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Monday, May 28, 2012

WHAT ARE the ODDS?

Could you help me calculate the odds?
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There is a good chance.  It’s my talent, you know.  What do you want to calculate the odds on?



I placed a mark on a Google Earth view of North America.  I put the mark where I thought Norse Christians settled in the 12th century and …
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 Zillion to one.  There were no Norse Christians in America in the 12th century.
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I have documentation from four different groups of authorities in the 11th and 12th centuries. One of those authorities wrote that the Norse were near an "Ocean discovered by many." 
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The only ocean beyond the Atlantic would have been the Pacific or maybe he meant Hudson Bay?
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He may have meant Hudson Bay, which was shown on French maps as "Mer Christian" until the 18th century.  There is physical evidence that their documentation was an accurate account of past events.  Assume I am correct and ...
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And?
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And calculate the odds of me placing a place mark within ten miles of a 14th century Norse artifact that I did not know was there.

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.You placed a mark on a Google image of North America, where you thought 12th century Norse Christians might have been. There was a 14th Century Norse artifact within ten miles?
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What are the odds?
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The realistic odds are now two zillion to one.  Neither the Norse Christians nor the Norse artifact were in North America then.  But the hypothetical odds to your delusional proposition are 188,000 to one. 
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How did you calculate the odds that fast? 
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Easy.  North America has 9,400,000 square miles.  An area of 50 square miles has a hypotenuse of ten miles.  So if you put your mark in any area of 50 square miles and if there was a Norse artifact in that area, the area would be one out of 188,000 such areas in North America.  .

How could you get it in your simple skull that the Norse Christians and the Norse artifact were where you placed the mark?
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You and I have different paradigms.  My paradigm is that many boats came to ancient American from many places at many different times.
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I cannot understand how someone, like you, who depends on the logic of numbers, can believe the Eurocentric Myth that not one boat landed in North America before the European invasion?
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The European Myth, as you call it, has to be correct.  We all learned that in school.  Scholars would not allow a myth to be repeated in history books if it were not true.
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Perhaps you are too trusting of scholars.  I learned in my youth that paper is a funny thing.  The paper just lies there.  Scholars can write lies on paper.  Most students read the paper and believe the lies to be true.
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Why would scholars lie?
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Why would a thief write that nobody was home, when, in fact, he killed the family and moved in over their dead bodies?
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A thief could not get away with that.
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Thieves did get away with it because the nearest authority was 3,000 miles away -- in England.  The thieves' stories were easy to believe in England.  The historians had already conned the people of England to believe that there were only a few pagan natives in the New World. 
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So, you say, the historians, back home in England, recorded the thieves’ lies because they reinforced the growing Eurocentric Myth? You have favorable odds for that statement.  
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Then the English historians entrenched the Eurocentric Myth by printing it in the history books.  Every scholar for four centuries has re-written the Myth as the gospel truth. 

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The first Europeans, who came to America, came from war-ravaged Europe, where Protestants and Catholics were slaughtering each other. Then the European Christians did not behave as we think, now, that Christians have always behaved.   
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What are the odds the paper, which the invaders of America wrote upon, was an accurate account of past events.
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When you phrase it like that, the odds against an accurate account of events would have been very high.  One of the first European actions was the Catholics massacring hundreds of Protestants.
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Then the Protestants returned to massacre the Catholics.  Nice time in the New World, huh? We rarely see that episode in school history books.  The historians have a hard time fitting those actual events into the Eurocentric Myth.
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They also have a hard time fitting the 12th century Norse Christians--the "family" that was home in America-- into the Eurocentric Myth.  So they leave it out.  
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The paradigm of many boats coming to America from many places at many different times has better odds of being correct than no single boat arriving ahead of the invasion.
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Well, maybe.  But there is no evidence.  You got to have evidence.
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Seven years ago I recorded the evidence of Norse Christians in America. I counted 129 Norse artifacts from 26 different states and provinces in North America. 
.What do you think the odds are now?
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Wait a minute!  You knew the area was not the whole of North America.  Define the area better.
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Norse artifacts have been found in an area from the outer banks of North Carolina to the Iowa-Nebraska border, then the boundary angles northwest to the Arctic Ocean, then east to Baffin Island, southeast to Labrador, and back to the outer banks.  Do not bother to calcite that area; it is about 2,800,000 square miles.
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Which lowers your odds to 56,000 to one for one artifact.  If 129 artifacts were randomly distributed in that area, your odds would be 434 to one. 
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Still high odds, but not formidable, But you say you recorded 129 artifacts.  You must have known about the Norse artifact near where you placed the mark, didn't you?
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I was recording data from many references.  Unless the artifacts seemed to be duplicates, I did not pay attention to where they were found.  So I do have the Norse artifact listed in my compilation.
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But, seven years later, when I was calculating the location of Wynland of West, I did not remember the artifact was in my old compilation.  I was not even thinking of my list of Norse artifacts, when I placed the mark.
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At 434 to one, you were still very lucky.
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Your odds are less than I thought they would be, but I like to think that finding a Norse artifact within ten miles of where I placed the mark was more than luck.
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What do you mean?
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The Kensington Stone, which was found in the 19th century, had text about men traveling 14 days to ships waiting for them.
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You mean the Kensington Rune Stone?.
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The Kensington Stone only has a few runes on it.  The text is mostly 14th century Swedish.  Anyway, while I was preparing for Norway Day in San Francisco, I went back to check some dates in a book written by Tornoe, a Norwegian historian.
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I noticed a section on Greenland that I had not remembered reading before.  Tornoe quoted a Pope in 1160, who wrote to the Archbishop in Trondheim, Norway.  The Pope wrote about his concern for the Christians beyond Greenland that were 12 days or more away from any other Norwegians..

