
Quebec teen discovers ancient Mayan ruins by studying the stars - vinnyglennon
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/quebec-teen-discovers-ancient-mayan-ruins-by-170620746.html
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Ccecil
I noticed a while back playing with google earth that if you take the ruler
tool and trace a ray from the Nazca lines that quite a few of them intersect
with known ruins...some quite some distance away. I am not sure if it has any
"real" meaning...but it was an interesting thing to play with. For all I know
it is irrelevant due to the errors on the google earth stuff or the curve of
the earth...but it was still fun to play with. Some of the intersections were
all the way up in Mexico...some as close as the coast.

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zevkirsh
peter theil needs to meet this kid.

formal schooling is the worst thing in the world for curious and thoughtful
minds like this.

still, it's amazing that such a 'discovery' can be made so quickly by
sattelite confirmation. the age old human mind combined with modern sensor
tools is capable of 'discoveries'. simply not possible in the past.

consider in the past, it owuld have taken years to put together expedition
funding and organize explorers to get to the suspected location of the alleged
city.

now, you just get the right person on the phone at the right research
department , and existing searchable maps of the location are already at your
disposal, if they (high resolution lidar?) aren't already accessible through
public google earth maps.

this is amazing. we are making discoveries at light speed because massive
quantities of diverse information are available to 15 year olds, and the
capacity for verifying suspicions is there because of our capacity for
creating searcheable organized data.

this truly is the structure of scientific revolution. so many things coming
together to make a new paradigm of discovery possible. it is THESE kinds of
stories really give me passion for science making the world better.

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vinnyglennon
[http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-m...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/forgotten-
mayan-city-discovered-in-central-america-by-15-year-old-a7021291.html) another
source

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mcv
Snopes doesn't think so: [http://www.snopes.com/canadian-teen-satellite-
maps](http://www.snopes.com/canadian-teen-satellite-maps)

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Kinnard
Can someone hook this kid up with a blog or a school or something?

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iofj
Great find. But sort of lowers my opinion of Maya culture. Having city
locations decided by star constellations ? Sounds like this is on the insane
side even for theocracies.

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tpeo
Why is it insane?

I don't know for what purpose they'd build something like that, but I reckon
that's the kind of stuff about anything which is most easily lost. Stuff from
millenia ago can easily look like "cow tools". They were mostly agricultural
civilizations though, and attached importance to astronomy to some degree
because it allowed them to make calendars and plan ahead of time.

I don't think it's nothing out of ordinary that they've built stuff to align
with the sky.

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iofj
Well it obviously means that priests dictated where cities were to be built.

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raddad
What if the stars were a version of GPS? You could find your way around from
city to city. Ships did it, why not pedestrians?

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Ccecil
Some of the areas...such as Coba...had roads made from white rock so they
could travel easily at night too...so it all seems to make more sense.

