Oddities, curiousities and strangness in history

I wasnt sure where else to put this but......its fooking weird !





This is it motionless.
Looks to human-ish !

Yup thats pretty weird looking all right.  

  on a weirdness scale, its way up there.

Is it a relative, Azriel?  

You guessed it Orwell ! Its me auntie Freda ! Its been said theres a family resemblance running thru the family ? Ive never been able to see it but, I do spend longer than usual in the bath tub   Ive got little legs ? We are still worried about uncle Bob !

Wow! I saw a similar creature on Dr Who! And there's me thinking Dr Who is all made up... gor blimey! Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, and you and your family even stranger, Azriel!  About time we had someone interesting come here. The closest we had to an alien was Petty here to now.  

Hey! Im indigenous! Somewhere.

Unfortunately man cant fly to Uranus yet.

Think they bloody can from what Ive seen on Google images Mrs Figg !!!!  

'Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world's oldest lunar "calendar" in an Aberdeenshire field.
Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.
A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago.
The Mesolithic "calendar" is thousands of years older than previous known formal time-measuring monuments created in Mesopotamia.
The pit alignment also aligns on the Midwinter sunrise to provided the hunter-gatherers with an annual "astronomic correction" in order to better follow the passage of time and changing seasons.
Vince Gaffney, Professor of Landscape Archaeology at Birmingham, led the analysis project.
He said: "The evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies in Scotland had both the need and sophistication to track time across the years, to correct for seasonal drift of the lunar year and that this occurred nearly 5,000 years before the first formal calendars known in the Near East.
"In doing so, this illustrates one important step towards the formal construction of time and therefore history itself."- BBC

This all rather fits well with my personal theory that Scotland was the scientific hub of the neolithic period.
From Skara Brae and the massive ritual centres of the isles to Maes Howe and all the standing stones, circles ect that dot our landscape from that time period.
It also convinces me more that the Book of Enoch does in fact record a genuine journey from the mid-east to northern Europe (probably Maes Howe) with the express purpose of teaching and disseminating the knowledge (stone circles also appear in the Middle east from this time on)

azriel wrote:I wasnt sure where else to put this but......its fooking weird !





This is it motionless.
Looks to human-ish !

 weird? it's super cute.

another pet hate of mine. Sweaty neck. I HATE  having a sweaty neck, and when I do you can guarantee theres a cold breeze on it. I dont normally get too sweaty even though its fucking 38 degrees, but sweaty neck yes.

btw we had 22 guests all at once earlier today. 22? thats weird.  

Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit - Innovation inspired by nature

Yep  , Highly intelligent wonderbrains humans that we are, we've copied MANY things from Nature ! Somehow, someone thought this through a lot better than WE did, shows the simplest things are often better & dont diss nature ! And its taken THIS long to realise this ?? Im also pretty sure that the key to a lot of problems & diseases are out there, hidden in Nature, we just got to find out where to look, find the key & unlock it. Why have we so much diversity on this planet ? why is there SO many types of insect ? birds, fish etc ? Must be a reason surely ?

azriel wrote:Y Why have we so much diversity on this planet ? why is there SO many types of insect ? birds, fish etc ? Must be a reason surely ?

One of the BIG QUESTIONS.  
I'd think there were as many reasons as there are creatures. The world is an almost unimaginably complex, interconnected system. When one thing changes, a hundred other things are instantly affected, and each of them changes triggering more changes.

Imagine how many changes that makes over the 3 billion years there's been Life on this planet! 
And each time Life adapts, because that's what Life does.
That adds up to a lot of reasons!

I agree David ! Its mind boggling ! I was merely thinking out loud, but your right. One LITTLE change can bring down an eco system ! I personally believe there is a reason for everything on THIS planet, maybe our intellect cannot absorb this ? its to great & we are not advanced mentally to accept it ? But, with determination & in depth thinking hopefully some astute people will develop those skills to find much needed answers ! Better safe guards on our natural resources, pollution solutions, wide spread distribution of food stuffs, control of disabling diseases etc etc & make these ideals common place & understandable instead of elusive & being used as a weapon of greed for wealth & power ? Love the world with an arm full of roses not beat the world with a rod of iron.

It's certainly beyond me, but I do believe there's value in pondering it all.

There's hard bits too, like what role famine and plague play in a natural balance?

What keeps any creature's birth rates and death rates in balance, and what pandora's box are we opening when we tinker with them.....?

Plenty to think about!

Agreed Dave ! I also dont believe in opening any Pandora's box ! There has to be a healthy balance, a Ying & Yang to all things. After all, are we not just a collection of atoms ? molecules ? I think, maybe, education is key. We should tread carefully & cautiously towards an attainable co-existence with not just what we call "living things" but with all substances, by which I mean Atmosphere & natural gases, the organic properties on this Earth, water supplies, etc. Man should not play God as one slip either way can cause the destruction man was trying to avoid.

Ive come to a slightly profound-ish conclusion on these matters and this is it, so brace yourselves-

The first 20 years of your life you spend trying to work out what its all about and what your place and role in it is, and the last 20 years you spend forgetting everything you learned, which gives the average person about 20-60 years of actual really useful time where you feel like your getting a bit of a grip on it all.
Unfortunately, if you have this sort of existence in a ginormous universe with more stuff in it than is conceivable, like the one we happen to be in, your in trouble if you evolve to the point where you can stop and think about yourself, and it.
Because even if you could be presented with knowledge and understanding of everything ,there isn't time to learn it or see and experience it all.
Its not even possible to see everywhere on this one planet in one human lifespan, let alone the ridiculous amount of places in the universe and ways of experiencing the universe.

So the answer has to be that we arent really a race of individuals, we are a species- all that matters therefore is the whole, not the individual- the whole can see and learn everything- given time.
I type this on a keyboard, hooked to a pc, connected to a tv- every bit of which knowledge is built on the knowledge of people long since dead.
But the species hasn't forgotten it, and its improved it, and built on it and made new discoveries out of the old ideas- and all the individuals involved will die and be gone, yet for the species it goes on.
And if we survive we will go to space and colonise it, because we've told ourselves we will as a species, just as we told ourselves stories about the moon and the gods and goddesses who lived there right up to Jules Verne writing of a gun firing a rocket to the moon from Florida, and a hundred years later a real rocket gets fired from Florida and the first human walks on the moon.
The species can achieve anything, even when all the individuals come and go.

Its a bit of a bigger picture view.

A rare picture this- a fog bow- Ive never seen one myself- from the BBC viewer submitted pics- taken on the hillside above Loch Earn.



Its a proper rainbow but the much smaller water droplets in the fog restrict the refraction and so the colours.

No, Ive never seen one either ! Ive seen a water spout at sea near the beach, that was actually creepy cos it LOOKED like a small hurricane.

Never even heard of a fogbow before. That's pretty interesting.

These little grey foxes evolve 5 million years ago to hunt in ancient forests. They've adapted to the deserts of the American Soutwest. Amazing animals! Amazing photos!  More at this site: www.tenbestphotos.com/starlight-hunters/photos-pi_90.html

The little foxes are cute, but what animal did the terrifyingly large spine draped from the tree belong to? The head sort of looks like a snake's, but I didn't think snake vertebrae were that large.