I saw that in a book all the way back in elementary school. I remember using the idea just once, and forgetting about for close to 60 years until reading your post.
I use the jigidi site to work jigsaw puzzle from user-supplied images. One recent image was a fox standing on its hind legs to eat a bunch of cherries. I think foxes like fruit.
Anatolia aka Asia Minor was Greek for millennia. The virtually total replacement of the previously existing civilization there by Islamic Turks is a reworking second only to the replacement of native Americans by Anglos.
interesting fact: many birds when walking do the “chicken walk”, that bobbing head thing …
the reason for this is that the bird’s brain does not have enough bandwidth to process “movies”, just barely enough to process “photos”. that’s why they have the bobbing head thing going, wich is really a thing where the head stays stationary for as long as possible, while the remaining birds walks continously, thusly allowing to take a “sharp (as in unblurred) photo”.
So, in a way, the chicken walks “analogue”, whereas the head moves “digital” (or integer )
When I read that post I remembered Umberto Eco, who in one of his books (probabaly Foucault’s Pendulum, but I could not find the precise quote yet) takes the piss of those numerology boffin’s infatuation with the measures of the great pyramid by getting a lot of nature’s contants and historical data and other seamingly significant stuff from the measures of Italy’s newspaper stands, which have (had?) a distinct shape and size. He took the length, the hight, the size of the front opening, the slope of the roof and so on and by juggling with the numbers he could get the precise date of the battle of Waterloo and the number pi to a lot of decimals to last week’s winning lottery numbers.
When you put those numbers in units that did not exist at the time of the pyramids, like cm, inches, feet, seconds or whatever the meaning is as Lumpy wrote: exactly zero.
Of course I cannot find the quote again, but I remember it quite distinctly, perhaps someone else has read the book I mean and remembers better than me. It was funny.
It is a charming language, and really easy to learn the basics. Aside from “orang utan,” I like “people” - “orang orang” and “ducks”, the beautifully onomatopoeic “bebek bebek”. “Jalan” means a way, or a direction or a street, “jalan jalan” means “to go” in the direction or on the street.
Just never eat “ikan mas”, translated as “gold fish”, a type of bream, similar to khoi. Unless you are brave: typically these fish live in ponds below the small-scale family farm lavatory.
Apparently formal Bahasa Indonesia is mind bogglingly complex, but the conversational language is easy - it took me just a couple of days to be able to converse and haggle in markets.
I read about the Heron’s skill at fishing. Placing itself with the sun behind it, stepping in shadowed areas of water. Something about swaying as it moved, might have been mimicking plant motion to avoid detection.
Greenland has the northernmost spot of dirt/rock in the world, which is about 430 miles (statute) from the north pole. Canada (Ellesmere Island) is a close second, losing by around 40 miles. Russia’s northernmost island is over 100 miles farther south.
Yes, what’s amazing to me is some of these guys had way, way too much time on their hands. They spend quite a while trying to determine what the standard of measurement the pyramid builders used, which is sort of interesting. But then, they go on to all sorts of fanciful conjecture, claiming the dimensions and angles of the various internal features reveal the circumference of the earth, the weight or mass of the earth, the exact distance of the earth from the sun.
If you want to compare the size of a pyramid (which you know in pyramid inches) to the circumference of the Earth (which you know in kilometers), you’re gonna have to convert one number into the same units as the other. I didn’t check all their numbers, but the conversion from British Inches to cm appears to be accurate for the time (with one added digit of precision).
I don’t think there’s any great cosmic significance to the size of the pyramids, but converting from one unit to another isn’t something they pulled out of thin air.