The Reality Check Episode 19

Pseudoegyptology+Feng Shui+The Rule of Thumb

Part 1:

Pseudoegyptology! Some while ago, many people thought that the Sphinx is actually a lot older than said in the textbooks. The sides of the Sphinx look like it has water erosions around it, and there hasn't been water in Egypt for thousands and thousands of years. But, now we know that it is actually not true. The Sphinx is actually made up of different materials. The head is made with a really solid and hard material. The body however is made with many many layers of stone, which is quite soft compared to the head, and can be shown to look like it had an erosion by the wind and sand. 

As mentioned before in a previous podcast of the Reality Check, the Earth's axis actually moves and shifts the whole planet by 1 degree every 72 years. In some ancient Egyptian texts, the Orion's Belt is suppose to be right above the Sphinx when it was made. Now if we do some calculations, we know that the last time Orion's Belt was right over the Sphinx was 10500 B.C., which was a long time ago. There are many other things such as the pyramid's angle should be facing a direction, and it's a bit off today. 

Some people say that the Sphinx actually used to be a lion, and they found out they can't have a big face hanging up in the sky or something like that, and they recarved it. There are other examples like this one as well, halfway through building something, the Egyptians found out it can't be done that way. There's one bend pyramid of the Three Pyramids, the angle of the Pyramid is actually kind of bent and not straight as it should be. 

Gram Hancock suggests that all the world's civilization came from one origin, and the place he suggested was Antartica. He said that there was once a great civilization there, and once there was a random drastic shift of the plates around 11600BC, antartica quickly shifted 2000 miles south overnight. However, there is no evidence of it though. 

In conclusion, the Pyramids are not 10000 years old, the Sphinx does not relate to the Orion, and you can't trust Hollywood movies. 

You can look up more of Gram Hancock here: http://www.grahamhancock.com/biog.htm

Part 2:

風水 means wind water, as we all know. It's basically the art of balancing 氣 energy through the arranging objects at the appropriate positions. That is the definition of modern 風水, you can actually use it anywhere. Just anything in your daily life, where and how your house should be built, what direction is should face. What names you should give your children, where and how to bury your dead. You can just it for anything; no limits with 風水. You need to arrange the things to let the 氣 flow in and out smoothly, then things will go well. 

The masters who calculate the 氣 use a diagram which is really flexible with millions of changes called 八卦. We don't know how, but they know how to use the diagram and calculates how to do and place things. 

However, they all come up with different ways to place your things. If you took three different masters together and get them to say where to place things, they would say different places. It's not consistent, and again, it's not falsifiable. 

There was a time when telephones were introduced to Hong Kong, and the people there at first were pushing and destroying the telephone poles. They said that it disrupted the 氣 from flowing smoothly. But then once the higher up people, such as the masters and the priest were paid a lot of money, everything is flowing smoothly again. 

Science Myth of the Week: 

The Rule of Thumb has been said to derive from the belief that English law allowed men to beat their wives with a long stick as long as it's not thicker than their thumbs. 

It originated in 1976, it was not because of the negative origin as mentioned above.