Back when I was an avid patron of science publications, I often heard scientists comment about how scientists were like blindfolded men examining an elephant. One grabs its leg and declares it’s a tree, another grabs its trunk and declares it’s a snake, and so forth…
Not a good way to start the New Year, but I’m feeling a bit like one of these blindfolded scientists today, after going over WMF Petrie’s measures between major Giza pyramids again.
Very easily possible I’ve tried to do too much too fast with too many distractions, and come up with the wrong answers, in spite of what I can hope is a very good track record of not having to submit revisions.
Something doesn’t seem quite right with that work, and especially not if the math is going to show that Petrie was almost perfectly accurate here but off by three or four feet over there.
Hence, I’m not sure what there is to, for example, stop his figure of 15170.4 inches from being something rather different than my first attempts at interpretation say it may be. It could be, say, 15198.17755 (((15 / (Pi^2)) x 10^n) for all I really know, in spite of the very strong appearance that more than one of these measures displayed the use of the Palestine Cubit.
For that, I’d have to say that everything I’ve had to say about these measures so far needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt.
I’ll leave the posts up for now, but please be advised that the work needs to be reconsidered before resting much confidence in it. Under the circumstances I certainly shouldn’t have declared that any of it has been solved. I’m very eager to make and share new discoveries on a regular basis and to see some of this work finished at long last, but that’s no excuse for being hasty.
Apologies for any confusion I might have caused concerning the orientation of Giza’s pyramids, it’s certainly my intent to cause less confusion, not more.
I suppose there’s some irony in that if I’ve erred here, it may well have been for trying to stick too close to the data, for trying to be too respectable and too accurate. There is such a thing, and I still don’t know of an accurate “yardstick” by which to measure Petrie’s accuracy for large measures such as these, even if we can rightfully consider him to generally be rather impeccable when it comes to smaller measures.
For that, yes it is a lot like trying to practice zoology while blindfolded, as tired as the story of the blindfolded men and the elephant may be trying to get.
Speaking of elephants, btw, elephants are part of my standard explanation of why I don’t pay much attention to accurate placement of decimal points.
We used to make up fancy expressions for this like “decimal harmonic” and “digit string”, but the point is very simple – if math is being used as language here and digits are like letters and numbers are like words, it really doesn’t matter if I write “ele.phant” or “elephan.t”, either way the reader is hopefully thinking of a large gray animal with big floppy ears.
Sometimes I just put the decimal point where I think it will be easiest for a search to spot, and maybe I shouldn’t even be using decimal points in the first place.
At any rate, when I talk about the critical nature of “mathematical truths”, I’m certainly not talking about accurate placement of decimal points.
The only time decimal placement really matters here is when we are talking about square roots, which operate at every other decimal place of the square, and cube roots, which operate at every third decimal place of the cube, and so forth, something I’m temped to call the “root rule” and stick with it.
That’s why for example the highly fundamental values of sqrt 2.4, sqrt 240, sqrt 24000, and etc belong to this math, and sqrt 24, sqrt 2400, sqrt 240000 and etc don’t.
–Luke Piwalker
Luke Piwalker 