My 21st birthday. I was broke, so I did not organise anything.
My friends organised a trip to Ngoma Kurira - a large granite dome outside Harare, Zimbabwe. At sunset - a glorious one - we were lucky to see two different cumulo nimbus thunderclouds at slightly different altitudes, one raining into the other, with the sun setting behind them.
Absolutely unbeatable sunset.
Fabulous! Never in life have I seen that phenomenon.
Angel pubes.
(I know, it’s FQ, but we’re 42 posts in)
As an aside, this thread reminded me of when I was a very little kid, and the adults in my life told me that the sound of thunder during a storm was 'God and the angels bowling up in Heaven". I would actually picture a huge lane on a cloud top, with giant, white robed, winged deities hurling bowling balls and knocking down enormous pins.
Clouds are water droplets. But what keeps them up there?
I seem to recall reading that any cloud you see is actually falling slowly, with the droplets often evaporating before they get to the ground, because the lower air is warmer. Does anyone know if this is right?
Pretty much right. The water droplets start small enough to stay buoyant in air. Not that they’re less dense than air, but they’re small and light enough to go with the flow of whatever air currents are around. Just a few water molecules condensing on some nucleating particle, such as a very fine piece of dust. But as it moves around, more water condenses, it gets larger. At some point, it gets too large to stay buoyant and starts to fall. When it gets to the bottom of the cloud, it may evaporate depending on conditions (temperature and relative humidity). If it doesn’t, it’ll keep falling, likely combining with other droplets. Thus you get rain.
The condensation is often not as liquid water, but as ice. And often the ice has a better lifting shape than a drop of liquid water.
When my parents had to travel – which didn’t happen often – they always took the train. The first time they had to fly – in their old age and because there was no other practical way to visit my brother way over in California – I was with them and had my dad sit by the window seat so he could see the view. Part of the trip was above overcast skies and he was convinced he was seeing snow (this was in Canadian winter, so not an entirely unreasonable assumption). I had to explain that no, those were clouds, and they were far below us!
The other point here is that humans had a lot less diversions and a lot more time to observe (and think about) nature. How many today can identify more than a few constellations, or find the pole star? People 4,000-plus years ago noticed tracked and named the visible planets.
As far as clouds - anyone who observed boiling water, fog, mist on a cold night on a pond or meadow, breath on a cold day, etc. - would see the connection that water could turn into a visible vapourous form. That rain came from clouds, fog lifted to become low clouds, etc. all provided evidence.
Today we learn what clouds are from grade school science, and mistakenly assume before those textbooks came along, people did not know things.
(For example - the Greeks measured the diameter of the earth - fairly accurately. Herodotus remarked on the Egyptians’ calculations of how fast silt deposits grew in Egypt. Egyptians knew geomtery well enough to resurvey fields after floods covered them in silt, and could lay out the base of pyramids properly oriented to the north; the Romans made cement, built aqueducts that ran for miles (including siphons), they traded with China over the silk road, and by ocean to India. They built roads that ran straight as an arrow for dozens of miles and are still solid today.
Even “primitive” nomadic folk had a long history of observation and knowledge of the world around them, passed down from generation to generation.
We seriously underestimate what acncient folk could do.)
Stone Age tribes, living in the same place for twenty thousand years, knew about their world to a depth and detail we would find unfathomable. They were not the stupid ignorant children that moderns, flattering themselves, imagine.
And the people who created those cave paintings 30,000 years ago were as much geniuses as the greatest modern painters, maybe even more so, because they were pioneers.
I saw a cartoon How it all started… where a caveman is standing back admiring his cave painting of animals being hunted and his wife is adminishing him, “Do you have to keep posting pictures of your meals up on your wall?”
I don’t see why it would be unfathomable–just different from what we know.
A Stone Age tribesman knew tens of thousands of facts: the name of every single plant they used , when it blooms, when to harvest it and how to prepare it for eating, what its seeds looked like, which other animals would be found near that type of plant, what the tracks and shit-droppings of those animals looked like, etc, etc.
Now,: compare with us modern folk:
even an illiterate hillbilly knows a lot of the same stuff as the cave man mentioned above knew, plus a lot more–
thousands of food items on the shelf at the supermarket, how to prepare them, what the price is for each one:
he can identify hundreds of tools, a thousand parts of an engine, hundreds of different types and sizes of screws, and what each is used for.
.
even weirder to me is that those early thinkers imagined 4 simple elements as the basis of the whole world, -but one of them --earth-- is clearly NOT a simple element. Earth is obviously not simple, but a combination of other stuff–sand, clay, mud, pebbles, dead roots,
So if you had a .scientific mind , like Aristotle, how could you not notice that there’s something wrong with your theory of only 4 elelements.?
This is not at all true.
Most of those thousands of food items on that supermarket shelf are made from (aside from synthetic additives) a handful of ingredients. Any cave man could stroll around and open something and eat it.
Put a typical suburban commuter in a wilderness and they would die. Quickly. Nor could they create any of those supermarket items, since they would have to know how to breed wheat, as just one example of what those “simple” ancestors of ours figured out how to do.
Also, you seem to misunderstand the concept of the four elements.
I stand by my premise that we are the degenerate offspring of a once-brilliant species who lived cleverly and sustainably for hundreds of thousands of years, up until now. Now we think we know everything, which makes us fatally stupid.
I would argue neither a lot more or a lot less. The average person probably has had a consistent amount of information held across time. What the information is has changed, even in shortish time periods.
I couldn’t cite the study but remember this from not long after the internet became big, comparing generations of students.
Older students listened to the lecture and remembered more bits of information from it; younger ones remembered more where to access it.
We have vast resources of data off loaded and available at a moment’s notice so we we spend less effort remembering them. We remember less. But more effort on how to manage all the information that is available.
I studied EE in the late 80s/early 90s, so shortly before the WWW, and already one of our profs had the mantra “You don’t have to know everything, but you must know where to look it up”.
I agree with this, except that, as individuals, we are far, far weaker and more helpless than our ancestors. All it takes is the grid going down and we’re like chicks without a hen.
The grid is much more fragile than people want to believe.
I’ll also point out that the way our ancestors survived is by being a tight group of often related individuals who worked together, with a collective repository of survival knowledge embodied in the elders. We have none of that, although I am confident that given necessity we could find it again.
Moderns tend to point to “civilizations” ie cities and empires which are relatable to our own. Empires destroyed, arguably more than they ever invented or created. They destroy ecosytems, cultures; most of the humans living under them are powerless cogs. As today.
Illustrating the improved skill at finding what I could barely remember
No question. Our meta-organism, civilization, is very powerful. But we have become akin to individual cells in that organism, dependent on the whole. No self sufficient protozoans we! We need whole tissues of specialists to survive.
Factual questions and all - let’s get this out there regarding STEAM.
High-pressure steam is invisible. What you see as “steam” in everyday situations is actually water vapor that has cooled and condensed into visible droplets. Superheated steam, which is steam at temperatures above its boiling point at a given pressure, is also invisible. Steam, superheated or high pressure, is deadly because it is invisible. 600 psi at 800 degrees F in a boiler/turbine room will end your day or disable you painfully for a long time.
Adding that the line decades past in med school was similar to that EE bit. You don’t have to know everything, but you need to know both when you don’t know and who is the person to call who will. Or something like that. I can’t remember. Who should I call?