Learning

SSLau

I learned that....

Canadians living in the rural areas are friendly and willing to help strangers. Steve Cheng and I got lost among the corn fields driving from Great Bend to London to pick up a Lighter for the pre-reunion. The person at the resort told us incorrectly in how to get there. When we were lost, one corn field looked exactly like the other one. Good thing the people were friendly and helpful. I cannot say the same for the London policemen in England nor the bus drivers in Macao.

Marathon run was named after the historic episode of a boy- runner who brought good news of defeating the Persians at the port of Marathon in Greece back to Athens a few thousand years ago. The distance between the two cities was 26 miles. The boy died due to exhaustion after delivering the good news to the Athenians. That is why the Marathon run is always 26 miles in modern athletc events. Some runners did die, I imagine, after the sporting event at times.

The Greek goddess of victory was named "Nike" ---pronounced "Nicki" with a short "i", and not with a long "i" as in the shoe company, so I was led to believe.

Diamond was seen 400 to 500 BC in Greece, but they did/do not have diamond mines there. The diamonds must have been brought in from Africa, possibly suggesting an African civilizatione was more advanced and existed before the earliest Greek civilization ( the name of the period I have forgotten).

In the same period, the Greeks used oxide crystals as ornament. These oxide crystals are transparent, likely to be large bandgap insulators, but relatively soft. They could have used them for protective windows, had they vknown how to put them together in a panel.

Saw quite a few gold death masks the the historic museum in Athens. These are the masks made of thin gold foils, and hammered into shape on the face of someone who just died. The Greek kings liked this sort of thing to preserve their faces. Death masks last for a long time, perhaps, until the end of time. Again , gold must have come from Africa. Pure gold is extrmely malleable and can be made into thin foils with primitive tools. This is also why American Indians bit into a gold coin to see of it is real, as we have seen this practice in movies.

The was this study conducted using DNA tracing and concluded that all men and women came from one single female from Africa, not in conflict with the teory of Eve. If we all originated from Africa, there really should not be any racial problems. Why, then, we the Asian look differently from the other races? Is god playing a trick on us mere mortals to create racial issues?

Often times, findings lead to more questions.