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Yucks Digest V1 #108
Yucks Digest Fri, 6 Dec 91 Volume 1 : Issue 108
Today's Topics:
Kid talk about love
Lucky dogs, etc.
The difference between a friend and a best friend
Saturn Myth
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----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 91 15:13:01 PST
From: uunet!valid.com!jay (Jay Blackwood)
Subject: Kid talk about love
To: ross@harpo.qcktrn.uucp
Kids Talk About LOVE by David Heller
Reprinted without permission from Cosmopolitan (Don't know
which issue)
What Exactly Is Marriage??
"Marriage is when you get to keep your girl and don't have
to give her back to her parents!"
-Eric, 6
"When somebody's been dating for a while, the boy might
propose to the girl. He says to her, 'I'll take you for
a whole life, or at least until we have kids and get
divorced, but you got to do one particular thing for me.'
Then she says yes, but she's wondering what the thing is
and whether it's naughty or not. She can't wait to find
out."
-Anita, 9
How Does a Person Decide Whom to marry??
"You flip a nickel, and heads means you stay with him and
tails means you try the next one."
-Kally, 9
"My mother says to look for a man who is kind....That's
what I'll do....I'll find somebody who's kinda tall
and handsome."
-Carolyn, 8
Concerning the Proper Age to Get Married.
"Eighty-four! Because at that age, you don't have to
work anymore, and you can spend all your time loving
each other in your bedroom."
-Carolyn, 8
"Once I'm done with kindergarten, I'm going to find
me a wife!"
-Bert, 5
How Did Your Mom and Dad Meet??
"They were at a dance party at a friend's house. Then
they went for a drive, but their car broke down....
It was a good thing, because it gave them a chance to
find out about their values."
-Lottie, 9
"My father was doing some strange chores for my mother.
They won't tell me what kind."
-Jeremy, 8
What Do Most People Do on a Date??
"On the first date, they just tell each other lies, and
that usually gets them interested enough to go for a
second date."
-Martin, 10
"Many daters just eat pork chops and french fries and
talk about love."
-Craig, 9
When Is It Okay to Kiss Someone??
"You should never kiss a girl unless you have enough
bucks to buy her a big ring and her own VCR, 'cause
she'll want to have videos of the wedding."
-Allan, 10
"Never kiss in front of other people. It's a big
embarrassing thing if anybody sees you....If nobody
sees you, I might be willing to try it with a handsome
boy, but just for a few hours."
-Kally, 9
The Great Debate: Is It Better to Be Single or Married??
"You should ask the people who read Cosmopolitan!"
-Kirsten, 10
"It's better for girls to be single but not for boys.
Boys need somebody to clean up after them!"
-Anita, 9
"It gives me a headache to think about that stuff. I'm
just a kid. I don't need that kind of trouble."
-Will, 7
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 6 Dec 91 13:36:23 est
From: Patrick Tufts <zippy@filbert.cs.brandeis.edu>
Subject: Lucky dogs, etc.
To: hicomb!lark@uunet.UU.NET
From: hicomb!lark@uunet.UU.NET
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 91 13:23:59 EST
A young border collie, named Gregor Mendel (after the monk
who's studies on peas established the principles of "Mendelian
genetics") seems likely to spread his genes farther in the dog
world than any dog has ever done before. His owner is Dr.
Jasper Rine, a geneticist at UC Berkeley, who is undertaking a
dog genome mapping project.
It appears that young Gregor (not yet one year old) will be bred
with bitches of numerous breeds, in order to map genes that control
behavior, shapes, size, hair length, and other traits.
In a related story, Rine announced he intends to work closely with Wilt
Chamberlain on the human genome project.
------------------------------
Date: 6 Dec 91 11:30:03 GMT
From: apa1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Andrew Peter Anselmo)
Subject: The difference between a friend and a best friend
Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
A friend is someone you call to help you move.
A best friend is someone you call to help you move... a body.
