There's still hope for the survival of books. A new Barnes & Noble opened up in Orange Ca years after the old one closed because of a fire. The store is packed every time I go in there. And the book selection doesn't reflect the corporate publishing world's idea of what we should buy but, rather, the tastes of the employees and the residents of Orange County with it's large Hispanic and Asian population. It's great to have a neighborhood bookstore again.
Love this and yes - books - the real thing - are a remarkable technology - I was just looking at a stamp issued to commemorate Gutenberg's Bible - the stamp came out in 1952....and was marking 500 years of movable type. We have been transformed....
Gutenberg's breakthrough was in being able to cast type using a standard set of molds. It helped that he was printing in an alphabetic language, so he only needed a hundred or so glyphs. Chinese languages are word oriented, so thousands of glyphs were needed.
Didn't Francis Bacon point out that the compass, paper, the printing press and gunpowder were all originally developed in China but became important elements of European civilization. (Other technologies from China were also adopted like spaghetti and the familiar European plow.)
It appears that "The Million Charms of Princess [Somebody]" was the first; not that there were a million copies; but several thousand is still pretty impressive. And "charms" is of course an inaccurate old translation for what were sutras.
Not really relevant, although Chinese movable type was widely used in East Asia. European movable type changed the world, not because it was better, but because europeans were more aggressive and successful imperialists.
It's actually quite relevant, as Hal mentioned European movable type in the context of commemorating it's impact on the world. You may not like the reason for that greater impact, but that's irrelevant.
For what it's worth, one reason why China didn't historically trade with the wider world is because they were so profoundly racist that they thought that trading with other countries was beneath them. That's also why many of their other inventions had similarly little impact on the wider world.
China traded quite a lot with other nations, then and now. Which is how movable type came to Korea, for example. A better explanation would be that Chinese or Asian characters don't lend themselves to movable type as easily, as you would need an absurd number of characters. But it sounds like you're engaged in motivated reasoning.
"That's also why many of their other inventions had similarly little impact on the wider world."
Like paper or porcelain, to give the first examples to come to mind. As I said, motivated reasoning.
"A better explanation would be that Chinese or Asian characters don't lend themselves to movable type as easily, as you would need an absurd number of characters."
So you actually agree with the original comment. So why exactly is it "ironic" that movable type was invented in China? Sound like a little motivated reasoning 😏
"Like paper or porcelain, to give the first examples to come to mind. As I said, motivated reasoning."
Exactly my point. The West spread those things to the wider world, not China. Along with gunpowder, lenses, and yes, movable type.
And tea got to China from India. Which was also the source of Arabic numerals, which I think are now called Hindu-Arabic; and Istanbul was Constaninople, before which it was Byzantium; and Troy was a city long before the Greeks heard of it; and Columbus didn't discover America till long after Lief Ericson... Fun.
Barnes & Noble is succeeding because it is inefficient by design. By letting local humans choose books, the stores create "serendipity"—the joy of finding a book you didn't know you wanted.
In an age of digital fatigue, people are increasingly willing to pay a premium for human curation over a cold algorithm.
During the Cold War when the USSR was a menace and Communist China a threat, American ideologues used to rant against central planning. They'd complain about government interference in the economy and picking winners and losers. They'd joke about having to buy bread from Community Bakery 35 rather than one with a proper name.
It's different now. Most businesses are dominated by a handful of colluding big players, so they are as centrally planned as any business establish by some remote Politburo. We don't even give our stores identifying numbers, let alone names. This works for some businesses, if you ignore the price fixing, where the product is a commodity. Red wheat #3 was one of those inventions that let us feed the world.
It even worked for some cultural products, though at a cost. Hollywood cranked out movies that were seen throughout the country, though carefully edited for the racist South. Singers and musicians could become wealthy thanks to mechanical reproduction. The upside was a shared culture. The downside was a vulnerable monoculture. Central planning works until it doesn't work, and bookselling is a case in point.
In one of her films that talented little actor Shirley Temple sings and dances through a number with that black man called Mr Bojangles + to this day I'm not sure if he is the same one as in that song. But I heard a radio documentary about it and they snipped out the bits where she is holding his hand,and this edited version was the one released in the South USA. Who knew a sweet film about a cute kid could be political but having read her autobiography (half of it) little Shirley was quite political from an early age but strangely for the other side than the one she became an icon for as a kid. That is she felt she was born a Republican but it was FDRs New Deal Democracts that kind of used her to represent "young new America".
