This question inspired by this post..
How they used to get rid of motor oil back in the day.
For the uninitiated: Clarke and Dawe - The Front Fell Off
I mean… the wisdom not really incorrect - the oil would soak into the ground. In this era people just piled up garbage in their back yard and burned it. Obviously this isn’t an appropriate way to dispose of things in 2024.
The wisdom is incorrect though, in the sense that you aren’t ‘disposing’ of the oil using this method. You are simply hiding it while simultaneously toxifying your immediate environment.
Semantics. What does it mean to “dispose” of something?
to get rid of something, especially by throwing it away
I love how nowadays they made it illegal to wash your car out on the street because it pollutes the ground.
Like motherfucker where do you think this dirt goes to when it falls off the car while driving?
They should outlaw cars to fix this.
He said can’t wash on the street which implies you can wash on the driveway which will immediately spill into the street.
I suspect the law is more of a safety law created after some teens were hit while washing their car and the parents demanded something must be done.
We have safe cleaning detergents, the government agencies themselves claim it’s the dirt hence a reply to their claim
“Feed a cold, starve a fever.” Rest, hydrate, and eat if you can.
We also learned that a mild fever is productive in fighting the virus and that you should let it get to a certain point before dealing with it.
It means trying to end a fever by bringing the temperature of the person down via whatever method.
Aristotle was obviously a great teacher and philosopher but he ended up being wrong about a lot. Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
He thought eels didn’t procreate because no one had ever seen it happening. (They go out to sea to fuck.) He was into bees and correctly noticed that there were workers and drones and that young bees grow out of the honeycomb. But he just assumed the Queen was a King and that worker bees were out collecting tiny baby bees from flowers. (He thought the air just blew pollen around and the honey naturally appeared.)
He had a lot of ideas that were just ideas but he was so influential and his writings were preserved and translated. It took a shocking number of years for people to question if Aristotle was full of shit.
The worst part of it was that for a ton of stuff he had contemporaries that were right about much much more, but were dismissed in favor of his confidently incorrect BS.
For example the Epicureans, who thought matter was made of tiny indivisible parts, that light too was made of indivisible parts moving really fast, that each parent contributed to a “doubled seed” which determined the traits of the child and could bring back features of skipped generations, that the animals which we see today were just the ones that were best able to survive to reproduce, and that all of existence arose only from the random interactions of these indivisible parts of matter and not from any intelligent design.
And because Aristotle’s stupid ideas influenced the lineage of modern thought, most people learn about him but very few learn about the other group that effectively preempted modern thought millennia earlier.
But he just assumed the Queen was a King
Actually, he acknowledged “some say” the Queen was female, but then argued it couldn’t be because the gods don’t give women weapons and it had a stinger. And the identification of the leader of the hive as male was actually used for centuries to justify patriarchal monarchy as being “by God’s design” because after all, look at the bee hive (somehow when we realized it was actually a female that logic went up in smoke).
So there were other people that did know what was correct, but Aristotle screwed up the development of thinking around it by rationalizing an opposite answer with an appeal to misogyny.
Wild that he was only two degrees of separation from a teacher famed for praising the knowledge of self-ignorance and not falling into false positives and negatives.
What I’m getting from this is that people were the same back then as they are now. Aristotle was basically a hack who said just the right bigoted things for the ruling class to latch onto to justify the status quo. Like an ancient political commentator, or popular “scientist” who says anything for attention.
But the Epicureans also denied that virtue is primary in achieving eudaimonia and from a Stoic POV, that’s just a cardinal sin. Due to the Stoics is also the idea of animals being self-aware as well as cosmopolitanism and the absolutely unheard of notion that women have the same mental faculties as men and thus should also enjoy education.
But really, all the “Figuring out how to be like Sokrates” schools of philosophy were highly productive.
“Element” is a fairly general word, we just generally use it colloquially to refer specifically to the chemical elements. If you interpret his usage in the same way we use “states of matter”, it’s not horrendously far off. Earth, water, air, and fire roughly correspond to solid, liquid, gas, and (extremely rudimentary, very low ionization) plasma (or perhaps a more general energetic concept). In any case, an object “wanting” to get to its “natural” place also isn’t terribly far off from a statement of consistent physical laws. Solids do “want” to accumulate with other solids by gravity, energetic gases do “want” to rise above less energetic ones through buoyancy.
Ok, but the rocks and flames thing is pretty cute. The elements… they yearn for their homes…
My boy Aristotle thought men had more teeth than women, and whatever testable hypothesis he created to prove that fact didn’t include, you know, counting the teeth of men and women.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy, and will agree that “classical elements” is probably the dumbest thing to accuse him of being wrong about. Hell, I have considered getting a Bekker number tattoo, but he was definitely full of some shit. It’s okay to acknowledge he was right about some things and wrong about others. That’s the whole point of this thread.
It’s fascinating just how utterly alien this all sounds to our modern ears, with the benefit of many generations cycling through the creation and deployment of the written word, then the printed word, then electromagnetic communication, then computers, then the internet.
Imagine the strange descriptions and explanations that were passed down via the spoken word and memory alone, for countless generations until arriving at Aristotle. Before the Sumerians and all the way up to the Phoenicians and FINALLY the invention of a workable, practical phonetic alphabet. Imagine the tales they would tell! So many of them lost to time, before they had a chance at being registered in a physical medium.
How did they make sense of what they saw in the night skies at places like Lascaux and Gobekli Tepe? How did they regard and explain the migration of the birds, the rainbow and the lightning?
Accumulating knowledge and communications technology have standardized certain views of the world, one step at a time, first slowly then more rapidly, and accelerating. In the days of Aristotle, this was all just barely beginning, and I believe that what we don’t know about those people before that time - the human primate in the process of becoming civilized - could surprise and confound us, that their views might have been more alien and even outlandish to us than we can imagine.
I mean… Aristotle sounds weird enough, right? I believe he’s just the tip of a huge and deep iceberg of ideas and time.
Like he thought the “elements” were earth, wind, fire, and water and that all objects want to be in their “natural” place. So, if you drop a rock, it tries to return to the earth. Fire goes up because it’s trying to get to where it “wants” to live.
That’s basically correct, though, as long as you’re intepreting “elements” to mean something more in linenwith “states of matter”, rather than actual fundamental periodic style elements.
Check out the history of bird migration science. There was everything from birds going to the moon for winter, swallows burrowing in the mud, transmorphing to different species, up to the 19th century
Add to that where people thought bugs and vermin come from. Obviously they spring fully formed for dirt and muck. Even rats come from rotting grain.
For anyone curious the history really is interesting, when reading previously I learned about Pfeilstorch, storks throughout the years that had flown to Germany with African arrows stuck in them. First seen at a time when people didn’t understand bird migration, it helped to explain where all the birds would go.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
