Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2003 21:05:26 -0700 From: Pat Lashley <patl+freebsd@volant.org> To: "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>, Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org> Cc: Kenny Freeman <kennyf@pchg.net> Subject: Re: Jail FS questions. (Columbus ref) Message-ID: <4218860000.1065758726@mccaffrey.phoenix.volant.org> In-Reply-To: <20031009223612.J28590@ganymede.hub.org> References: <20030803200948.GA10712@lewiz.org> <200310091700.09658.kennyf@pchg.net> <20031010011640.GE10682@rot13.obsecurity.org> <20031009223612.J28590@ganymede.hub.org>
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--On Thursday, October 09, 2003 22:55:26 -0300 "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org> wrote: > You know, its this attitude that would have kept Christopher Columbus in > Europe ... all the "big scary warnings" said that the world was flat back > then, no? No, not at all. Because by the time of Columbus, every educated European knew that the Earth was spherical. Hell, the ancient Greeks and Romans knew that. (Anybody who's ever stood on the shore and watched a ship sail over the horizon should be able to figure out the most likely reason why it disappears from the bottom up; and why you can see it for longer from a higher vantage point.) Where Columbus differed from his contemporaries was in the estimates of the size of the sphere and of the land distance between Europe and Asia. The commonly accepted estimates were fairly accurate. Columbus grossly under estimated the size of the earth and over- estimated the land distance between Europe and Asia. Which is why he thought that the East Indies were part of India - they were about the right distance west of Europe, according to his badly flawed estimates. There is also strong reason to believe that he -knew- that there was a land mass between Europe and Asia. Why else would he take the longer southern route against the currents of the Gulf Stream instead of the more northerly route that would have shortened the distance and time travelled out of site of land? And there is evidence that Welsh fishing fleets were regularly fishing off the coast of Newfoundland for at least 200 years before Columbus. (But at the time, the location of good fishing sites was considered a valuable trade secret. There is evidence of contemporary rumors of a land mass in the northern ocean to the west; but not a precise location; and it was thought to be a large island, not a continent.) And there is also considerable evidence that an Irish monk sailed to Canada in a small tarred-hide boat around 800 AD. That certainly wasn't any secret in Columbus' time. Nor were the Norse stories of Vinland. So let's stop giving Columbus credit for things that he didn't actually do. And particularly stop giving him credit for being more insightful than his contemporaries when his success actually came from being grossly wrong in almost every respect. -Pat
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