Re: Freedom, Leftist Weenie Style

In article <n65tn4til8ampis7drn32set93a678upee@xxxxxxx>,
quiettechblue@xxxxxxxxx says...>
On Mon, 26 Jan 2009 02:21:32 -0800 (PST), Martin Brown
<|||newspam|||@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On Jan 24, 5:19 pm, JosephKK <quiettechb...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:39:52 -0800 (PST), Martin Brown

<|||newspam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The Koran itself is no worse than the Bible. Some extremist readings
of it are pretty bad though. And in historical times before the
Christians started the Crusades against Islam the main world religions
coexisted fairly amicably. Some of the greatest seats of learning were
in the Islamic world and scholars of every religion were welcomed to
work on translations of original books on algebra and astronomy into
Latin. The mathematics and some of the observations that led
Copernicus to propose a heliocentric universe came from Persia.

What put the Western world ahead was that with the advent of the
printing press movable type was much more amenable to the Roman family
of languages that to Arabic script.

Complete and utter nonsense.  Movable type works for all languages
that have character based scripts.  Comparing cursive forms to
separated character forms is a disingenuous red herring at best

The problem appears to have been more one of implementation. Early
printed Arabic books are incredibly rare - they stayed with manual
transcription for longer. I understand the Bodleian library in Oxford
has the earliest known printed book in Arabic type dating from 1514. A
part of the problem was that the typesetters made a much larger number
of mistakes. And mistakes were considered intolerable in sacred works.
An *extremely* rare first printed edition of the Koran (replete with
lots of typos) has been found in one of the major libraries. It is the
only copy known. There is a series at present on BBC4 exploring the
various contributions of Arabic science to the Renaissance in Europe.

http://www.cems.ox.ac.uk/exploring_texts3.shtml
(IIA2 para 8)

It served European conquerers to play down the level of sophistication
of Persian astronomy, medicine and science. But you only have to look
at the names of things like alcohol, alchemy, algebra, algorithm, and
even the common bright star names that US telescope makers
(annoyingly) still use for telescope alignment even today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Khwarizmi#Astronomy

Modern convention uses alpha, beta, gamma <constellation name> in
descending order of brightness for the naked eye stars. This is a lot
easier than "Alcor" that requires you to know which star in the sky
has that name. Most people can find Polaris. They eventually "fixed"
this problem by adding a GPS reciever so the scope can roughly point
towards the right star and the user then just has to tweak it a bit.

Regards,
Martin Brown

It is a mixed blessing / curse. On the other side of the coin the
abruptly lower cost of decent optics and frames for primary lens /
mirror sizes from 70 mm to 700 mm and even above coupled with the
astonishingly better ease of use has created an armature astronomy
resurgence that may shame the 1960s. I think i will take the renewed
interest in astronomy.

Which constellation is the "motor"? ;-)

IMO, the reason amateur astronomy hasn't taken off again is light
pollution. Even a halfway decent comet isn't seen by most.


.

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