(Heard at Catch A Rising Star in NYC)
------------------------------
Date: 1 Sep 91 00:34:21 GMT
From: ted@grebyn.com (Ted Holden)
Subject: Saturn Myth
Newsgroups: talk.origins,sci.astro,sci.misc
[This is kind of long, but really bizarre. I've been saving
it up for when I had only a few other things to send out. --spaf]
The following article summarizes some of the evidence now being amassed
concerning the nature of our solar system and its recent history.
Immanuel Velikovsky published his theory involving the recent history of
the earth and the planet Venus in 1950, and a number of events have
tended to bear him out despite the intense dislike which establishment
scientists have always displayed towards this body of theory. An
Egyptian version of the basic story told in Worlds in Collision has been
found which can be shown to directly implicate the planet Venus
(basically, the story of the "destruction of mankind" contained in
Budge's "Gods of the Egyptians"), since the goddess Sekhet, the
so-called "Eye of Horus" is now universally recognized by Egyptologists
as the morning star. The entire surface of Venus has been shown by the
Magellan probes to be 900 degree F lava flows, and that says new planet.
Velikovsky PREDICTED the intense heat of Venus in 1950; Sagan's
"super-greenhouse" theory, the only other theory which purports to
explain this heat, was a monday-morning effort at saving the astronomical
community some much deserved embarassment. Super-greenhouse can be
annihilated by any of a number of logical approaches. Since by all
accounts more than 98% of solar energy entering Venus' atmosphere is
absorbed before it gets to the surface and, since the surface is hotter
than any section of the atmosphere, super-greenhouse obviously involves
a gross violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Physics doesn't
work that way.
Velikovsky claimed that the story he told in Worlds in Collision
represented the last two or three chapters in a series of changes in our
system which had been taking place over the last ten thousand years or
so. Something like the events he described involving Venus obviously do
not occur in a vacuum. Velikovsky had in mind to write a sequel to
Worlds in Collision describing what was known or knowable about the
antedeluvian world, and about the great flood, but he never got to this
work. David Talbott, one of the founders of the old Student Academic
Freedom forum published "The Saturn Myth" in 1980, and this is
essentially Worlds in Collision, Chapter II.
Following leads provided by Velikovsky, Talbott uncovered massive
evidence of our earth having once been part of a small binary system
involving two bodies of which Jupiter and Saturn are the remains; in
the case of Saturn in particular, there is every indication that it was
once more massive.
Classical Greek and Roman literature (e.g. Hesiod's Works and Days)
describes a golden age of man when "Cronos [Saturn] was the king of
heaven", followed by a silver age under Zeus [Jupiter], and then the
Trojan wars and then our present recorded ages. Students of mythology
have adapted every possible explaination for this language except the
simplest and most obvious: our present sun is the "king of heaven" now;
Hesiod and Ovid et. al. were clearly stating a belief that things
other than our sun once served as "kings" of heaven, and they clearly
related these other things to the two astral bodies we now know as
Jupiter and Saturn.
Talbott shows that glyphs for the various supreme gods of the Egyptians
amount to various forms of a picture of a star or astral body of some
sort with a ring around it, i.e. literal pictures of Saturn or of
something very like it. And he noticed something else. Remember that
classical mythology often mentions a supreme god atop a magic mountain,
or world mountain... Zeus atop Olympus, Jahweh atop Zion etc. Pictures
of the Egyptian supreme deity almost always show a star in a ring atop
a mountain, and there are indications that Egyptians saw this mountain
as being compposed of LIGHT; one very common version of the picture
shows the mountain composed of lightning forks which clearly point
upwards. Artistic representations of lightning from the classical Greek
era to our day, as far as I am aware, always point down.
One version of this picture involves Osiris (which is represented as a
human eye, the pupil and eye forming again a star and ring), atop a
pyramid; this picture may be seen on any American dollar bill. It is
the oldest symbol mankind possesses.
Between Jupiter and its little moon Io today, there is an
electromagnetic flux tube which is visible from the cosmos. Primative
people living on Io who knew nothing of physics or of electromagnetic
flux tubes would describe this as the great god (Jupiter) living atop
the magic mountain (the flux tube).
Thus, the notion of a magic mountain or holy mountain in mythology had
two meanings: the high part of the earth itself, which was eggshaped
before and for awhile shortly after the deluge, and the electromag flux
tube.
