Picture Source: Clipart.com Some facts are buried under the dust of history but they are there. We have to sweep that dust away to find them but they may be well worth it when we do. I thought that the discovery of the plans for the building of the Temple of Apollo in 1979 gave us a great insight into the way the Greeks thought. The plans which had remained undiscovered for thousands of years were in plain sight. They were actually etched into the temple IN FULL SIZE. They were so huge and covered with dirt in places that people walked by them without ever realizing what they were. The temple construction was begun somewhere around 330 BC, give or take a few years. It was worked on until somewhere around 300 AD but wasn't finished. The plans were discovered by Lothar Haseberger a German archaeologist in 1979. They showed that the ancient Greeks had put certain imperfections into their plans because they made the temple look better. They had built bulges into the columns in the middle. So the secret of the ancient Greek perfection in building those wonderful buildings was imperfection. A lot of people type in web address and they often have to type in www at the beginning, but some people don't know what this stands for. It means world wide web. Diets were different in ancient times, I think many of us knew this already. The ancient Greeks never ate tomatoes, lemons, oranges or potatoes among other things. It was not that they wouldn't have liked them, but they hadn't been discovered yet. A shot of whiskey is called that because a bullet in the old west cost about the same as a drink and cowboys sometimes were out of money and the bartenders would accept bullets in payment, thus whiskey in a glass was called a shot. Usually a city is located on a continent or island but there is an exception to this rule. There is actually a city that spans two continents, it is Istanbul in Turkey. Istanbul is located in Europe and Asia. The construction of Stone Henge spanned from 2950 BC to 1600 BC a period of over 1300 years. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier is guarded by military sentinels. Each soldier wears gloves which are wet. These wet gloves help prevent the soldier from losing the grip on his rifle. The soldiers must be between 5'10" and 6'2" and their waist can not be larger than 30". Lincoln was not the hayseed lawyer as he is always portrayed. He was the most successful lawyer in Illinois in his time. One of his clients was the Illinois Central Railroad, the biggest corporation in the world. The country of India has not invaded any other country in the last 10,000 years. Navigation was invented in India 6,000 years ago on the river Sindh. Navigation comes from the Sanskrit word "Nav Gath". Up to 1896, all the world's diamonds came from India. The world's first dams were built in India about 300 BC. Tunguska was the place in Siberia where a huge, unexplained explosion took place in 1908. Many today say it was a small meteor impact, but a crater was never found. It has been reported that before the explosion, strange atmospheric conditions were taking place. These included twilights that were very bright and solar halos. These conditions increased in intensity from 10 days before the explosion. One never sees this in the western reports of the incident. It takes about 850 peanuts to make a 18oz jar of peanut butter. The average American household consumes 6 pounds of peanut butter per year. The average American child will have eaten 1,500 peanut butter sandwiches by the time they graduate high school. Americans eat the most peanut butter in the world. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, or so they say. The solar system is about 5 billion years old and Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. The Dutch discovered Australia not the British. Lightening hits the earth about 100 times per second. Of the over 6 billion people on Earth, over 3 billion eat rice has the main entry of their meal. Over 30 million people on this planet are blind. 450,000 people play golf every day. At any given time, 250,000 people are flying in an airplane. Every day 140,000 cars and trucks are produced. Every day about 40 computer viruses are written. 1,000 books are published per day. 1.2 billion letters are written every day. Every day 7,000,000 documents are added to the internet. In 1900 the average speed limit in the U.S. was 10 mph., 30 people lived in Las Vegas and only 8 homes out of a hundred had a telephone. |