afdave
Posts: 1621 Joined: April 2006
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Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ Sep. 06 2016,12:57) | Quote (Lethean @ Sep. 06 2016,12:22) | Over on TalkRational, Hawkins starts a thread where he claims to be "researching" the possibility that "the ancients" (by which he means Seth the son of Adam) had advanced knowledge of the natural world including its size and oblateness.
No, really.
Having gone way off the reservation into woo-meister number-wanking territory he makes this rather odd assertion.
 Quote | Dave Hawkins  Quote | Brother Daniel  Quote | Pingu  Quote | Dave Hawkins
In fact, evidence has been increasing in recent decades that mankind had at least as much knowledge of the natural world as did Eratosthenes even as far back as 4500 years ago. |
No it hasn't. |
Something I've noticed about Dave: Â When talking about amounts of evidence, he loves to make claims about the evidence "increasing".
It doesn't matter to him if the evidence is less than 0.01% of the amount needed to begin to take the idea seriously. Â As long as that tiny amount of evidence represents an INCREASE over whatever it was previously, then he imagines that the amount of evidence has some sort of momentum, and will thus continue to increase to the point where it eventually becomes overwhelming.
Apparently, he's not concerned with the overall weight of evidence; he's concerned with the rate of change of the overall weight of evidence.
(Never mind that he can't support even his claims about that rate of change. Â That's another issue.)
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The reason I said that in this instance was because I've referred to the Wiki article on Eratosthenes several times over the years and I don't remember EVER reading that he got anywhere close to 1% of the true circumference value. Â I think that was a "fringe view" 10 years ago. Â Now it's in the Wiki article and hasn't been removed by Wesley Elsberry's goons.
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Wesley, if this is a paid position I'd like an application if you don't mind. |
I wish I were in a position to pay people to do useful stuff, though I think I would refer to y'all in somewhat more positive terms than "goons".
About Hawkins... just because Wikipedia hadn't until recently explicitly noted that certain old estimates of the earth's size weren't too shabby doesn't mean that the appreciation of it is recent. And he apparently still is upset over the little contretemps we had over the possibility of new alleles being produced via recombination, which played out in part in the editing of the Wikipedia article. |
Hi Wesley!
-------------- A DILEMMA FOR THE COMMITTED NATURALIST
A Hi-tech alien spaceship lands on earth ... DESIGNED.
A Hi-tech alien rotary motor found in a cell ... NOT DESIGNED.
http://afdave.wordpress.com/....ess.com
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