The ancient aliens were trying out a lot of different designs.
February 3, 2022 7:47 AM   Subscribe

Wikimedia contributor Cmglee created a nifty comparison of pyramids showing the profiles of many famous, pointy human constructions. (They also discuss how to make dynamic svgs for the web.)
posted by eotvos (10 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
For a little levity:
The Boulder CA Historical Preservation Group is showing the modern (but not too modern because it needs to be preserved) version: Just in case you are not sure, the pyramid is the one in the top right corner, probably about 6-8 meters tall.

funny Twitter feed
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:06 AM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


"That is no coincidence, for our people visited your Egypt thousands of years ago....."

"....we learned many things from the mighty Egyptians, such as pyramid building, space travel...and how to prepare our dead so as to scare Abbott and Costello."

(One of my favorite jokes in Futurama)
posted by RonButNotStupid at 8:14 AM on February 3, 2022 [4 favorites]


I do a fair amount with SVG but never really thought about treating it as a dynamic graphics format. Looks like there's a lot of good tools. SMIL is new to me; it's a way of doing simple animations along paths.
posted by Nelson at 8:16 AM on February 3, 2022


I tried to get myself up to speed with D3.js, but never got very far with it. The examples gallery is really cool though.
posted by adamrice at 8:51 AM on February 3, 2022


I did not know that there was a pyramid of Cholula.
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:20 AM on February 3, 2022


Due to the requirements of laser cutting, in the last 6 or 7 years I've shifted my thinking about images almost entirely from raster to vector. For context I cut my teeth on Photoshop 4 (Big Electric Cat). I've messed with SVGs in a lot of ways, including programmatically generating them, but I had no idea they supported interactivity or animation like this.

ALSO my job and hobby is puzzles so I think this could be a pretty dang useful approach for prototyping or making quick web things to test. I am excite!
posted by aubilenon at 9:39 AM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


Incomplete.
posted by Admiral Viceroy at 9:57 AM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


Not only is there a pyramid of Cholula, it has the greatest footprint of any major pyramid in the world, as my tour guide told us on a visit. (It was remarkable! I recall an adventurous zig-zagging through tunnels in its interior. The city of Cholula is wonderful, too, with a distinct college-town feel, being home to the private Universidad de las Americas)

I like how the animation takes care to show the breadth of the Cholula pyramid's base.

Why is the Ryugyong Hotel still under construction? Maybe the builders gave up when they realized they had another 200 meters to go to match Ball's Pyramid?
posted by Theophrastus Johnson at 12:19 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


Seems to me that the aliens first arrived at Central America and diversified to other places later on. The pyramids in central America and Mexico were smaller sizes but the aliens were similar to ourselves and competitors:
Alien 1: "WE CAN ALLOW TO BUILD A PYRAMID JUST LIKE THE ONE IN CHOLULA"
Alien 2: "Oh yeah! That G*&%GKP guy think is a big shot and do better that anyone else"
Many other aliens:"YES YES LETS MAKE IT TALLER!!"
All of them (Aliens): "YEAH GO AHEAD LETS GET IT DONE"
posted by CRESTA at 12:54 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


It was mentioned somewhere that Fresh Kills Landfill had some large piles of garbage that matched smaller pyramids in height.
posted by ovvl at 3:43 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]


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