If your name was Mao, you had no problem getting the people to read your books; they were required to do so voluntarily. 100% readership = perfect efficiency, with no marketing costs.
I love the caves of the Dordogne, especially Lascaux and Pech Merle. I did a ton of research for my book METASKILLS, including several trips to France to gather information. Like Ted (and many others) I've hypothesized that the caves were used primarily to prepare tribesmen for the hunt. if you use a flashlight to simulate a flickering torch, the painted animals appear to fly across the walls and ceilings of the larger caverns. You can easily imagine the thunder of hooves being simulated by the drug-fueled drumming of the hunters. These caves were the sacred cinemas and of their time, central to the culture of the tribe. As to scaring away large animals on the surface, that seems a bit of stretch. Besides, the whole point of these rituals was to screw up their courage to take down a mastodon, or at least a few bison.
Peche Merle was amazing. Werner Herzog did a movie about a newly discovered cave with lots of cave paintings in his movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It wrapped up with albino alligators swimming in warm nuclear power plant waste water, but that's Herzog for you.
Caves may have been used for hunt preparation, but they might also have been used as schoolhouses. Not that long ago, a British furniture salesmen recognized that a lot of cave paintings of animals had a set of markings that indicated which month after the solstice that the animals returned to the area. Odds are the cave paintings were educational tools, and, as noted, education was an important part of preparation for the hunt.
I think people underestimate the need for education in early human society. If you visit Uluru, for example, there was an area used as a boys' school and another area for a girls' school. Children aren't just little sponges. They respond to and learn better from explicit instruction. (There used to be a paper on this that one could find by searching for "spoodle", but then they started using this as the name of a dog breed, so now it's hard to find.)
There are better angels living among us, reminding us to reach a little higher, try a little harder, give a little grace more often. Taylor Swift is one of those angels.
I so look forward to Ted's posts each time. My Barnes & Noble is still where it has always been but I have not visited it in many years. I think it might be time to do so now. I LOVE how people are responding to the wonderful world of reading and books. Love all of you in this Substack community too!
Im not sure why. Is it so hard to imagine people making noise in a cave and settling where it sounds the best? Any little kid(well at least when i was a kid) knows how to do this. Testing the sounds of new spaces is almost instinctual, maybe not even almost.
"Reading for pleasure is down 40% but Barnes & Noble is growing steadily."
Maybe its cool to buy books. Even cooler to be seen buying books. Js.
And idk why, bc i hate youtube, but i got some kind of pleased thrill reading the headline about yt giving billboard the finger. I dont have any animosity towards billboard either, i just like it when big players do away with pretense. Its like some refreshing level of honesty from consummate liars.
I spoke with an employee at our local B&N about the changes under the new CEO, and she was very enthusiastic about the changes. She said it was so much better than under the previous CEO. She also mentioned that B&N is buying independent stores, but not changing the name to B&N. Rather, they're giving cash infusions, updating technology, etc. Exciting times!
re the cave/singing business, ted. Several years ago we visited a cave system in Niaux which is up into the Pyrenees beyond Foix. This is a closed system and guided tours need to be booked well in advance. We descended underground for over a Km through dark and claustrophobic tunnels, guided only by the hand torches of the three guides accompanying around twenty visitors. We eventually reached an area where the cavern opened both out and upwards. this was where the cave paintings were located but what was immediately apparent was the immense acoustic space which allowed the slightest sounds to reverberate naturally and echo. The guide said bone flutes had been found in this chamber and the assumption was indeed that these people had both prepared for hunting and celebrated their success with chanting/singing and playing as well as the paintings. We were encouraged to sing and the atmosphere was eerie and impressive. This was a very profound experience which caused many of us to rethink such terms as “primitive” and “modern”.
"Daunt cares deeply about books and hires people who feel the same way. Then he enlists the support of booksellers in individual stores—who are given more freedom now to promote works they love. He even stopped taking promotional money in order to focus on the quality of the book instead of kickbacks from publishers."
So that's why the big strategically located stacks of right-wing remainder fodder are no longer on display at my local B&N! That alone makes them supporting.
I'd like to know how many devoted readers stopped going to brick-and-mortar stores partly because they didn't want to be confronted by Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter's paper presence.
