Some of the most important and vital technology we have today is also some of the oldest. We take this technology for granted any more. In fact, at the end of the year, many businesses hand out this technology as advertising to their good customers. Others famously plaster scantily clad vixens on the technology and sell them for profit. In any case, few people stop to realize the sheer magnitude of the items and their power over life and death.
Of course, I am talking about calendars and clocks.
They are so vital that vast stone monuments have been erected to ensure their endurance. Ubiquitous modern legends have grown up around the Mayan calendar. There are presently about seven major calendars in use today, though the most common is the Gregorian, which renders today as 12May2012. Many of the great rulers of history are known as much for their innovations with calendars, as anything else.
A good calendar means the difference between life and death. Without them, our civilization could not exist. Likely, neither could we individually, in any form we would think of as comfortable. In fact, the current domination of Western civilization is based in part on the Gregorian calendar.
Likewise, the clock. We organize our most mundane events and chores around clocks. The invention of an accurate time piece for ships is what allowed the British to conquer large chunks of the globe for 300 years and lead to the current reliance on Greenwich or Zulu time and the modern Prime Meridian or Zero Longitude.
More than any other devices ever invented, these two are of the greatest consequence to our modern lifestyles and all that implies. Without them, we could not measure the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, nor the motions of the stars in the sky, and that would mean almost certain death for billions of humans.
Calendars are central to farming and the production of food. Without knowing when to plant and harvest, we are reduced to watching the vagaries of wooly boogers and animal fur. Our ability to predict the first and last freeze of the winter would be completely shot, and food production would dwindled to virtually nothing. Those who survived would be little more than hunter/gatherers, at the mercy of the elements and random luck.
Think of all the things we take for granted that are dependent on calendars and clocks. The computers on which I am writing and you are reading rely completely on internal clocks to draw meaning from the otherwise useless flow of 1s and 0s. You dinner tonight is possible because of someone using a calendar. Even the buxom bubblehead reading the weather forecast off a Tele-Prompt-R needs a calendar somewhere in the loop.
A fellow by the name of Crichton Miller has developed a fascinating theory that something we all consider to be a religious symbol is, in fact, a depiction of a device that was able to calculate calendars and clocks, among many other useful things. It is so simple, yet the implications of his theory are astounding. It is the cross. More specifically, it is the Celtic Cross, which most folks would recognize as a cross with fat arms and a circle around the center.
When one ponders his discovery, the deeper revelations are literally mind-blowing. Here, staring us all in the face for centuries, hidden in plain sight, and used as mundane adornment, is a tool of such remarkable utility as to allow the circumnavigation of the planet, the building of huge edifaces, and the accurate calculation of a local calendar and time system. Attached to a plumb and either hand-held or mounted, it is an amazing analogue computer that can even multi-task, and has all its applications hardwired into it.
The implications of his theory are profound, and may even be proof of a pre-deluvian civilization, and it literally surrounds us. Its enormous importance is shown by the central placement of the cross in so many religions and civilizations around the Earth and through time.
An interesting side note to this is a man named Eritosthenes. He was a Greek in 200BC who invented geography and did a number of other useful things. Among them was calculating the circumference of the Earth, the Moon, and the distances to the Moon and Sun. Amazingly, he was exactly 10% shy of absolutely right. The reason he was 10% short was that he used an Egyptian measuring system that was used by the high priests in ancient times to survey land tracts for taxes. In order to inflate the tax revenues, they shaved 10% off their measurements to over-estimate the amount of land held by an individual.
Not only does this demonstrate that religion and government have lied and cheated throughout history, but it shows the importance of the ability to measure the surface of the Earth, and all of Nature, accurately. Tools such as the Celtic Cross do exactly that, and much more.
Which brings us full circle to my original rant: the ubiquitous conspiracy that is destroying our civilization.
It's the digital clock.
Folks today can barely read, much less use analogue clocks. It's a conspiracy to prevent us from learning certain basic skills that would allow us to build a civilization out of virtually nothing. By keeping us ignorant of things as basic as analogue clocks, the PTW have attempted to destroy our ability to decipher our truly amazing hidden history.
I don't normally use jewelry or personal adornment. I have little use for it. But when I travel, I always carry a towel (thansk Douglas Adams) and an analogue watch. The towel is strictly a comfort item, but the watch is a survival tool.
Among other things, you could literally drop me in the middle of BFE, and using my watch, I could determine my exact location, the time of year and construct tools for surveying and constructing a house. All I need is the watch, a stick and a basic knowledge of astronomy (about 25 stars or so). With a little knowledge of geography, I could find the distance and direction to the nearest major city. I could build a calendar to tell me when to plant and harvest. I could construct a mile-long viaduct to bring spring water to my little house on the prairie. In fact, there are hundreds of useful things I could do with, or based on, an analogue wrist watch.
Oh sure, you say. Tom Hanks made a calendar in Cast Away with nothing but a hole in the rock. Sure, and it took him the better part of a year, and that only told him the season and latitude, not the longitude. One without the other doesn't get you home. If he had had a good analogue watch, he could have figured all that out in a day or two and been home in less than a year.
You need to know the right ascension and declination of 25 stars (one in each hour of the sky and the pole star), how to read the Sun and Moon, and a good watch.
When you're building a soap box racer, success and greatly reduced medical expenses are as simple as a lynch pin. Without that one simple tool, all your efforts are doomed to fail, and it's likely to be very painful. A few hours of reading and some warm nights staring at the stars can mean survival in the most extreme situations.
Simplicity is often the easiest thing to overlook.
