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

economist.com

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

#231

Post by hirako2000 »

ethbr0 wrote: post #218
chmod600 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, bu…

The effect of constructionism coupled with post modernism offering an attractive alternative to the complicated math.

And it isn't only half idiots promoting these ideas.

Just take a look at The Craft of Writing Effectively from the university of Chicago, social science of course. You will be even more baffled, it is a hard to believe and difficult to watch lecture. Apparently these things are university approved and now watched in the millions on YouTube.

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

#232

Post by notcoolbezos »

joecot wrote: post #32
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 thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere . Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations).…

so the older civilizations like greeks or romans did not know about the americas? We've come a long way in 500 hundred years!

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

#233

Post by kitd »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #154
kitd wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Bristol fishermen were known to fish Icelandic waters and beyond. A major backer of their voyages was Welshman Richard ap Meryk, sometimes elided to Ameryk. There's a theory that the fishermen established a processing station in Newfoundland and called it Ameryka in his honour, associating the left-hand side of the pond with that name in voyagers and cartographers minds.

That's a fun etymology. I thought it was well established that the name America came either directly or indirectly from explorer Amerigo Vespucci.

I agree, it's the more likely source. But as a Welshman, I quite like this one!

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

#235

Post by ummwhat »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #126
prewett wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lao is often use as a colloquial form of respect. So “ba” means “father”, so “lao ba” is kind of like “my old man”. “Lao ban” (ban meaning business owner / boss) is “boss”. Wives might call their husband “lao gong”. I think “jiu4” is old as in the opposite of new (xin1), as in Jiujinshan (San Francisco, literal, old gold mountain).

I have read that 旧金山 originated as the term for the mountain of silver the foreigners who came to trade silver for silk must have had somewhere. (They did have such a mountain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerro_Rico ) "Gold" is, in this analysis, just a more respectful way to refer to silver. I'm curious when and how the name might have attached itself to San Francisco, which is not near Potosí.

Wouldn't it obviously have come from the California Gold Rush?

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

#236

Post by simorley »

cafard wrote: post #55
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…

Herodotus dismisses a story of Phoenicians (acting for the Persian king) sailing around Africa. He says it must be a lie, because they claim that the sun was in the wrong direction--just what for a modern reader strengthens heir claim. But the notion of trans-Atlantic voyages, the Vikings apart, seems shaky to me. You are correct that the notion of isolation tends to be carried much too far.

> But the notion of trans-Atlantic voyages, the Vikings apart, seems shaky to me.

Why? The distance between western europe and greenland/north america is rather small. When compared to the vast distances that polynesians have been sailing in the pacific, it's nothing.

We know that the inuit/siberians/asians have been traveling between alaska and beyond and back to siberia/asia for thousands of years. And it's almost a certainty that some northern asians knew of "north america". But it was mostly tundra/ice so people simply didn't care. Who really cares if there is more ice beyond the ice that they already knew.

What was revolutionary wasn't that columbus sailed to americas. It's something people ( asians/siberians/inuit ) have been doing for thousands of years and it's something europeans have been capable of for thousands of years. The importance of Columbus's expedition was that he showed it can be profitable or at the very least convinced the european elites of it. That's what separated columbus from the vikings, asians/inuits/siberians, vikings and other europeans who sailed to the americas. He showed there is profit in it. Of course columbus's "profit" came at the price of genocide of the natives he came across in the caribbean, but that's another topic.

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

#237

Post by TMWNN »

foobarbazbarfoo wrote: post #95
jbay808 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was mostly due to Islamic scholars. Weren't the monks mostly erasing and repurposing old scrolls to make copies of the Bible?

A lot of those scholars were not "Islamic" or "Muslim", just happened to live in the area. Many of them were christians (Church of the East), Sabians, Jews, or local hellenistic inspired cults. Also some of those translations were translated to other local languages (eg. Assyrian, Hebrew...) then to Arabic. Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the wor…

>Of course, in todays world, one could say Arabic/Islam becoming the dominant culture/religion minimized the work and exposure others get.

Similarly, 10,000 books have been translated into Arabic in the past 1,000 years. That is fewer than the number translated in Spain in one year. (https://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/04/entertainment/et-ar...>)

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

#238

Post by simonebrunozzi »

ethbr0 wrote: post #169
hirako2000 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how deeply wrong we were at that time, while we precedently knew all the dimensions and distance of most parts of the globe with pretty high accuracy.

We "did." [0] What we did not know was an accurate way to determine longitude, specifically on a ship, until 1761. [1] [2] Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude. 33 days of speed-estimated dead reckoning in 1492, plus having no idea of the speed or orientation of the underlying current you're in, leaves a lot of room for error. [0] For values of "did" that inc…

> Consequently, any voyage before 1761 knew its latitude exactly, but dead-reckoned its longitude.

Correct. This is key to understand most of the issues at play in these past events.

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

#240

Post by CRConrad »

hirako2000 wrote: post #230
ethbr0 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're arguing from an epistemological or objective basis, but I'll assume the latter. We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us. We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not. If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.

We don't know that. All we know is that we have further knowledge that at certain points in time. We have a tendency to assume we know more than at any other time before on the basis that we know more than our rather recent ancestors.

> All we know is that we have further knowledge that at certain points in time.

What does that mean, if not "we know more than they did"?

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