I read many books on megalithic sites. It is only recently more attention has been brought to light about how these structures were build using very complex geometry and harmonics that mimic the harmony of the spheres (planets). One of the more prolific writers on this subject is Richard Heath. "Harmonic Origins of the World" "Matrix of Creation" and Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness. It has been speculated that Rock Art in Lascaux France depicts the Precession of the Equinox with the 6 stars over the bull (Taurus) being the six stars of the Pleades.
In 1941, a gentleman named Edward R. Dewey founded the Foundation of Study of Cycles. It was generously funded by the Rothschilds and Harry Truman in order to study hidden cycles in the economy to prevent a depression from ever happening again. The book, which was just rereleased, writes about how Dewey found cycles in every branch of human life. Cycles in music, cycles in culture, cycles in war, cycles in the fish counts in streams, cycles in yeast growth in test tubes.
No longer could you see life as a random walk, nor the economy, nor innovation in the sciences or music. Since then there has been alot more study on the subject and there are great many people who study these cycles. We're still a small group but with the internet there is alot more information more easily available then when I began my interest in the subject in 1987.
It was found that the harmonics (divisions) of the time of the precession of the equinox are the cycles in the economy and the stock market and these cycles were build into these megalithic structures and actually occulted in ancient religious scriptures. The Torah, Bible, Vedic writings and the Quran. Obviously most adherents of these religions know very little, if anything, of the deep mathematics buried in these book.
I went to the source site of the article that Ted wrote about on the acoustic properties of the caves where the art was embedded.
Heath and archeologists before him have shown these megalithic sites were often astronomical observatories in that the math was embedded into the structure and many of the paintings and hieroglyphics were astronomical symbols
Chaco Canyon has been shown to track the precession of what is known as the lunar nodes which is the 18.6 year cycle in business conditions that Edward Dewey discovered. Somebody, a long time ago was very very interested in these moments of time where I speculate they knew that change was upon them.
15 years ago, I watched this video by an archeologist who tracked this cycle and took meticulous photo's of the light entering a window at the site just like many megalithic sites. https://youtu.be/cy9BMe2CRCc?si=e-Kj1XnexDa-M89F It should give you goose bumps to realize that somebody designed a structure that would record the moment these astronomical events would be recorded. This includes all the megalithic sites in the UK including Stonehenge, Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and the early mounds in the United States which are identical in their geometry to ones found in Ireland.
I also believe that the greatest conspiracy of our time isn't Epstein, or JFK or 9-11. Why? These are the events everyone talks about. It's the things nobody talks about that are the ones they least want you to know. I believe history is the most institutionally and government supported suppression of our world in our modern century. History and time our past knowledge where there is proof that they tracked time and it wasn't just incidental to every day living. Ancient cultures with advanced astronomical sciences and technology that would be laughed at by statist scientists.
We just experienced the ingress of the 18.6 year cycle (it's an average) which we have over 200 years of records of how they timed the turning down of business conditions. Three of them around 53-55 years, periods of war, and commodity cycles.
I had said we don't need to worry about a crash in 2025 because of this. But 2026 and 2027 is different. One of the features of this cycles is that it resonates with the real estate cycle. Did you know that when the Empire State Building opened in 1931, it opened empty? Another feature of this cycle is higher and bigger. Man attempts these humongous projects as if we were Gods. If you go to wikipedia and look up the worlds tallest buildings, you'll find more are under construction then ever before. Construction cranes in every city in the world. We've been watching and documenting. Highest salaries for nonsense, highest paid piece of digital art, astronomical stock prices for stocks with no income.
We're not there yet but 2026 to 2027 should mark the top (for while) And while I don't expect a 1929 repeat at this point, I do think flash crashes are highly possible. Recession, war. This might also synchronize with a renaissance of the art. I have found the 36 year cycle plays a role in the evolution of jazz, music and film. And that hits this year.
Despite all my reading on megaliths, cave paintings and time cycles, this is the first time I've heard about the acoustic properties of these sites. I'm stoked to learn this. I have alot of research to do.
That whole cycle business is very imteresting to me. My whole life it seems is dictated by, often "vicious", cycles. Almost comically so. Most people ive tried to talk to about this look at me like im crazy.. unless until weve known each other long enough that i can start pointing things out. One friend was so perturbed by this she started hiding things she knew fit some cycle i had drawn attention to.