You thought that "14 days to ships" and "12 days to Norwegians" might refer to the same journey?
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I had a hunch they did because I had learned during the past three years that the time from the Kensington Stone to Fargo-Moorhead was about two days by a crew in a crew rowed boat.
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A crew rowed boat?  Are you talking about a large canoe with the paddlers moving in rhythm?
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A large canoe could have been used.  But I visualize a narrow, long boat looking more or less like the narrow Viking Dragoon Ships.  So, if two days of rowing got the crews to Fargo-Moorhead, which was 12 days away from Norwegians in Hudson Bay, what are the odds?
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About the two trips of 12 days to Hudson Bay,  where friends would have been, being the same trip; maybe 55 to 45.  The trips do seem similar, starting from a common place. 
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In the past three years I discovered that the Nelson River, Lake Winnipeg, Red River route to Hudson Bay had been part of the transcontinental waterway, which was built several thousand years ago.
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Whoa, just a cotton-picking minute!  What transcontinental waterway?
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Do you remember the Bronze Age? 
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Yes, I read about it, and no.  No one remembers much about it.  It ended 3,200 years ago.  There are about 400 years of history missing before people started making records again.
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During the Bronze Age, for about a thousand years, an average of fifty ships a year came to America so the crews could load up with pure copper, which was found near the surface of the ground around Lake Superior.
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Fifty ships per year for 1,000 years!  Then they would have hauled away about--110 million pounds of pure copper.  That much copper would have equipped 300, 10 thousand man armies.  Is there evidence that we can bet on?
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Yes there is.  Those numbers are the most conservative estimates.  The evidence can still be seen.  At one time there were 10,000 holes about 30 feet across and 30 feet deep around Lake Superior.
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So what do all those 50,000 ships have to do with the transcontinental waterway?
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Some very smart men figured out a way to move heavy boats, like a Viking dragon ship, from the Red River Basin into the Mississippi River basin.  They figured out how to move the boat on water the whole way.  But sometimes the crew had to pull the boats up stream.
At Minneapolis, on the Mississippi, they loaded the boats with copper.   Then they floated down stream to the Gulf of Mexico.   Then back to Europe on the Gulf Stream.
The transcontinental waterway began just north of Fargo-Moorhead.  When the crews made the pulls upstream. They were able to walk though grass beside the streams.  So they could pull the boat up stream with no trees in the way.  
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They called the grassland "Wynland," which meant "fine land.".

OK, I get it.  The people back in Europe, who were drinking wine every day, thought the word meant, "Vine."  
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So you assumed that the Norse Christians were somewhere along the Nelson River, Lake Winnipeg, Red River route? 
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Your odds are down to 35 to one, if your understanding of the ancient sources is correct.  
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Why did the Norse Christians settle so far from the shore of Hudson Bay?
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The land between Fargo-Moorhead and Hudson Bay is like a giant swamp.  Even now the few people near the mouth of the Nelson River are called Swampy Cree.  Not many people can live in swamps.
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My friend, Steve Hilgren, who lives in western Minnesota, says that the Norse artifacts are found above a terrain feature called "Herman Beach."  Herman MN is at an elevation of 330 meters.  Fargo-Moorhead is at an elevation of about 270 meters.
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So, if the Norse Christians were along the Red River, the area suitable for settling was on the high land to the east.  Now your odds are down to 18 to one.  Did you, by any chance, have other information I do not know?
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I went back to read the 11th century authority, Adam de Bremen.
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Was he the "Vineland" guy?  Every authority and his kids have been searching for "Vineland" and not finding anything that I would bet on.
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That is part of the reason I started with your proposition a zillion to one odds.  Now you, devious devil, you got me to calculating that 50,000 ships would carry110 million pounds.  I think those odds are reasonable, when we think about 50 ships a year for 1000 years.
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Then the amount of nothing in 10,000 holes could have been where 110 million pounds of copper could have come from.
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Was the "Vineland" in western Minnesota?
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There are wine grapes in Minnesota, along with 18 other wild berries that could have made wine.
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Adam de Bremen wrote about "Vinland."  Translators in America from the 17th and 18th centuries wrote the "Vin" syllable as "Wyn" in America.  "Wyn" means, "fine, smooth, cleared."  The key word is "fine."
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All that definition does is confirm that the grassland in western Minnesota may have been the fine land where the Norse Christians may have settled.  Does not change the odds.
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But the confirmation made me feel more positive.  Adam de Bremen wrote more words about a self-seeding grain than he did about vines.
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Self-seeding grain?  You mean like wild rice?
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I thought so.  So I went back to check the odd pictograph 3.9 in the oldest American history.  It shows the younger brothers slithering through reeds that might be wild rice. 