Versions of this basic picture show an astral body atop a magic mountain
with HALF of a circular enclosure about it, variously to the left,
above, to the right, and below the body. Talbott takes this as
indicating that the ring about the astral body showed phases as does our
moon now, during the various times of the antique day, and this also
indicates that at the time when these drawings were made, shortly after
the flood, that the light involved was reflected, most likely from our
present sun. Saturn at that time was referred to as the "sun of night",
and is thus known to scholars. Talbott says that when the sun itself
"went down", whatever that meant then, that the Saturnian configuration
lit up.
It is possible that Saturn and/or Jupiter had been live stars prior to
the flood. Saturn (Osiris) is often described as "shedding green light"
upon the earth in the Egyptian Book of the Dead" (see Budge's version
for example). Nothing glows green in our present sky.
More recently, it has been shown that logical examination of physical
evidence along two directions tends to support Talbott. The following
articles were recently presented seperately, and are presented here in
their entirety for any who might have missed one or another of them.
All concern the notion that our world once was oriented with its North
pole pointed permanently straight at the body we then orbitted.
This caused a reduction in the felt effect of gravity on earth as well
as a pronounced deformation of the earth itself. The earth was
egg-shaped, the high part lying directly under the body we orbitted.
......................................................................
......................................................................
There exists a dilemma in the study of the large animals which
lived in our world in past ages. Scientists used to think that
sauropod dinosaurs lived in water, believing it self-evident that
they were too heavy to have borne their great bodies on land. We
now have good evidence that sauropods walked and ran on land (the
Texas footprints), as well as the evidence of wear and tear which
sauropod teeth show; you get that from eating leaves, giraffe
style. Eating soft aquatic vegitation doesn't wear anybody's teeth
that way. Nonetheless, the sauropods were still too heavy for our
world.
It is known that muscle tissue is nearly identical for vertibrates
under the miscrope (For instance, "SCALING - WHY IS ANIMAL SIZE SO
IMPORTANT", Knut Schmidt Nielsen, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984, pp
163-164), as well as that creatures generally lose (or at least do
not gain) efficiency as they grow larger (by scaling). Thus, one
might logically regard the level of effort attainable by a man such
as Bill Kazmeier as a kind of an upper limit for creatures his size
or larger, on a lb. per lb. basis. Kaz could deadlift or squat 1000
lbs or thereabouts, and used to amuse himself by embarassing the
strongest men from the NFL and the WWF in the old television "World's
Strongest Men" events.
It is a simple observation that the square/cubed problem which
reduces the power-to-weight ratios of creatures as they scale
upwards can be compensated by dividing through by the 2/3 power of
bodyweight of the creature involved; indeed, this is the natural
scaling factor for all competitive lifting events. It may also be
noted that dividng through by the 2/3 power of weight roughly
compensates for the difference between quadrupeds and bipeds, since
virtually every muscle in a lifter's body is being used for maximum
squats and deadlifts.
The ratio we get for Kaz doing a 1000 lb squat (thighs parallel to the
ground and then up again) is:
1350 / 350**(2/3) = 27.288801
which may be viewed as a rough upper limit for lifting efforts by
creatures as large or larger than Kaz.
Now, let's examine the ratios we get observing various creatures simply
lifting their own weights off the ground, which any land animal must be
able to do.
For humans between 130 and 230 lbs, you get a ratio of around 5 or 6 just
to stand up e.g. 130/130^(2/3) ~= 5. The number goes up fast, however,
yeilding around 17 for a 5000 lb creature and around 25.3 for the 16000
lb stuffed elephant, Jumbo, at the Smithsonian museum. Thus we see a
curious near equality for the ratios of lift derived from the ultimate
known weight lifting feat which resembles in any way the ordinary act of
standing up, and the actual act of just standing up as done by the
largest creature known to have lived in historical times.
What this means, is that elephants have simply evolved into the largest
animals possible on our world; just a tad bigger, and they'd not be able
to stand up at all.
This may be regarded as the basic reason that we do not see creatures
larger than an elephant in our world. Basically, a big elephant is the
largest theoretical as well as the largest actual creature of our world.