Monthly cycles, seasonal, yearly, and longer periods, things repeat. Even what music i like and when, so much so that ik when to listen to certain of my favorite artists to effect(and affect). And when i listen to those artists "out of time"(damn im on a roll) they *do not* do it for me.
Idk, its some crazy shit. I could go on for pages about this but you get my point. Its validating to hear im not as crazy as i think.
welcome to the bat shit crazy club!! I definitely get your point!! The idea of cycles of life, men and nations has been wiped out of our consciousness. Any man who writes a book on the nature of randomness will likely have his book nominated for a Pulitzer and put on the front desk of Barnes and Noble. Any man who writes a book on the universal order of the world will be relegated as a nut job. Indeed, I have cycles of music I listen to.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
The pendulum wave is an example of the hidden order in chaos. What we call "chaos" and "order" are simply two different views of the same thing. They are the Yin and the Yang, or the Yin/Yang. Sort of like Jazz/Classical, or Silence/Sound, or Male/Female. The part contains the whole, and the whole, the part. The universe in a grain of sand.
The Canyon de Chelly also has acoustic properties. Our tour guide pointed out that the areas, often a fair bit above the canyon floor, were chosen for their acoustic properties. It's a bit out of the way, but well worth visiting.
Barnes and Nobles (at least the ones surviving / newly opening in LA) have much reduced square footage. I appreciate the clean, well-lit stores, but offerings are more limited and the tight spaces discourage reading and the cafe / third place aspect of the older stores.
Taylor Swift has the biggest grossing tour in history, and gives a staggering amount of money in bonuses to the people who helped her. Pharaoh built the pyramids, and he used slaves to do the work. (Or did he? I hear now of artisans and corvee laborers.) Great things can be done when we care for people. Domination, violence and war are not required. Even if our political leaders keep telling us they are necessary.
With respect there has been a lot of archaeology done in the last four decades at the places that were the camps of villages where the persons who "built the pyramids" lived while engaged on this mega-project. And what has emerged is still under debate of course with some studiers of the evidence interpreting it one way and some another. But they definitely were NOT Hebrew slaves! Building these huge enigmatic structures which I doubt were actually meant as Tombs for Kings though they may have been used that way as a secondary purpose.,it seems to have captured the imagination of the Egyptian population,this idea of putting a mark on the world and they willingly did their six months service and gave their labour willingly to build these things. The diggers have found notes on shards and things like that with happy approving words on like people enjoyed being part of this huge project in which Humanity was saying (to the Gods?) WE ARE HERE. Of course it's all still under debate but I like the idea that people were enthused by the idea and willingly contributed.
Your comment certainly indicates there is more to the story about the building of the pyramids than what I was taught and heard. The line about "willingly did their six months service" caught me. Many of the people that I have known in my lifetime would bristle at having to do such forced labor. There are others that would make the best of it. I have to imagine Egyptians would have been a bit the same.
It's an interesting topic. There is also a theory (only) among some archaeologists that the great western European stone structures,the most famous being Stonehenge were built by local Kings primarily to display their power,wealth and control. By which I mean the fact that they could command so many people to create this (and with only reindeer antler picks!) demonstrated their social power - to other rulers. We don't have any inscriptions such as have survived in Egypt but it's thought by some archaeologists that the people willingly participated as a way of making a mark,a statement to The Universe,we are here. They certainly impressed us! That these stone places may have archaeological significance could be secondary. In fact,the famed astrogical competence of Stonehenge is being questioned as it was to all intents and purposes rebuilt in around 1912 as most of the big Sarsen stones were lying on the ground as they had been for hundreds of years and medieval folk had taken a lot for reuse or had fun blowing them up (as they were the Devils work),they'd build a huge bonfire over the stone and the heat would crack it into pieces. All blessed by the local vicar.
There's still hope for the survival of books. A new Barnes & Noble opened up in Orange Ca years after the old one closed because of a fire. The store is packed every time I go in there. And the book selection doesn't reflect the corporate publishing world's idea of what we should buy but, rather, the tastes of the employees and the residents of Orange County with it's large Hispanic and Asian population. It's great to have a neighborhood bookstore again.
Love this and yes - books - the real thing - are a remarkable technology - I was just looking at a stamp issued to commemorate Gutenberg's Bible - the stamp came out in 1952....and was marking 500 years of movable type. We have been transformed....
