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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if you look hard enough...

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The Ancient Aliens discovered the same laws of engineering:

5. (Miller's Law) Three points determine a curve.

6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker.

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

Speaking of Ancient Aliens - I did have also read a book by Erich von Däniken when I was younger (9 or so) although I had realised that was nonsense by my stage of hunting maps for alignments it probably influenced me to think about it.

I used to read his books as exercises in critical analysis—how does he get from the data to these conclusions, and what does he ignore that doesn't fit his conclusions? Then I discovered that, as stated by Carl Sagan, von Däniken also relies on factual errors in his arguments.

Assume pi is 1

I yell Akin's laws to any new coworker like a drill sargent.

I studied art history, and this always bothered me when learning about Christian symbolism. When reading about numbers related to cathedrals, such as the number of statues on a ledge or the number of archivolts (the bands around doors), so much emphasis was put on the meaning of these particular numbers by whoever authored the piece. Three related to the Holy Trinity, four represented the four Gospels, five alluded to the number of wounds Christ received, seven related to the days of creation, sins, or virtues - and don't even get me started on twelve.

In fact, as an architect of a cathedral, you pretty much had to make 22 or more of anything to avoid having a meaning ascribed.

One Christmas homily, the priest told a story about how the candy cane was invented by persecuted Christians as a symbol for each other. The cane looked like a shepherd's staff, red for Jesus' blood, etc. If you look into the actual history of the candy cane though, none of this is true.

What I'm saying is that it didn't matter what the architect did. Someone, well after the fact, would have found a tenuous connection between their work and the Bible and claimed they were divinely inspired.

Not the candy cane, but the fish: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variations_of_the_ichthys_sy....

Might the fish have anything to do with precession of the equinoxes into Pisces? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38761574

The fish was derived from a Greek acronym. The wikipedia link above mentions this as well. Is there any evidence for an astrological significance?

No, “fish” in Greek is ιχθυς, which was used as an acrostic for Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter, Jesus Christ, Son of God, savior. I vaguely recall seeing somewhere that during the persecutions, one Christian would draw one line of the two-line symbol as a shibboleth for another to complete to show that they too were Christian.

As far as I can tell from a cursory search, our evidence for ιχθυς dates from II and later, which would indeed put it firmly in a "fisher of men" or "loaves and fishes" interpretation and not an astrological one. Thanks!

Humans sacrificed animals when relations between abstract numbers and reality were discovered:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoreanism

The practice of wonder surrounding numbers and their role in existence has been practiced by nearly every ancient civilization for many millennia.

Definitely not unique to Christianity. Definitely as natural as religious practice itself.

Humans may have done that, but not the Pythagoreans, who were vegetarians. From that wiki page:

> The Pythagoreans also thought that animals were sentient and minimally rational. The arguments advanced by Pythagoreans convinced numerous of their philosopher contemporaries to adopt a vegetarian diet. The Pythagorean sense of kinship with non-humans positioned them as a counterculture in the dominant meat-eating culture.

Wasn't the whole point of building the thing to make physical all that symbolic stuff in the first place?

The temple _is_ God's physical dwelling place

The buildings are more than symbols, we have no clue how they were built, just theories, but remember there were no power tools before 1895. There were no cranes. Those massive Roman columns, were carved in perfect symmetry by hand tools?

The beings who built the cathedrals had methods and technologies of amazing power that we know virtually nothing about. They are artifacts of something that is now, presumably, gone.

The Great Glen Fault is beautifully straight line across Scotland. Once seen it can't really be unseen.

My own favourite is the Highland Boundary Fault - the northern edge of the rift valley that is central Scotland:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Boundary_Fault

I'm not sure if this is concrete fact, or just a theory, but you can continue the line up Norway's western coast too. Then in the other direction, the line was broken, but restarts & progresses from Nova Scotia down through the Appalachians in North America.

IIRC they were all part of the same Pangaian range, and include Greenland east coast and the Atlas mountains.

I'm gonna be driving along most of Loch Ness early this autumn. Anything in particular I should look out for with respect to the Great Glen Fault? Any less-obvious geologic features?

Not related to the Great Glen Fault but the Parallel Roads in Glen Roy are fairly close and worth a look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glen_Roy#The_Parallel_Roads_of...

Edit: Also have a look at the Lochaber Geopark:

https://lochabergeopark.org.uk/

Thanks! I'll keep an eye out.

I had a similar obsession for awhile. Take any 2 really famous places in the old world and draw a great circle line between them on Google Earth... and it's astonishing what falls under that line. (Try Avignon and Jerusalem, for example).

It's a type of apophenia.

More like the garden of forking paths, the look-elsewhere effect and data dredging.

As opposed to the forking of garden paths, the whereelse-look effect, and dreading dating

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