Re: the Star Wars club is growing

From: jjustwwondering (jwasilewsky_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 07/15/04 

Date: 15 Jul 2004 13:32:49 -0700

Rand Simberg <simberg@interglobal.org> wrote in message news:<ounJc.3122$mL5.1312@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>...
>> He's quite a buffon..

> A "buffon"?

See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon

Excerpts:
|| Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707-1788)
|| was a French naturalist, mathematician,
|| biologist, cosmologist and author.

|| Buffon's views influenced the next two generations of
|| naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin.
 
|| Buffon is best remembered for his great work
|| Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (1749-1788: in 36
|| volumes, 8 additional volumes published after his death

|| It included everything known about the
|| natural world up until that date. In it
|| Buffon considered the similarities between humans and apes,
|| and the possibility of a common ancestry.

|| Buffon's work is considered to have greatly influenced
|| modern ecology.

|| The problem of Buffon's needle in probability theory
|| is named in his honor.

|| In Les époques de la nature (1778) Buffon
|| discussed the origins of the solar system, speculating
|| that the planets had been created by comets
|| colliding with the sun. He also suggested that
|| the age of the earth was much greater
|| than the 6,000 years proclaimed by the church.
|| Based on the cooling rate of iron, he
|| calculated that the age of the earth was
|| 75,000 years. For this he was condemned by
|| the Catholic Church in France and his books
|| were burned.