The irony being that the Chinese had movable type centuries before Gutenberg.
Gutenberg's breakthrough was in being able to cast type using a standard set of molds. It helped that he was printing in an alphabetic language, so he only needed a hundred or so glyphs. Chinese languages are word oriented, so thousands of glyphs were needed.
Didn't Francis Bacon point out that the compass, paper, the printing press and gunpowder were all originally developed in China but became important elements of European civilization. (Other technologies from China were also adopted like spaghetti and the familiar European plow.)
It appears that "The Million Charms of Princess [Somebody]" was the first; not that there were a million copies; but several thousand is still pretty impressive. And "charms" is of course an inaccurate old translation for what were sutras.
Yes, but Chinese movable didn't change the world, but European movable type did. Discuss amongst yourselves . . .
Not really relevant, although Chinese movable type was widely used in East Asia. European movable type changed the world, not because it was better, but because europeans were more aggressive and successful imperialists.
It's actually quite relevant, as Hal mentioned European movable type in the context of commemorating it's impact on the world. You may not like the reason for that greater impact, but that's irrelevant.
For what it's worth, one reason why China didn't historically trade with the wider world is because they were so profoundly racist that they thought that trading with other countries was beneath them. That's also why many of their other inventions had similarly little impact on the wider world.
China traded quite a lot with other nations, then and now. Which is how movable type came to Korea, for example. A better explanation would be that Chinese or Asian characters don't lend themselves to movable type as easily, as you would need an absurd number of characters. But it sounds like you're engaged in motivated reasoning.
"That's also why many of their other inventions had similarly little impact on the wider world."
Like paper or porcelain, to give the first examples to come to mind. As I said, motivated reasoning.
"A better explanation would be that Chinese or Asian characters don't lend themselves to movable type as easily, as you would need an absurd number of characters."
So you actually agree with the original comment. So why exactly is it "ironic" that movable type was invented in China? Sound like a little motivated reasoning 😏
"Like paper or porcelain, to give the first examples to come to mind. As I said, motivated reasoning."
Exactly my point. The West spread those things to the wider world, not China. Along with gunpowder, lenses, and yes, movable type.
It’s in the way that you use it - they had gunpowder before the West as well.
And tea got to China from India. Which was also the source of Arabic numerals, which I think are now called Hindu-Arabic; and Istanbul was Constaninople, before which it was Byzantium; and Troy was a city long before the Greeks heard of it; and Columbus didn't discover America till long after Lief Ericson... Fun.
Barnes & Noble is succeeding because it is inefficient by design. By letting local humans choose books, the stores create "serendipity"—the joy of finding a book you didn't know you wanted.
In an age of digital fatigue, people are increasingly willing to pay a premium for human curation over a cold algorithm.
During the Cold War when the USSR was a menace and Communist China a threat, American ideologues used to rant against central planning. They'd complain about government interference in the economy and picking winners and losers. They'd joke about having to buy bread from Community Bakery 35 rather than one with a proper name.
It's different now. Most businesses are dominated by a handful of colluding big players, so they are as centrally planned as any business establish by some remote Politburo. We don't even give our stores identifying numbers, let alone names. This works for some businesses, if you ignore the price fixing, where the product is a commodity. Red wheat #3 was one of those inventions that let us feed the world.
It even worked for some cultural products, though at a cost. Hollywood cranked out movies that were seen throughout the country, though carefully edited for the racist South. Singers and musicians could become wealthy thanks to mechanical reproduction. The upside was a shared culture. The downside was a vulnerable monoculture. Central planning works until it doesn't work, and bookselling is a case in point.
In one of her films that talented little actor Shirley Temple sings and dances through a number with that black man called Mr Bojangles + to this day I'm not sure if he is the same one as in that song. But I heard a radio documentary about it and they snipped out the bits where she is holding his hand,and this edited version was the one released in the South USA. Who knew a sweet film about a cute kid could be political but having read her autobiography (half of it) little Shirley was quite political from an early age but strangely for the other side than the one she became an icon for as a kid. That is she felt she was born a Republican but it was FDRs New Deal Democracts that kind of used her to represent "young new America".