For a 70,000 lb brontosaur, however, you get a ratio around 41, which means
that a brontosaur simply could not live in our world, since he would be a
land creature unable to stand. Some major league difference between our world
as it exists now and as it existed prior to the flood is needed to
explain the dilemma.
Nobody has any qualms about weight figures for brontosaurs; they are
generally described as being around 70' and 35 tons, making them
something like 4-5 times the actual weight of the 8-ton elephant I
mentioned. Nothing to marvel at. Brontosaurs were known in the last
century, and until recently were thought to be the largest land
creatures. Recently, however, a number of collosal finds have been made
including supersaurs, ultrasaurs, brevoparipus (of which we have only
tracks), and the seismosaur. The brevoparipus tracks indicate a
gigantic size (given as up to 160'), and the actual skeleton of the
seismosaur is now known to be around 140' long (see the July issue of
Popular Mechanics).
The seismosaur turns out to be a two-for-one, double-sized brontosaur,
and that says that you multiply the weight figure (35 tons) by eight.
The thing weighed around 560,000 lbs, and would derive a ratio of around
83 just to stand. I mention this because, in the past, a number of the
t.o regulars have advanced the basically stupid argument that the
sauropods somehow got better leverage in standing than we humans do.
The case of the seismosaur shows that for the rubbish it is. A
completely impossible triple lift, or power-lifting combined total of
3000 lbs for squat, dead-lift, and bench press by a 250 lb athlete,
which guaranteed uses every muscle in his body to the outright max at
least twice, would only yeild a ratio of around 76. The seismosaur
needs more than that just to stand.
Think about the reality of a 560,000 lb animal. Our biggest tank, the
Abrams, weighs around 60,000, and the biggest tank of all times, the
German Tiger, weighed around 80,000. Despite treads and every
technology, the tiger suffered an extreme lack of mobility; the tiniest
bit of rain or mud or loose ground, and it was stuck.
Likewise, the largest birds which fly in our world are around 30 - 35
lbs, and those are barly capable of takeoffs and landings; we know,
however, that quite aside from Quetzlecoatlus Northropi which flew at
300 lbs and more, the pteratorn, a 160 - 200 lb golden eagle also flew.
Albatrosses and other large birds have wings made for lift; they are
the bird equivalents of sailplanes/cargo-planes. For a 160 lb eagle to
fly in our world is as impossible as... picture a C5A, the largest
aircraft manufacturable and flyable given our current jet engines,
materials, and manufacturing techniques, and then picture building and
flying a fighter plane with virtually NO lift in its wings somewhere
between five and seven times the size of the C5A. Eagles and pteratorns
are bird equavilents of fighter planes. It can't happen.
Likewise, there appears to be some size limit inherent in the design for
virtually every creature which crawls, walks, flies, or swims on this
planet. Bigger and stronger are inveriably better until you cross some
threshold at which the design for a creature no longer works well.
With dogs, the hips give out, with men, the lower back, with birds,
flight... And yet, most of these size limits were considerably larger
in past ages then they are now. The world supported the 1000 lb super
lions of North America, the 400 lb wolf-bear, the giant cave bears,
super bison, super rhinos, mammoths bigger than our present ones,
dragonflies with 3' wingspans... the list goes on and on. The natural
question, especially in the cases of elephants, bison, rhinos etc. which
we KNOW were once larger, is: "If it worked once, why does it no longer
work? Why do they not RE-EVOLVE to their former sizes?"
Of course, the limiting factor in all of these considerations was
nothing other than our old friend, the force of gravity, or more
precisely, the felt effect thereof. The only real answer to any of
these dilemmas is that the felt effect of gravity must have been heavily
attenuated in the antique world by forces no longer in evidence. Yet
another way in which realities of the antedeluvian world varied from
those of our own.
This, Velikovsky and latter day catastrophists, especially David
Talbott, can account for.
Establishment scientists and their apologists can do nothing with any of
this but make excuses, scream, curse, bandy the word "pseudoscientist"
about in much the manner in which their spiritual forbears attempted to
use garlic and the inquisition against witches and werewolves, and
generally wring their hands and weep.
