DoDo, I don't follow myself either!
Backing way up: all I (mis?)understand is:
It's possible (using specific events such as eclipses) to bring exactitude to our study of the earth-sun-moon-stars relationships. We can measure different combinations, so I'm assuming that ancient peoples could in theory have known how to calculate movement west-east/east-west.
(And as Migeru said: why would they think there'd be any difference, unless they had travelled east-west/west-east, taking their almanacs, far enough to discover the differences--or else they met people from somewhere else who had almanacs...which didn't match? I like this idea because either
a) two different groups came to the same conclusions re: rotation, position, etc...
or
b) the various groups were, in fact, connected--just maybe not at the speeds we imagine; maybe they communicated once a year or even less? I have no idea. I just like the concept.)
I can imagine that people who knew of other locations could work out their longitude relative to those other locations (did I read somewhere that the pyramids were an ancient equivalent of Greenwich? Zero = the north south line between a pair of pyramids or somesuch.)
Then I can imagine someone attempting to do this on a boat--no success. Maybe they would try different techniques, different devices. This guy's device...has he tested it at sea? Certainly it seems that holding something out at arms length while one gently or not so gently bobs up and down does not sound right. So then my question about minimum useful measurements. You're saying that the minimum feasible is the width of two moons, which is a useless measurement?
When it comes to degrees I get lost.
(I thought latitude wasn't a problem--you measure a star's height against the horizon or somesuch...I could well be wrong...I really am out of my depth at this point.)
With the snakeskin, I think he wanted his theory to match up to...all the signs. I suppose it's possible to e-mail him and ask what he meant.
And...bowing humbly...
I thank you again! Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
Certainly God doesn't like the idea that people once upon a time were sharing knowledge:
11:6 Yahweh said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do.
11:7 Come, let's go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
11:8 So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city.
11:9 Therefore the name of it was called Babel, because Yahweh confused the language of all the earth, there. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.
http://www.awitness.org/biblehtm/ge/ge11.htm
These are old pre-flood/post-flood myths, seen through the eyes of the Torah; I prefer myths that involve some happy humans somewhere communicating and getting along. The stars...seem a useful, because obvious, point , which might be the same myth seen a different way (except for the God confusing everyone part.) Certainly we have myths of before/after and the only cataclysmic before/after we have is the ending of the last ice age, which would confound all old social relationships...unless one were free from the effects--isolated. Yet it seems that all communities have flood myths; which would make sense if there were a global connection network pre-melt...
...contact between disparate groups. You mentioned that to understand the concept of longitude (or maybe I misunderstood!), one would have to have an almanac and then travel with it.
I don't know how far you'd have to travel west-east/east-west before the naked eye and memory pointed out that things had changed. Maybe never? See how little I know! In my imagination I see a person far from home, staring up at the sky as the moon goes past and thinking, "Hold on. That shouldn't be there, it should be over there." His friend from the other faf-flung tribe pats his knee. "Happened to me first time I came to where you live. Here, have one of these. It'll help," he adds, handing him a large mushroom...
*:R Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
I now get what you mean with the eclypses, e.g. that the ancients could have been aware of the Moon's parallax and put that in almanachs. This is the case at least with the Greeks -- Hipparchos is credited with the measurement of the Moon's parallax using a soler eclypse (probably 129 BC).
But for a navigator to get the parallax at an unknown location, that's another thing. So if, say, we want to get the error under just 3' for the Moon anywhere in the sky, the guessed location must be precise by 320 kilometres, while the error of the final result will be around half of that or more -- not very efficient. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
it's the difference between landing at Standstead--miles from London! Where to stay?
and landing in a country where they know of you and welcome you; and if you arrived a hundred miles (or whatever measurement you choose)...away from where you were heading...there wasn't a problem.
So I think the problem must have been aiming at small islands. They are the things you can miss.
If it was a problem; and if they didn't have alternative navigational methods as adjuncts to--or even alternatives to--the sky.
If you ask the following question:
"That's north, that's south, that's east, that's west" pointing, "Are we moving? And if we are, which way are we moving?"
If they look confused, you say, "The sun rises in the east and," drawing an arc, "it sets in the west. Which way are we moving?"
I asked a colleague today.
"Clockwise," she said. "I suppose we're moving clockwise."
But, for an hour or so she was as fascinated as me by the basic movements of planet (spin), sun (axis), moon (moooovement), and stars (tick tock)....
What was the measure of efficiency before those huge ice-sheets melted? Because humans have been around for long before they melted. I'm beginning to think...hmmm...who wouldn't have been inundated? Who would'nt have had their life revolutionised. Maybe some people in India, in China, the himalayas must have changed; but maybe they changed, and the inhabitants could change with the himlayas, which are still growing...
Bhutan has an "Annual Happiness Index"...or somesuch. Was it Laurent who pointed out the ridiculousness of GDP? It's ridiculous. An overthrow, and overhang, of Empire. "It's over there, grab it!"
The sun is our source of life. If we harness the sun's powers...we still live on an unstable ball of energy, with fruity effects--us!
So risk is ever present. But now people have no sense of solar risk, or lunar risk, or stella risk. All the risks are human-created. War. Famine. Destitution.
DoDo!
You got me rambling!
Thanks for all your input. Very much appreciated! Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
And you got me thinking! Thinking about a hypothesis I would normally have dismissed out of hand (due to its bad wording). Soon I'll post a second summary as top-level comment. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