If your name was Mao, you had no problem getting the people to read your books; they were required to do so voluntarily. 100% readership = perfect efficiency, with no marketing costs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_from_Chairman_Mao_Tse-tung
I love the caves of the Dordogne, especially Lascaux and Pech Merle. I did a ton of research for my book METASKILLS, including several trips to France to gather information. Like Ted (and many others) I've hypothesized that the caves were used primarily to prepare tribesmen for the hunt. if you use a flashlight to simulate a flickering torch, the painted animals appear to fly across the walls and ceilings of the larger caverns. You can easily imagine the thunder of hooves being simulated by the drug-fueled drumming of the hunters. These caves were the sacred cinemas and of their time, central to the culture of the tribe. As to scaring away large animals on the surface, that seems a bit of stretch. Besides, the whole point of these rituals was to screw up their courage to take down a mastodon, or at least a few bison.
Peche Merle was amazing. Werner Herzog did a movie about a newly discovered cave with lots of cave paintings in his movie The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It wrapped up with albino alligators swimming in warm nuclear power plant waste water, but that's Herzog for you.
Caves may have been used for hunt preparation, but they might also have been used as schoolhouses. Not that long ago, a British furniture salesmen recognized that a lot of cave paintings of animals had a set of markings that indicated which month after the solstice that the animals returned to the area. Odds are the cave paintings were educational tools, and, as noted, education was an important part of preparation for the hunt.
I think people underestimate the need for education in early human society. If you visit Uluru, for example, there was an area used as a boys' school and another area for a girls' school. Children aren't just little sponges. They respond to and learn better from explicit instruction. (There used to be a paper on this that one could find by searching for "spoodle", but then they started using this as the name of a dog breed, so now it's hard to find.)
Brilliant. I agree about Taylor Swift. She is revolutionary in so many ways.
There are better angels living among us, reminding us to reach a little higher, try a little harder, give a little grace more often. Taylor Swift is one of those angels.
I so look forward to Ted's posts each time. My Barnes & Noble is still where it has always been but I have not visited it in many years. I think it might be time to do so now. I LOVE how people are responding to the wonderful world of reading and books. Love all of you in this Substack community too!
"I was completely amazed,” says archaeologist
Im not sure why. Is it so hard to imagine people making noise in a cave and settling where it sounds the best? Any little kid(well at least when i was a kid) knows how to do this. Testing the sounds of new spaces is almost instinctual, maybe not even almost.
"Reading for pleasure is down 40% but Barnes & Noble is growing steadily."
Maybe its cool to buy books. Even cooler to be seen buying books. Js.
And idk why, bc i hate youtube, but i got some kind of pleased thrill reading the headline about yt giving billboard the finger. I dont have any animosity towards billboard either, i just like it when big players do away with pretense. Its like some refreshing level of honesty from consummate liars.
FWIW, I think B&N mostly sells tchotchkes.
Not anymore. The sections of toys are such are gone, at least in the one near me.
I spoke with an employee at our local B&N about the changes under the new CEO, and she was very enthusiastic about the changes. She said it was so much better than under the previous CEO. She also mentioned that B&N is buying independent stores, but not changing the name to B&N. Rather, they're giving cash infusions, updating technology, etc. Exciting times!
re the cave/singing business, ted. Several years ago we visited a cave system in Niaux which is up into the Pyrenees beyond Foix. This is a closed system and guided tours need to be booked well in advance. We descended underground for over a Km through dark and claustrophobic tunnels, guided only by the hand torches of the three guides accompanying around twenty visitors. We eventually reached an area where the cavern opened both out and upwards. this was where the cave paintings were located but what was immediately apparent was the immense acoustic space which allowed the slightest sounds to reverberate naturally and echo. The guide said bone flutes had been found in this chamber and the assumption was indeed that these people had both prepared for hunting and celebrated their success with chanting/singing and playing as well as the paintings. We were encouraged to sing and the atmosphere was eerie and impressive. This was a very profound experience which caused many of us to rethink such terms as “primitive” and “modern”.
😂 “The first rock music — surrounded by actual rocks”
"Daunt cares deeply about books and hires people who feel the same way. Then he enlists the support of booksellers in individual stores—who are given more freedom now to promote works they love. He even stopped taking promotional money in order to focus on the quality of the book instead of kickbacks from publishers."
So that's why the big strategically located stacks of right-wing remainder fodder are no longer on display at my local B&N! That alone makes them supporting.
I'd like to know how many devoted readers stopped going to brick-and-mortar stores partly because they didn't want to be confronted by Sean Hannity or Ann Coulter's paper presence.