......................................................................
......................................................................
The most recent issue of the Aeon journal, which concerns itself with
the nature of the antedeluvian world, carried my article concerning
sauropod dinosaurs, as well as a somewhat longer and more interesting
article by Lynn Rose involving continental drift theory. The average
viewer of these groups will be vaguely aware that continents are thought
to have drifted over the last 200 million years or so, but is probably
unaware of the rather startling configuration which they are thought to
have been in 100 - 200 million years ago. I have posted a file called
Tethys.pcx to the alt.binaries.pictures group which shows the
configuration.
This picture has been painstakingly peiced together from data involving
the fits of the various continental borders. The most striking feature
of the entire picture is the Sea of Tethys, a monstrous intrusion into
the very center of the all-continent mass which leads a viewer to see a
missing wedge; the entire configuration resembles nothing so much as a
pac-man with its mouth agape.
Lynn Rose noted several glaring problems with this arrangement, and
suggested a novel way of solving them. The problems included:
1. That the continents were all clumped into a single mass in the first
place. No force exists at present which might ever draw them all
together, and the odds of them all merely drifting together for no
reason are greater than 64 - 1, which would be the odds against them
ever merely appearing in the same hemisphere for no real reason.
2. If, as seems overwhelmingly likely, some force drew the continents
into one place, then that force should have drawn them into a circular
mass. The sea of Tethys is an anomaly, which clearly does not belong in
the picture.
3. Given uniformitarian views, if we assume the system to be 7 B years
old, our earth should have been in equalibrium even 200 M years ago. If
some force existed then to draw the continents together into Pangeae,
and if that force were terrestrial, then clearly Pangeae should still
exist. The relatively minor catastrophes which establishment science
presently allows for as per the case of the Alverez version of the
dinosaur extinctions should by no means have broken up Pangeae.
4. As all who have downloaded my little file and viewed it have seen,
India starts out on one shore of the Sea of Tethys and moves to the
other. According to current theory, again as per "Continents Adrift",
India can barely make it over that distance even in the greatest version
of the allowed time involved; it should be on the ocean floor. Rose
goes into some detail on this point.
Rose mentions one other very major problem with continental drift theory
which is more properly a part of another article. Rose derives evidence
that two prior ages have existed, one, the so-called "Age of Cronus" of
the Greeks and Romans during which the felt effect of gravity was
heavily attenuated by the different planetary allignment, and a prior
age, that of Pangeae, during which the effect was even more
pronounced. During both ages, the earth was egg shaped, considerably
more so in the age of Pangeae.
Rose's solution to the aforementioned problems: imagine a half of a
grapefruit skin sitting atop a basketball (our egg-shaped world), and
then inagine that a catastrophe occurred during which this felt effect
of OTHER gravity, from the small-star or large planet(s) was reduced,
which amounts to imagining that somebody pushed the half grapefruit skin
down atop the surface of the basketball, thus forcing it to lie atop a
surface of lesser curvature. The skin of the grapefruit half would
split into something very like the Sea of Tethys.
What Rose is saying is that the Tethys Sea never existed, and that we
are only forced to imagine it's having existed by our insistence on
believing that the world was always round as it is now.
...................................................................
...................................................................
Lynn Rose mentions one final problem involved with continental
drift theory, and this involves the present fits of the Red Sea
shores and the shores of the Gulf of Aden. Both fits are quite
good; you can join the shores of the Red Sea, or of the gulf, BUT
ONLY ONE AT A TIME; if you join the shores of the Red Sea, the
shores of the Gulf will be open by about 20 degrees, and vice-
versa. Basically what you have is like two letter "V"'s connected
at their vertices, one something like 110 degrees and the other
something like 90. This ammounts to a dilemma on the map of the
world. Given our earth as it presently exists, such a split could
not happen. I feel no need to include a .pcx file for this one;
you can all see it on any map.
Lynn Rose presents evidence for the existence of two prior ages;
the evidence involving Pangea involves a long distant and remote
age, posssibly the age of the seizemosaur and other really gigantic
beasts. The evidence involving the Africa/Arabia split involves a
much more recent and historical age, the time of the Greek Golden
Age and of the biblical antedeluvians.