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Then, when I looked at a map of western Minnesota, I noticed something I had not paid attention to before.
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What was that?
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There is a Wild Rice River on the east side of the Red River just north of the Buffalo River.  The Buffalo River was the northern entry of the transcontinental water way.
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The Kensington Stone has the words from "Vinland of West" on it.  Wynland of West might have been on the high ground north and east of the Buffalo River mouth near the Wild Rice River.
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Now you are down to about 9 to one odds..

Probably less than that.  I knew Holand had found two Norse Artifacts on the Red River near that location.  You calculated the odds assuming an even distribution of artifacts across northeast America.
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But I know that Minnesota had an unusually high number.  I had counted up to 26.  Steve Hilgren has found more than five more.

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Oh! You have not dealt me all the cards.  Now I am thinking that If you did NOT find a Norse artifact, you would have been going against the odds.
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I chose the land to the south of the south fork of the Wild Rice River.  The elevation is higher than 330 meters.  I placed my mark and then turned on the place names feature in Google Earth.  There are five, or more, towns nearby with Norse names:  Ulen, Ogema, Hitterdal, Waubun, Mahnomen, and, maybe, Syre.

.Wait a cotton-picking minute You are trying to tell me those names have endured for over 600 years?
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About 15 to 25 percent of the names in northeast America are Norse. They are usually found on the small towns back from the main roads.  Most of the states and provinces in northeast America have Norse names.
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I think the historical process may have been that the invaders named the important places to show that the land was theirs. But the names of the small villages probably endured because whoever wandered into a village may have asked, "What do you call this place?".
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Sounds like unreliable information to me..
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Look. The defenders of the Eurocentric Myth seem to find a way smear the authenticity of any Norse artifact.  In this case the artifact was a ancient sword dug up by a plow.  Eurocentric minds said that similar swords were used by the French in the 18th century.".
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Newer artifacts used somewhere else do not change the odds that an ancient artifact may be very old..
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The origin of the sword was with the Roman Gladiators before the 5th century.
The Vikings were in half of Italy and in France in the 11th century.  The odds are very high that the prototype of the French sword came ashore in the 11th century in s Viking boat..

But the Eurocentric minds do not care to investigate further.  The bogus French reference is enough for them to remove the Viking Sword from serious evaluation.
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But in 1940 Reider T. Sherwin wrote on page 135 that "Ogema" means "high man" in Old Norse.  The Ogema web page shows that the Chippewa said "Ogema" meant "Chief."  Those statements are solid testimony from two different sources. The testimonies are harder to defeat.
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They can be ignored.  Words do not mean a thing. right?
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This double testimony is more valuable than one contested Norse artifact.  Still the Norse sword had been found where I predicted there would be a Norse artifact.

Ah, but you used the testimony to pick your mark.
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No, I did not.  I put a place mark on the Google Earth image without the place names turned on.  Then, after I learned that the five of the towns might have Old Norse names, I began to examine the town data on the Internet. .
I contacted people in Ulen, MN first.   I was hoping to find someone in Ulen who would write me an email about Norse artifacts in the area.  While I was waiting for an answer I searched the Internet further and found the web site for the Viking Sword.
The Viking Sword?"

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The sword was found within 10 miles of my place mark.  What are the odds of that!
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Odds, Hell. Now I see why you call our history "the Eurocentric Myth."  You figured out where to put your mark by believing testimony and evidence that has been in plain sight for centuries.
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Your mark landed in a nest of five or more Norse names and within 10 miles of a Norse artifact!  There are no odds for just good historical research.
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This episode clearly illustrates that the odds against historians re-writing early American history to include historical evidence and testimony must be terribly high.
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About a zillion to one.

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