[disinfo ed.’s note: The following is excerpted from China’s Cosmological Prehistory: The Sophisticated Science Encoded in Civilization’s Earliest Symbols by Laird Scranton]
Integral to both the plan of the ancient Chinese city and the nine-plot layout of the well-field system—and to concepts of divination in ancient China—is the notion of the Lo Shu square, or magic square, sometimes referred to as the “nine halls diagram.” This figure is essentially a grid of nine squares, arranged like the well-field plots into a larger square, consisting of three squares per side (see below). Each smaller square is associated with one of the cardinal numbers from one to nine, arranged in such a way so that the sum of the three integers along any column or diagonal produces a total of fifteen.
Although there are variations in the myths, the invention of the magic square in China is traditionally assigned to Fu-xi at around 3000 BCE.… Read the rest
Not to make light of the loss of life here, but I sincerely doubt that the cell phone was even going to work after falling into an open-pit toilet. If it did, would want to put it next to their face, anyway? (You’ve got a collect call from dysentery. Will you accept the charges?)
