By the way, the RAF actually used pink paint for camouflage, at least on the Supermarine Spitfire, look here , here, and here.
However the polka dots didn´t make it; what a shame.
and of course if this were true, there could right now be ridiculously inconceivable alien ships right in fornt of our eyes that we aren’t seeing because of that mental framework issue.
This is from Conquest, a book about the conquest of the Aztecs (or Mexica, as the book more accurately calls them) by Cortes. I do not believe this some sort of linguistic trick. They perhaps may not have believed it was an actual mountain, but they surely did not think it was a boat, or they would have reported that to Montezuma, which they did not. In fact, Montezuma had some artists go back to the coast and draw pictures of this object, since neither he nor anyone else really understood what it was.
Uh, GorillaMan, grienspace’s joke was not that “No native American could see the ships”. It was that “Millions of native Americans couldn’t see them”. Which is true, since there are millions of native Americans who were too far away. The ones right on the beaches, on the other hand…
daffyduck writes:
> Millions of Native Americans couldn’t see Columbus’s ships because Columbus
> was in the Caribbean and, necessarily, on or near the ocean. I’ll bet those ships
> were mighty small when trying to see them from the Ohio valley.
But they did see him. And they were very impressed by his ships. That’s why they named a city after him.
Boo! What a terrible joke!
…and you beat me to it!
I’ve seen the movie (I was bored and there was free food). The claim had nothing to do with racism; it was simply a (bogus) story attempting to describe the producers’ idea that people—of any ethnicity—have great difficulty even perceiving things that do not fall within their notions of how things are. In my opinion, the story was probably used because 1) the story includes a wise man capable of seeing more than the average person, which is more or less how the narrators try to present themselves, and 2) it’s not something the average viewer will be able to verify or debunk.
In any case, this is hardly the only screwy idea presented as fact in the movie. Others include:
[ul]
[li]Quantum physics indicates that thought affects reality on a macroscopic scale.[/li][li]A large group engaging in “transcendental meditation” was able to reduce crime in Washington, DC, by 25% in the summer of 1993.[/li][li]Thoughts and emotions affect the physical properties of water.[/li][/ul]I know there was more, but damned if I can remember it. Suffice it to say that the movie plays fast and loose with facts.
Finally, someone who can describe the movie scene in context, and not just reflexively throw race cards around. Thank you, Catalyst!
From what you’ve said, it sounds like the movie producers believe in Jedi mind powers or something like that.
This claim has been made. Masaru Emoto in his book: The Hidden Messages in Water
I suspect somebody was reading “Life, the Universe, and everything” by Douglas Adams. In particular, the SEP field, or Somebody else’s problem field. For those not familar with the book, an SEP field, applied to even the most incredible object, makes it “Someone else’s problem” and thus the mind fails to percieve it.
So obviously, Columbus must have had access to the same technology 
Aliens have advanced camoflage technology that makes photographs of their craft come out looking exactly like clumsy fakes.
Yes, but I would guess that WWI subs didn’t have split prism rangefinders or they wouldn’t have bothered with the dazzle camo.
Two points about dazzle camoflage: first, it can be seen first-hand in London on HMS Belfast (I’d never clocked that this was what it was before…or maybe I’d just never seen the ship 
). Secondly, some of the designs look to my unknowing eye as if they’re designed to make it harder to identify & target the ships from aircraft rather than from subs. Any ideas?
I’ve seen the movie, too, and just wanted to point out that Emoto’s work is shown in the movie to bring up the idea that thoughts can affect water.
I didn’t see the movie and have only leafed through Emoto’s book at Borders. So I can’t really speak to what he was saying, the claim rang a bell in my dim memory.
I haven’t seen the movie and have only leafed through Emoto’s book in Border’s, so I can’t really speak to what the book says, but it rang a bell in my dim memory.
I can’t speak to the linguistics, but I can identify where the story derives from: the Cronica mexicana of Hernando Alvarado de Tezozomoc, written c.1600. (Using different conventions, some scholars refer to him as Fernando.) He wasn’t an eyewitness to the conquest, but he was descended from Mexica aristocracy and is usually regarded as invaluably giving one of the relatively few versions of events from their side.
In the translation from The Broken Spears (1959; rev.ed, 1992, Beacon), edited by Miguel Leon-Portillo:
A group is then sent to confirm this; they report back that “they had seen two towers or small mountains floating on the waves of the sea.” Further parties then actually make peaceful overtures to the Spaniards and are received by them.
In general, the translations in The Broken Spears are intended to be readable rather than literal, so caution is in order. There is a more scholarly and recent edition of Tezozomoc in Spanish, but I haven’t seen it.
Note that the only manuscript version of the chronicle is in Spanish. Whether it’s more plausible that Tezozomoc wrote in Spanish or whether this was a translation from Nahuatl - he also wrote a Cronica mexicayotl, covering earlier Mexica history, in that - I don’t know.
Not only do they say that thoughts can affect water (citing Mr. Emoto’s photos as evidence), they go so far as to imply that, since humans are largely composed of water, humans can also be affected by thoughts (as in, thoughts not actually expressed to the person supposedly being affected).
::Waves hand:: “This is not the enlightenment you’re looking for.”
In any case, the New Spain chronicle does indicate that the Mexicas DID see there were a number of large objects in the water, they just had trouble at first figuring out exactly what they were until they were able to get a close enough look. And their second group of observers started entertaining the idea of these being manmade objects (“two towers”). So the parable is clearly bogus at least for the Mexicas. And I would not be surprised if the Taino and Carib who met Columbus probably had a similar sequence of iterations as to what was that, but obviously could see a large object there.
(and BTW, nice of Moctezuma to tell the guy “he could rest now” after the guy decides of his own initiative to haul it all the way up to Mexico to give a report to the High Chief, after having had his ears and toes cut off…)
So this is like the Handbook for the Recently Deceased: Most People will not see ghosts because they refuse to see the strange and unusual.