I have no trouble believing that, in fact FinnAgain started a related debate…
One of his cites contained the following anecdote:
**"The anthropologist Colin Turnbull described what happened in the former Congo in the 1950s when a BaMbuti pygmy, used in living in the dense Ituri forest (which had only small clearings), went with him to the plains:
And then he saw the buffalo, still grazing lazily several miles away, far down below. He turned to me and said, ‘What insects are those?’
At first I hardly understood, then I realized that in the forest vision is so limited that there is no great need to make an automatic allowance for distance when judging size. Out here in the plains, Kenge was looking for the first time over apparently unending miles of unfamiliar grasslands, with not a tree worth the name to give him any basis for comparison…
When I told Kenge that the insects were buffalo, he roared with laughter and told me not to tell such stupid lies. (Turnbull 1963, 217)
Because Kenge had no experience of seeing distant objects he saw them simply as small.**
What’s actually worse is that his hospitality to the poor bloke seems to have been slightly ambiguous at best: the bit I didn’t type in is that he then turns to an official and issues the instruction “Take him to the prison, and guard him well.”
This talk about misidentifyuing ships reminds me of Frederick J. Pohl’s claims in his book Prince Henry Sinclar: His Voyage to the New World in 1398, in which he claims that the legends of Glooskap were inspired by Henry Sinclair’s visit, and that the island he built, with trees on it and sailed away on was really a European-style ship. This site gives the story (although Pohl’s book is the source):
Of course, despite the appeal of the idea, it’s highly questionable that Sinclair actually did make the voyage. But, even if he did, Glooskap was the Micmac cultural hero, and I kinda doubt he’d be inspired by a European. It smacks of Eurocentrism to believe that to be so.
There seem to be a lot of people alive today, in our own “Western” culture, who have such strong preconceptions that they are blind to certain facts of reality that seem “obvious” to other people. In quite a few religious or political discussions, how many times have you wanted to grab someone’s head, point it to a fact, and yell “Look, dammit!”?
But I’ve gotta admit, the Native American “syndrome” seems a wee bit farfetched.
The dazzle cammo on ships work on the same princepal as a zebra’s stripes.
Remember the ships that the subs are hunting are running in a convoy like a herd of animals. The cammo breaks up the continuity of a single ship and it is hard for the eye to focus on just one. To get the range and bearing and speed of the target the WWII sub camander had to watch the ships and try to take measure. The dazzle cammo made that harder.
That movie is wacked.
But then again it might explain why nobody has ever seen me having sex.
True, that, and it shows up in physics, too. Show a five-year-old a mirror, and he’ll instantly recognize that the images in it are three-dimensional and behind the mirror. Show an 18-year-old, and more often than not, he’ll insist that the images are flat and confined to the surface, despite what his eyes are seeing, because he can’t conceive of a two-dimensional object producing a three-dimensional image.
If that’s true, how come everytime I turn on Fox News, they’re talking about Micheal Jackson? He’s the defination of “Strange and Unusual”.
Why did the News Networks have people camped outside Martha Stewarts house looking through her kitchen window while she was making coffee? That kind of attention is bizarre.
Bunk. See MacOS, OS/2, Linux, all or most remotely successful incarnations of Unix, BSD, BeOS, all/most incarnations of DOS, and every other non-Microsoft OS that’s ever been vaguely commercially viable. What’s strange about 2000/XP is not that it’s a crash-free OS, but rather that it’s a relatively crash-free Microsoft OS. As usual, Microsoft broke away from standards and got you to believe that theirs was the standard all along.
To address this specifically, it was completely made up. I just checked the account of Columbus’ landfall as it is described in Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Columbus landed in small boats on October 12, and by the 13th at the latest the Taino were going out to his ships in canoes and coming on board to trade enthusiastically. There is not the slightest hint in Columbus’ account that the Taino had any difficulty in recognizing his ships, either at his first landfall or later on - and of course the Taino left no account of their own.
M’am, if you would please accompany the Escort Team to the awaiting vehicle, this will all be straightened out in the next 60 to 90 minutes. No, M’am, you needn’t bring any I.D. or worry about shoes.
> You racist pig! They’re called First Peoples, not Native Americans! Shame!
My impression is that “First Peoples” is the standard Canadian expression now and “Native Americans” is the standard American term now. But, of course, that’s irrelevant to this discussion, since this encounter happened in the Caribbean. What’s the standard term now for the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean?
Indians/indios, if anything. There is little need for a modern “politically sensitive” term (if I may call it that), since the original inhabitants of the Caribbean were wiped out very quickly. The Taino are long gone, and the few remaining Caribs and others are mostly very intermixed with European and African blood.
I haven’t seen the movie in question, but I think I remember reading this claim in Candace Pert’s book Molecules of Emotion. It sounded like a load of crap to me; that book was good at first, quite informative and interesting, describing how she discovered the opiate receptor and moving on to some neurology, but then it seemed to take a bizarre New Age turn. I wonder if Ms. Pert was the source for the claim in the movie being discussed.
But if he ever said the phrase “Eat your heart out” you knew you were in trouble…