I read many books on megalithic sites. It is only recently more attention has been brought to light about how these structures were build using very complex geometry and harmonics that mimic the harmony of the spheres (planets). One of the more prolific writers on this subject is Richard Heath. "Harmonic Origins of the World" "Matrix of Creation" and Precessional Time and the Evolution of Consciousness. It has been speculated that Rock Art in Lascaux France depicts the Precession of the Equinox with the 6 stars over the bull (Taurus) being the six stars of the Pleades.
In 1941, a gentleman named Edward R. Dewey founded the Foundation of Study of Cycles. It was generously funded by the Rothschilds and Harry Truman in order to study hidden cycles in the economy to prevent a depression from ever happening again. The book, which was just rereleased, writes about how Dewey found cycles in every branch of human life. Cycles in music, cycles in culture, cycles in war, cycles in the fish counts in streams, cycles in yeast growth in test tubes.
No longer could you see life as a random walk, nor the economy, nor innovation in the sciences or music. Since then there has been alot more study on the subject and there are great many people who study these cycles. We're still a small group but with the internet there is alot more information more easily available then when I began my interest in the subject in 1987.
It was found that the harmonics (divisions) of the time of the precession of the equinox are the cycles in the economy and the stock market and these cycles were build into these megalithic structures and actually occulted in ancient religious scriptures. The Torah, Bible, Vedic writings and the Quran. Obviously most adherents of these religions know very little, if anything, of the deep mathematics buried in these book.
I went to the source site of the article that Ted wrote about on the acoustic properties of the caves where the art was embedded.
Heath and archeologists before him have shown these megalithic sites were often astronomical observatories in that the math was embedded into the structure and many of the paintings and hieroglyphics were astronomical symbols
Chaco Canyon has been shown to track the precession of what is known as the lunar nodes which is the 18.6 year cycle in business conditions that Edward Dewey discovered. Somebody, a long time ago was very very interested in these moments of time where I speculate they knew that change was upon them.
15 years ago, I watched this video by an archeologist who tracked this cycle and took meticulous photo's of the light entering a window at the site just like many megalithic sites. https://youtu.be/cy9BMe2CRCc?si=e-Kj1XnexDa-M89F It should give you goose bumps to realize that somebody designed a structure that would record the moment these astronomical events would be recorded. This includes all the megalithic sites in the UK including Stonehenge, Pyramids in Egypt and Mexico and the early mounds in the United States which are identical in their geometry to ones found in Ireland.
I also believe that the greatest conspiracy of our time isn't Epstein, or JFK or 9-11. Why? These are the events everyone talks about. It's the things nobody talks about that are the ones they least want you to know. I believe history is the most institutionally and government supported suppression of our world in our modern century. History and time our past knowledge where there is proof that they tracked time and it wasn't just incidental to every day living. Ancient cultures with advanced astronomical sciences and technology that would be laughed at by statist scientists.
We just experienced the ingress of the 18.6 year cycle (it's an average) which we have over 200 years of records of how they timed the turning down of business conditions. Three of them around 53-55 years, periods of war, and commodity cycles.
I had said we don't need to worry about a crash in 2025 because of this. But 2026 and 2027 is different. One of the features of this cycles is that it resonates with the real estate cycle. Did you know that when the Empire State Building opened in 1931, it opened empty? Another feature of this cycle is higher and bigger. Man attempts these humongous projects as if we were Gods. If you go to wikipedia and look up the worlds tallest buildings, you'll find more are under construction then ever before. Construction cranes in every city in the world. We've been watching and documenting. Highest salaries for nonsense, highest paid piece of digital art, astronomical stock prices for stocks with no income.
We're not there yet but 2026 to 2027 should mark the top (for while) And while I don't expect a 1929 repeat at this point, I do think flash crashes are highly possible. Recession, war. This might also synchronize with a renaissance of the art. I have found the 36 year cycle plays a role in the evolution of jazz, music and film. And that hits this year.
Despite all my reading on megaliths, cave paintings and time cycles, this is the first time I've heard about the acoustic properties of these sites. I'm stoked to learn this. I have alot of research to do.
That whole cycle business is very imteresting to me. My whole life it seems is dictated by, often "vicious", cycles. Almost comically so. Most people ive tried to talk to about this look at me like im crazy.. unless until weve known each other long enough that i can start pointing things out. One friend was so perturbed by this she started hiding things she knew fit some cycle i had drawn attention to.
