How long is a piece of string?

Back down in Melbourne now and boy is it chilly! Bit of a shock to the system after two or so months of hot sunny weather. Luckily the smiles in everyone’s faces are making up for that somewhat, as is being re-united with the large stockpile of warm clothes I left at my godparents house before I left. Oh, and being back together with my lovely little Dell laptop again after a long break. The poor little thing was feeling lonely, so I’ve been giving it plenty of TLC and also trying to overload her hard drive with ten CDs of saved digital photos…

Random aside: While I was travelling someone described a theory on history they’d read about. This theory was based on the analysis of a historian who checked the number of innovations and historical events recorded for humankind by year. What they found was that although we take history to be about 2000 years from the ‘birth of Christ’ in fact there is a large portion of that timeline where very little seems to happen – in fact almost 500 years. Now this could be explained by a relapse into barbarism or alternatively it was proposed that recorded history as we know it is wrong.

Apparently the Roman Catholic church is mostly responsible for our current understanding of history, with a pope a few hundred years ago pushing some scribes to ‘go away and get a proper written history together’. The historians postulated that, for some reason, these guys got something wrong with how they translated some of the earlier dates and somehow added in another few centuries. An easy mistake to make, especially when you’re under deadline pressure. This would mean we’re actually around the year 1500 and not 2000 as we think – good news as it means armageddon’s another 500 years off or so. Sweet.

I’ve tried to find some references for this but haven’t managed – so please drop me a line if you find some as this is interesting stuff.