".

But there is absolutely no justification for this finagling of the numbers. Rather than reconcile Petrie's and Smyth's values, all he is doing is replacing Petrie's values by reproducing Smyth's invalid values starting from the common point of the four corners of the caseless pyramid.

What Davidson is doing is taking the correction needed in order to make the midpoints of the concave sides properly square (as the pyramid would have been when built), but then assumed that the pyramid is concave by design, and added those corrections to the corners of the pyramid.

But - and this is the key issue - the corrections are only there because the pyramid is assumed to have had a square design. If the pyramid is concave by design (as Smyth and Davidson assume) then those corrections do not represent anything and should not be used for anything.

So not only is Davidson applying a correction to something it should not be applied to, he is doing so despite the fact that in his model of the pyramid's design that correction does not exist.

And all this is done in order to artificially inflate the size of the pyramid in order to make the numbers fit Smyth's "cosmic significance".

Davidson has no grounds for fiddling the numbers the way he has, and by doing so he has demonstrated that he is either incompetent at best or fraudulent at worst.

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Davidson's reconstruction is in Fig. A on the left and shows the casing following the hollowed-in effect. This would vindicate Prof. Smyth if true. Is it true or not?
Most decidedly NOT.

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Well ... it seems logical that the casing stones would follow the core, does it not?
Yes, it seems logical. But Davidson is trying to have his cake and eat it, by assuming that the casing follows the core - but also adding the correction needed when one assumes that the core originally followed the casing.

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Davidson makes a case, but it is spread throughout his large volume in various places, so it will take me some time to work through it. One item he offers is that it appears Petrie assumed the casing stones would sit IN the sockets instead of OVER the sockets.
I can't comment on this without more information - but even if this is the case, it would not mean anything in relation to the age of the pyramid.

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Again, I am very open-minded on this and would love to hear your take. Also, I don't know much about LeMesurier. I think he wrote long after Davidson.
Yes, he was. I didn't know when Davidson wrote. However, the calculations used by both are pretty identical - so it looks like LeMesurier used Davidson as a source (as they both used Smyth) rather than the other way around.

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Secondly, I do appreciate the various comments on the Crow paper. I agree that Crow pointed out that modern medicine causes our population to retain more deleterious mutations. However, it seems clear to me that one of his statements ...
Quote:
If war or famine force our descendants to return to a stone-age life they will have to contend with all the problems that their stone-age ancestors had plus mutations that have accumulated in the meantime.
forces the unstated-by-Crow conclusion that our present population has a higher load of accumulated slightly deleterious mutations than our ancestors did. This conclusion is also supported by Crow's talk of the mutation accumulation problem being similar to the "population bomb" but with a much longer fuse. In discussing this paper with a microbiology professor from Ohio, he admitted something to the effect of "the human race is probably headed for mutational meltdown." I could provide the link upon request, but it would be some work.
Yes, this is correct.

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In any case, if I am reading Crow right here, this overall picture from population genetics (corroborated by other geneticists) fits well with many Biblical statements regarding the initial "good" state of mankind, the subsequent Fall and Curse with its attendant death and suffering, the accounts of long-lived ante-diluvian patriarchs, and of the "groaning creation."
This is where you go wrong. Crow is explicitly not saying that our ancestors were healthier and longer lived than us because they had better genes.

He is saying that they acquired the same genetic problems that we do and at the same rate, but they would have suffered and died in ways that we can prevent with modern medicine - which would have (in a rather brutal way) kept those problems in check.

In other words, they were unhealthier than we are, and lived (on average) shorter lives - the very opposite of what the Bible says.

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Hence my inference from these data that the earliest humans--Adam & Eve--were vigorous and healthy--much more so than modern man--and that naturally, without the aid of modern medicine. There is even a tradition in Whiston's notes on Josephus that Adam and Eve had 33 sons and 23 daughters(!) (Whiston's Josephus, p. 32, Footnote C). Biblical statements also cause us to think this health and vigor continued to some extent through the early post-Flood world, at which time recorded lifespans began decreasing.
Your inference is not only completely unsupported, it actively goes against the thing that you are inferring from.

In fact, I would suggest that far from inferring that scenario from the data, you actually believe that scenario purely through faith - and you are trying to impose it onto the data rather than getting it from the data.

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Also ... from your NASA pages I was not able to find the 6-7 degrees you mentioned RE: Alpha Draconis. Do you have a quote?
They do not quote that number directly, but it is the result of a simple calculation based on the numbers that they do quote.

Alpha Draconis was above the pole in approximately 2650-2600 BCE (from their page).

Precession moves us 360 degrees in 25,750 years (also from their page). This means we move approximately 1 degree every 71.66 years (although from our perspective, it appears that the stars move 1 degree every 71.66 years in the opposite direction).

There are about 450-500 years between the date when it was above the pole and your date of 2150 BCE. Moving 1 degree every 71.66 years means that in 450-500 years the star would have appeared to move (450/71.66)-(500/71.66) degrees, or 6.279 - 6.977 degrees.
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Old 06-21-2007, 03:31 AM   #230
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PS to my last post...
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Originally Posted by afdave View Post
......I want to know if the GP embodied advanced scientific knowledge or not, and it appears with what I know now that it did indeed. But I am happy to be corrected on this if I can be shown that it is wrong.........
Dave, I forgot to comment on this, but as you were comprehensively shown at the Flood Debate Commentary thread at richarddawkins.net that it is wrong, you'll forgive me if I don't hold my breath on this one. Please tell me that we don't have to revisit pi-ramidology all over again..... :devil1:
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