Monthly cycles, seasonal, yearly, and longer periods, things repeat. Even what music i like and when, so much so that ik when to listen to certain of my favorite artists to effect(and affect). And when i listen to those artists "out of time"(damn im on a roll) they *do not* do it for me.
Idk, its some crazy shit. I could go on for pages about this but you get my point. Its validating to hear im not as crazy as i think.
welcome to the bat shit crazy club!! I definitely get your point!! The idea of cycles of life, men and nations has been wiped out of our consciousness. Any man who writes a book on the nature of randomness will likely have his book nominated for a Pulitzer and put on the front desk of Barnes and Noble. Any man who writes a book on the universal order of the world will be relegated as a nut job. Indeed, I have cycles of music I listen to.
There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up,
a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.
You are on to something. You might be interested in this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8O1jlHyKpU
The pendulum wave is an example of the hidden order in chaos. What we call "chaos" and "order" are simply two different views of the same thing. They are the Yin and the Yang, or the Yin/Yang. Sort of like Jazz/Classical, or Silence/Sound, or Male/Female. The part contains the whole, and the whole, the part. The universe in a grain of sand.
Here is another sample:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLwClbpnIaM
Dunno about you, but I find these examples quite profound and moving.
How about "the one in the many"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXBia5kuqY&t=5s
The Canyon de Chelly also has acoustic properties. Our tour guide pointed out that the areas, often a fair bit above the canyon floor, were chosen for their acoustic properties. It's a bit out of the way, but well worth visiting.
The lack of artist development by the music industry has a directly corollary in how and why the roomba was killed: research takes money that could go to stock buybacks: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-wall-street-ruined-the-roomba
Barnes and Nobles (at least the ones surviving / newly opening in LA) have much reduced square footage. I appreciate the clean, well-lit stores, but offerings are more limited and the tight spaces discourage reading and the cafe / third place aspect of the older stores.
Taylor Swift has the biggest grossing tour in history, and gives a staggering amount of money in bonuses to the people who helped her. Pharaoh built the pyramids, and he used slaves to do the work. (Or did he? I hear now of artisans and corvee laborers.) Great things can be done when we care for people. Domination, violence and war are not required. Even if our political leaders keep telling us they are necessary.
With respect there has been a lot of archaeology done in the last four decades at the places that were the camps of villages where the persons who "built the pyramids" lived while engaged on this mega-project. And what has emerged is still under debate of course with some studiers of the evidence interpreting it one way and some another. But they definitely were NOT Hebrew slaves! Building these huge enigmatic structures which I doubt were actually meant as Tombs for Kings though they may have been used that way as a secondary purpose.,it seems to have captured the imagination of the Egyptian population,this idea of putting a mark on the world and they willingly did their six months service and gave their labour willingly to build these things. The diggers have found notes on shards and things like that with happy approving words on like people enjoyed being part of this huge project in which Humanity was saying (to the Gods?) WE ARE HERE. Of course it's all still under debate but I like the idea that people were enthused by the idea and willingly contributed.
Your comment certainly indicates there is more to the story about the building of the pyramids than what I was taught and heard. The line about "willingly did their six months service" caught me. Many of the people that I have known in my lifetime would bristle at having to do such forced labor. There are others that would make the best of it. I have to imagine Egyptians would have been a bit the same.
It's an interesting topic. There is also a theory (only) among some archaeologists that the great western European stone structures,the most famous being Stonehenge were built by local Kings primarily to display their power,wealth and control. By which I mean the fact that they could command so many people to create this (and with only reindeer antler picks!) demonstrated their social power - to other rulers. We don't have any inscriptions such as have survived in Egypt but it's thought by some archaeologists that the people willingly participated as a way of making a mark,a statement to The Universe,we are here. They certainly impressed us! That these stone places may have archaeological significance could be secondary. In fact,the famed astrogical competence of Stonehenge is being questioned as it was to all intents and purposes rebuilt in around 1912 as most of the big Sarsen stones were lying on the ground as they had been for hundreds of years and medieval folk had taken a lot for reuse or had fun blowing them up (as they were the Devils work),they'd build a huge bonfire over the stone and the heat would crack it into pieces. All blessed by the local vicar.