A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas • Hacker News Board

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#211

Post by cardiffspaceman » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

dr_dshiv wrote: post #90

earksiinni wrote: post #46

This find is not as surprising as the Economist article would have you believe. First, what was written about areas beyond Europe's periphery tended to lag behind actual common knowledge of those areas by hundreds of years. An example would be the concept of "the torrid zone," part of an ancient Greek climatic theory that divided the world into two habitable temperate zones, two uninhabitable frigid zones (at the pol…

From the article: "...one of the students, Giulia Greco, found a passage in which Galvano, after describing Iceland and Greenland, writes: “Farther westwards there is another land, named Marckalada, where giants live; in this land, there are buildings with such huge slabs of stone that nobody could build them, except huge giants. There are also green trees, animals and a great quantity of birds.” Where are there mega…

I visited Chichen Itza in a guided tour. The guide was a local Mayan man. He led us to a structure which had reliefs of people. One of the people had trimmings around his face. The guide stated that this was a man's curly beard, and that in the past this relief had been polychromed, and the color used on these trimmings was red. And as if we couldn't make the required extrapolations on our own, he said that the relief indicated that Mayans had known/may have known of Eric the Red. I don't know of other evidence that Mayans of old had direct or indirect pre-Columbian contact with curly-haired explorers from Europe. It's just that your query triggers this reminiscence.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#212

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:34 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #140

distances wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.

"Before migration was understood, people struggled to explain the sudden annual disappearance of birds like the white stork and barn swallow. Besides migration, some theories of the time held that they turned into other kinds of birds, mice, or hibernated underwater during the winter, and such theories were even propagated by zoologists of the time." Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds actually transfo…

[deleted]

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#213

Post by garmaine » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #166

garmaine wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct that it is very different in Taiwan. But generally you're missing the point. (1) 老外 (lao wai) is an intrinsically othering term, and (2) it's generally applied by race rather than by national origin. It doesn't matter what the literal translation is. The point is about how the word is used. Here in California many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms 老外 or 外國人 to refer to white Americans. I always corre…

> many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms 老外 or 外國人 to refer to white Americans. I always correct them when they do--pointing out that they are the foreigners. Consistent with this, do you also insist that they refer to the USA as "中國"?

I don’t see that as consistent. The USA isn’t the middle of the world by any measure.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#214

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:20 PM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #213

thaumasiotes wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> many Chinese-speaking transplants use the terms 老外 or 外國人 to refer to white Americans. I always correct them when they do--pointing out that they are the foreigners. Consistent with this, do you also insist that they refer to the USA as "中國"?

I don’t see that as consistent. The USA isn’t the middle of the world by any measure.

中 [inside] is the opposite of 外 [outside].

(Actually, there are several synonymous words which are opposites of 外, but in the 中国 / 外国 contrast, the opposite of 外 is obviously 中.)

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#215

Post by pyuser583 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:21 PM UTC

jmchuster wrote: post #19

> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…

Columbus knew the distance around the globe. That was accurately determined by ancient Greeks.

What Columbus (and the Greeks) did not know was the size of landmasses in proportion to each other.

They thought Europe was much, much larger than it was. Large enough to leave little room for ocean between the Azores and East Asia.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#216

Post by chmod600 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:22 PM UTC

ethbr0 wrote: post #175

hirako2000 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we knew the right answer but we didn't accept it as correct so most people followed suit. It's fascinating. We are on the same track today. We know the truth but most of us jump on the same entirely wrong band wagons. One could argue that ignoring the truth is worse than pure ignorance.

I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty. Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to. On the one hand, we know more than they did (…

I think decades of diluting the word "science" with observational studies and other psuedoscientific junk was a mistake.

Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#217

Post by thaumasiotes » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #167

thaumasiotes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects. And as you can see, we did not in fact know that in the 18th century. Transformations are not so easy to observe directly; they often happen e.g. underground.

"Shape stability would be an example of being less complex than insects." Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different. Cells were known already. And that insects transform is known, but birds were closely known and there was not observation of them changing drastically. So that Aristoteles had this thinking is understandable given the time, but after enli…

> Not if the shape is stable, because the underlying cells are too complex to merge into something different.

This is not a valid concept. Vertebrates develop from stem cells the same way insects do.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#218

Post by ethbr0 » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

chmod600 wrote: post #216

ethbr0 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty. Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to. On the one hand, we know more than they did (…

I think decades of diluting the word "science" with observational studies and other psuedoscientific junk was a mistake. Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.

Yes and no. The public's (and media's) inability to differentiate between preprints, efficacy vs safety trial stages, and basic statistics boggled my mind.

I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with "Some people are ignorant and refuse to admit their ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality."

It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page essays on why numbers don't exist.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#219

Post by garmaine » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 7:54 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #214

garmaine wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see that as consistent. The USA isn’t the middle of the world by any measure.

中 [inside] is the opposite of 外 [outside]. (Actually, there are several synonymous words which are opposites of 外, but in the 中国 / 外国 contrast, the opposite of 外 is obviously 中.)

My history may be off, but I believe that the Chinese named their country 中國 because they believed themselves the center of the world. Much like how the Romans named the Mediterranean (which means “middle sea”). The primary meaning of 中 is “middle” and it gains the meaning of “inside” by the geometric implication of the insides of something being that thing’s middle.

中國人 is a specific term of nationality. Likewise with 美國人. But 外國人 is different—it is defined only in relation to something else, as The Other. That’s fine in the context of passport control where your nationality matters, and you need to be in the foreigner line. But it’s not okay when we all live together in the same country, speaking the same language and with our kids in the same class in school, and you still refer to me as The Foreigner. Do you see the difference?

Interestingly, A LOT of mainlanders don’t know to line up in the 外國人 line when they go through Taiwan’s passport control, and they get upset when they are told to switch. It happens literally every time I’m in the airport (at least pre-pandemic). I don’t know if this is a dialectical, cultural, or propaganda problem, but it seems related.

Re: A monk in 14th-century Italy wrote about the Americas

#220

Post by exdsq » Sat, Sep 25, 2021, 8:21 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #88

exdsq wrote: post #15

And even if they were written down, the Catholic church sure did love to burn books back then!

Please don't post religious flamebait to HN. It leads to religious flamewar, the most avoidable of all flamewar, which we do want to avoid here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28649134 .

I don't think it's religious flamebait, I believe it's historically accurate - but okay.