Lynn Rose sees in this evidence an indication as to the actual
location of the mythical garden of Eden, the home of Adam and Eve,
and the way in which all of this fits together is interesting.
I do not claim to be overly religious, and am certainly not a
creationist. I do not claim to know what is meant by claims of
Adam and Eve having been the first two people. It is possible that
God actually created them as written, it is also possible that
prior people more closely resembled bears or gorillas or
neanderthals, and that "first people" once meant something more
like "first such as us". Possible also is "first caucasians"...
who knows. But too much is written of Adam and Eve and in too many
places to lightly regard them as mythical figures. In many of
these sources, we find mentioned a "holy mountain"; it is written
that Adam and Eve and Seth and Seth's descendants lived upon the
holy mountain, and that Cain and his descendants descended and
began to live below.
Lynn Rose, of course, has given us an indication as to what the
"holy mountain" might have been, basically, the high part of the
egg-shaped world which existed prior to the great flood.
Rose proposes the world mountain (of the age of Kronos) to have
been based within the Afar Triangle. He proposes something akin to
a half a grapefruit sitting atop a basketball (for the purpose of
conceptualization and not necessarily to scale) as having been the
former situation, and then (when the whole thing fell at the end of
the golden age), surface splitting would occur with the skin of the
half grapefruit being suddenly forced to lie flat upon the surface
of lesser curvature. If two such splits thus occurred, as easily
might happen, then you would see just such an impossible split as
we see between Africa and Arabia now.
Rose states that rough figures show an earth eccentricity between
.3 and .4 and a world mountain of several hundred kilometers height
being needed for the African, East African, and Arabian plates to
fit, closing the rift valley and other problems along with the
afore-mentioned Red-Sea/Gulf-of-Aden anomaly.
Climbing our present mountains is tough enough; climbing up or
down a mountain such as Rose describes would be a major-league big
deal. Does literature record any such notion? In "The Forgotten
Books of Eden" Bell, (ed. R.H. Platt Jr.), pp 76 - 78 we find:
"But then Genun [of the children of Cain living below]
gathered together companies upon companies, that played on
horns and on all the other instruments that we have already
mentioned, at the foot of the holy mountain, and they did so
in order that the children of Seth who were on the holy
mountain should hear it.
But when the children of Seth heard the noise they wondered
and came by companies, and stood on the top of the mountain to
look at those below, and they did thus for a whole year...
...Then the children of Cain looked up from below, and saw
thge children of Seth standing in troops on the top of the
mountain, and they called to them to come down to them.
But the children of Seth said to them from above, " We don't
know the way"...
I should also mention that the capital of Yemen, opposite the Afar
Triangle which Rose cites as the former location of this holy
mountain, is called Aden. It thus appears that Adam and Eve and others
of the antedeluvians such as remained with them and their descendants
through Seth, lived in the vicinity of the Afar Triangle and of the city
of Aden.
The Age of Kronos and the age of Pangaea do not appear to have been
the same. The Red Sea/Gulf of Aden splits were recent, Pangaea a
bit less recent. Rose mentions that the same construction he uses
to explain the Africa-Arabia fit will also work for Pangaea, thus
solving problems 2 and 4 by eliminating any need for a Sea of
Tethys in continental drift theory, but that the world mountain
you'd need would be larger, over 1000 km, with Earth's eccentricity
between .5 and .7.
Before I lose track of it, I should also mention that Rose's novel
method of accounting for the splitting of continental plates, i.e. the
notion of a curved surface being forced to lie upon a world which is
suddenly less curved, will also account for a couple of other anomalies.
Mountains are generally thought to arise when continental plates collide
or shift over and under eachother, and yet we have cases of mountains,
such as the Urals, where nothing of the sort shows any evidence of ever
having occurred. Rose states that a highly curved surface suddenly
forced to lie upon a surface of lesser curvature, aside from splitting
as we have seen, could also wrinkle, thus forming mountains.
[This mostly results from playing too much football without a helmet,
methinks. --spaf]
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End of Yucks Digest
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