Re: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread

On Oct 5, 9:35 am, Engineer <inva...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Tom McDonald wrote:
BTW, in another post you wrote:

"They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was
round."

Apparently you mean that you or Babs will be vindicated in the future.

However, perhaps you ought to know that educated folks in Columbus'
time knew the Earth was round. They disagreed with him (and some may
have laughed) because they thought his estimate of the diameter of the
round earth was ~1/4 or so too small.

They were right; Columbus was wrong.

Does this mean that Thiering will be shown to be wrong, too? :-)

That is certainly the way to bet.

That miscalculation by Christopher Columbus (and it was an escpecially
stupid one; deriving the size of the earth within 10 or 20 percent is
fairly easy to do -- Eratosthenes did it in the second century BCE.)
would have killed them.

No ship of that era could possibly hold enough food / water to make
it. They would have died of thirst / starvation before reaching Asis.
It was only his running into undiscovered land partway across that saved
them. He also violated the basic rule of turning back when half of your
drinking water is gone.

Columbus was a liar. He kept two logs of the journey, one with his
best calculation of the real distance traveled and another with a
false distance to deceive his crew.

A crew member was the first to spot the land, but Columbus lied
to Spain and claimed he saw it first, cheating the sailor out
of a yearly pension and collecting the reward for himself.

Columbus was a very flawed man, who did a great feat of daring that
happened by merest luck to work out for him. He does not deserve all
of the opprobrium his worst detractors mete out; and nor does he merit
all of the glory some have heaped on him.

As the human face of one of the world's great 'tipping points', he is
extremely important.

But he was not the visionary that those who hold to Carl's cartoon
view would have him have been.

<snip>

.

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