Can you name the Seven Seas? Well, there are 4 oceans you can probably name and lately the part south of 56 degrees has been called the Southern Ocean. That’s the part where the wind blows uninterrupted all the way around the world. That makes 5 what about the other 2? The phrase is something we could call ancient wisdom, but it’s really an obsolete factoid.
We were taught, traditionally there are seven continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America and Antarctica. But it gets confusing. How is Europe a continent except in the egos of Europeans? It is not surrounded by water. And it is smaller than Russia or Brazil. Antarctica may be an archipelago under the ice.
Six-gun has come to mean loosely a revolver, since Sam Colt’s patented revolver held 6 rounds, but some modern high-powered revolvers hold only 5 while small caliber revolvers might hold quite few more. Six makes the most practical use of a cylinder, but 5 makes space for more powerful cartridges in the same frame. Five is plenty if you know what you are doing. We are all taught in elementary school that there are five senses, you can probably name them. Now we know there are many more, temperature, pain, balance, various emotions, doom, proprioception, and right or wrong. The list is almost endless because we can subdivide each one as we discover variations.
We can name 4 seasons. The distinctions are based on the relative angle of the earth axis to the solar orbit and we associate weather with those 4, but in the Southern Hemisphere the climate is inverted. July is winter and Christmas is summer. Even in the northern temperate zone weather can be out of sync with the seasons by a month or more. Winter weather may start before thanksgiving or not until January. San Diego really has no winter, but summer does not start until the Fourth of July because of June gloom. In the far north it feels like winter most of the time.
We were taught there are three dimensions, forever, but about the first time 3D movies were invented, time became considered a dimension. Even though the way of measuring it was completely different. Pilots are concerned with 3 more dimensions — pitch, roll and yaw, which are just as important. There are many more measurements that describe our environment but we haven’t learned to call then dimensions, temperature, pressure, density, entropy, enthalpy. Data can be stored in an n-dimensional array where n can be any number. An address can have many dimensions, state, city, street, number, floor, aisle, shelf and bin.
Traditionally we have 2 genders, at least in English, but some languages recognize a third neutral for inanimate objects or for living things that have characteristics of both sexes: mahu, fagela, berdache, or two-spirit. Some tribes counted as many as five genders. Man, woman, man who lives like a woman, woman who lives like a man or two spirit. None were terms of derision. Known features of some historic figures suggest they may not have fit either obvious gender or the one they lived as.
Abrahamic religions and some others recognize one God, but with subtle characteristics I will leave to the followers.
The Seven Seas concept seems to have originated with the ancient Greeks whose post Alexander world was defined by them. The Adriatic and Aegean are now considered divisions of the Mediterranean. The Black Sea is completely inland, but connected to the larger Mediterranean by a narrow passage, the Bosporus. The Caspian Sea is a very large freshwater lake. The Red Sea and Persian Gulf are large bays connected to the Indian Ocean. There are other candidates for the title depending on where you look. Many other bodies of water are called seas or the local equivalent, gulf, bay, sound, fjord, mer, loch, lagoon or lake. I think the only distinction is a body of water not flowing and too large to throw a stone across. Dividing the world or people into arbitrary groups does not help our understanding. People within a given group often have more variation than there is variation between groups, be kind.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com.