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Tides -> oceans -> gravity-> people's moods seems to be based on Argument by Similarity - the idea that just because two things look similar, they must be connected in some deep way.
But how does being made of water change anything? The tides go up and down. They don't have moods or personalities. They're completely predictable and mechanical.
So where do changes in mood and behaviour come from?
The only connection is a poetic one - moods ebb and flow, the sea ebbs and flows (even though tides are mechanical), so therefore, an obvious link.
But isn't this just taking a metaphor literally?
Being made of water doesn't really make anyone moody, surely?
Do unemotional people have less water in their bodies than moody people?
great question!
here's an 'indirect' answer:
people with a lot of water in their charts are definitely moodier/more emotionally governed, in my and many others' experience. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
As a heuristic tool to start an investigation it can be quite fruitful. She believed in nothing; only her skepticism kept her from being an atheist. -- Jean-Paul Sartre
brilliant and much better way of saying what i meant about objective reality's being a conversation point. 'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty
Oh, and just pay attention to traffic on a full moon day! :-) you know all those lunatics loose in cars.
And only around 30% of women have a cycle within two days of the 28 day (not 29.5 day) average.
And the Earth days themselves are slowing down, they had fewer hours a billion year ago.
The Moon is already tide-locked with one side watching the Earth. Eventually if the system could go on long enough (it won't, the sun will blast it all earlier), the Earth would also become tide-locked with the moon, with a day that last weeks and the Moon further from the Earth than it is now.
And anyway, it's only western women who have a 28 days cycle, found this looking for a ref. on wikipedia: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1340049&dopt=A bstractPlus Pierre
City life and brick and mortar dwellings have made us unaware of a very basic aspect of the moon cycle : a full moon means lights. Which may have had very practical effects in the way of life of your basic hunter-gatherer tribesman, especially pre-fire.
The fact that women's cycles are very variable means the adaptation could have been a weak one ; and that synchronisation within the tribe may have helped to adjust the cycles to the moon's cycles. And maybe the synchronicity happened only because once a yearly cycle was too long for reproductive success, another rythm was needed - and the one given by the moon was fairly convenient for biological purposes. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
(Aren't metaphors fun?)
He used to take his anual holiday two days at a time over the full moons to avoid the worst excesses, he reckoned that if he worked then, one of these months he'd end up on the other side of the bars because the inmates were just to difficult to deal with during that time. Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
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