TheBramble
Legendary member
- Messages
- 8,394
- Likes
- 1,170
I don't want to continue to stir up this issue and will let it drop right after this post. As an aside, I’m not sure why I’m giving this my time anyway other than to exercise my passion to cure folk of their persistent belief in belief being sufficient in and of itself to induce belief in others.
Lightning, if you check all the points you relate for us ('friend of Freddie II', 'wrote a number of books' etc) you'll find this all comes from the same initial and single source any of us have for all the information we allegedly have on this myth. We have no independent confirmation for instance, that Frederick II ever knew anyone like this. There is no documentary proof or cross-check to substantiate any of the confirmations necessary to establish the existence of this person as having had any physical reality.
Nobody has actually ever seen any of the original documents, only ever handed-down copies of. There is no provenance to support any of it.
I'm not going to venture into the why's and what for's of the basis for the myth and Fibs DO exist for the reason I highlighted earlier on this thread, but I am aghast that so many accept so much without any attempt to substantiate any part of it for themselves.
There is a rule which I can't remember the name of but it basically states that if anything is going to survive more than 7 generations there will be ample evidence from multiple sources to support its provenance from its point of origin. Basically, if you're that good, so many of your contemporaries will talk about you and write about you that your fame will be traceable through a number of independently verifiable routes each of which themselves will be independently verifiable through a similar process. However if you're a small town schmuck that nobody is going to remember after you're dead, or even while you're still alive in some cases, then you're unlikely to have produced anything worth talking about, or it would have been at the time, and in depth. Independently verifiable proof. That’s all that’s missing.
To address the other non-trading issues which is what I was doing when challenged by Sir Joules, check the following.
The Fibonacci numbers first appeared, under the name mātrāmeru (mountain of cadence), in the work of the Sanskrit grammarian Pingala (Chandah-shāstra, the Art of Prosody, 450 or 200 BC).
Check out all the apparent correspondences in nature too. The ‘proportion’ is said to exist in relation to a person’s height and the height of their navel (it doesn’t – that value is closer to 0.58 +/- 0.01); length of forearm in relation to base of palm to tip of middle finger (also out by a country mile for most non-Simians); number of spirals in a galaxy (uh? Most have just two), distribution and numbers of petals and branches (on a few, but not the vast majority of plants and trees), nautilus shells (actually not, if you check the detail), proportion of distance of the planets from the Sun (providing you miss one or two and give up after Mars and forget Mercury as well).
Really, there is just so much tosh talked about this subject and Trendie is right, if some use it for trading and sufficiently so for it to be a tradable phenomenon then use it – which is what I believe I said right back at the beginning. Just don’t get conned into all this rationalising hype generated in an attempt to give it credibility it doesn’t warrant. This is cognitive dissonance at its best.
Sir Joules, thou art a brave and able knight, but your lance is broke, thou art unseated from your steed and I fear you are undone. But be of good heart and know well, your fate was sealed long before it was begun.
Adieu.
Lightning, if you check all the points you relate for us ('friend of Freddie II', 'wrote a number of books' etc) you'll find this all comes from the same initial and single source any of us have for all the information we allegedly have on this myth. We have no independent confirmation for instance, that Frederick II ever knew anyone like this. There is no documentary proof or cross-check to substantiate any of the confirmations necessary to establish the existence of this person as having had any physical reality.
Nobody has actually ever seen any of the original documents, only ever handed-down copies of. There is no provenance to support any of it.
I'm not going to venture into the why's and what for's of the basis for the myth and Fibs DO exist for the reason I highlighted earlier on this thread, but I am aghast that so many accept so much without any attempt to substantiate any part of it for themselves.
There is a rule which I can't remember the name of but it basically states that if anything is going to survive more than 7 generations there will be ample evidence from multiple sources to support its provenance from its point of origin. Basically, if you're that good, so many of your contemporaries will talk about you and write about you that your fame will be traceable through a number of independently verifiable routes each of which themselves will be independently verifiable through a similar process. However if you're a small town schmuck that nobody is going to remember after you're dead, or even while you're still alive in some cases, then you're unlikely to have produced anything worth talking about, or it would have been at the time, and in depth. Independently verifiable proof. That’s all that’s missing.
To address the other non-trading issues which is what I was doing when challenged by Sir Joules, check the following.
The Fibonacci numbers first appeared, under the name mātrāmeru (mountain of cadence), in the work of the Sanskrit grammarian Pingala (Chandah-shāstra, the Art of Prosody, 450 or 200 BC).
Check out all the apparent correspondences in nature too. The ‘proportion’ is said to exist in relation to a person’s height and the height of their navel (it doesn’t – that value is closer to 0.58 +/- 0.01); length of forearm in relation to base of palm to tip of middle finger (also out by a country mile for most non-Simians); number of spirals in a galaxy (uh? Most have just two), distribution and numbers of petals and branches (on a few, but not the vast majority of plants and trees), nautilus shells (actually not, if you check the detail), proportion of distance of the planets from the Sun (providing you miss one or two and give up after Mars and forget Mercury as well).
Really, there is just so much tosh talked about this subject and Trendie is right, if some use it for trading and sufficiently so for it to be a tradable phenomenon then use it – which is what I believe I said right back at the beginning. Just don’t get conned into all this rationalising hype generated in an attempt to give it credibility it doesn’t warrant. This is cognitive dissonance at its best.
Sir Joules, thou art a brave and able knight, but your lance is broke, thou art unseated from your steed and I fear you are undone. But be of good heart and know well, your fate was sealed long before it was begun.
Adieu.
