Why do circles have 360 degrees

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
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As to “Velikovsky’s preposterous flinging about of planets in their orbits like billiard balls” failing anything, all that V. failed was obedience to mathematical traffic laws – an Abomination unto the Unimaginative, I’m certain. Still, the track record for Science divining (and attempting to enforce!) putatively immutable laws is hardly as impressive as Religion’s in its way… hardly as long-lived, and hardly as durable. … Physics laws are not different. Compared to those of most religions, they change much faster. Why SHOULDN’T the solar system have been juggled about like so many billiard balls at some point? Because you have a law?

Not directly because we have a law … instead, because if Velikovsky’s billiard balls must be accounted for in a correct theory, then EVERY prediction based on Newtonian mechanics is wrong. And not just wrong, but WAY wrong and easily shown to be wrong.

Unfortunately for your argument, all thse millions of predictions (based on Newtonian mechanics) that have been made in the last 300-odd years were correct or close to correct. Any detectable differences between observed behavior and predictions are explainable by extensions to Newtonian mechanics (e.g. corrections for velocities that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Accepting Velikovsky’s ideas of the motion of planets requires either discarding a system that is known to work and replacing it with a system taht does not fit any experimental observations, or postulating that significant changes in the way the universe works ocurred sometime before Galileo.

Of course, you are free to postulate such a change, but I won’t accept it without some evidence.

jrf

22

Dennison, you’re a riot.

I will kindly omit pointing out your misspelling of “Galileo.” But as to the true, not your, nature of the relationship between Velikovsky and Einstein and their discussion of his theories, including photocopies of all their written correspondence, it’s… RIGHT HERE ON THE NET!!! GO LOOK!!! PS, how many of these people who invoke Einstein for your falsely projected reasons do so because E. was a fond intellectual buddy who knew the guy’s theories deserved a fair shake?

So WHAT if the core temp of the sun is hotter than Saturn’s? My POINT was, your Givers Of Scientific Law declared Saturn’s surface temp was closer to absolute zero than to being hot enough to show signs of having recently been a supernova, as V. concluded. He wuz right, and they wuz wrong. Got it now?

And this “we” business… who is this solemn “we” who deduces laws from only the keenest of observations and declares The Immutable Truth For All To Believe? Have you been hired? And… what fragment of WHAT created the Tunguska explosion?

And if you’d READ the damn thing, you’d find reference to calculations projecting that a near miss between the two masses would create about what was reported, such as tides 4 miles high. And you could do your own calculations against those.

Cheesus. I mention a couple correct expectations V. had and you pretend that’s the total… never minding the fact that even to publish THOSE flew directly in the face of the Big Meanies like Carl Sagan and Harlow Shapley, who intended to destroy his career for such “heresies” – V. WAS a colleague in the greater academic world, not an ex-short-order cook.

Here, a couple more, though I hate to, because your lazy-mindedness is not well veiled by your show of skepticism: the presence of neon and argon gases in surface rocks on the moon; the presence of scattered magnetic fields as well. The presence of CARBOHYDRATES on Venus as well as hydrocarbons. Carbon dioxide polar caps on Mars. I’ll even toss in speculation that there may have been microbes on Mars, and definitely, water no longer extant.

There are scads of such conclusions he made and was right about. Don’t make me trot out more. I may have to hurtcha.

Yes PBS sucks, mostly for the science it sells. A meteor falls in the Caribbean and kills ALL the dinosaurs. Right. Next, a 3 Stooges retrospective, then a special on Hitler’s Missing Testicle.

As to whether you are a “big stupid meanie,” post a photograph somewhere, plus a sample of your writing, for study. And an address for me to send you the bill for the analysis. Since you asked, so far, your personality appears to be puffy. Do you watch a lot of PBS?

And Jon, wo, Jon, wo. Another true believer. You ARE saying that phenomena can’t exist unless a proper theory is first made for it to fit into. My GOD, how did people hold themselves on the ground before Newton showed them how?! Just because Science Sacerdotes take the liberty to make their infallible laws retroactive doesn’t mean they also make the world go 'round.

Einstein’s Big First Theory was a bang because it helped explain, or seemed to help explain, a very minor discrepancy in the orbital movements of planet Mercury which threatened somehow to turn Newton’s Universe over in its grave. Also, the postulation of Neptune’s existence, taken as Eternal Proof that Newton Is Your God, was highly inaccurate, except that the calculation did demonstrate “something else had to be out there.” Roughly.

In the same way, I will now make a Brilliant Genius of Myself and say Hey: Something Else Is Out There Even Past Planet X! I call Dibs on it here and now. Give me my Award now. Go read, you guys, if you want to argue anything in any substantial way.

All this may be required to even begin to begin establishing where the 360 degree circle really comes from. I see that one has to knuckle a few heads to get anybody to even think about listening.

23

The prediction of Neptune was quite accurate as to location. That’s why it took only hours to find it when astronomers were told where to look.

Planet X, on the other hand, is now known not to exist, not because of a flaw in Newtonian theory, but because planetary probes have given us more accurate numbers to plug into the equations. Once that was done, the remaining “errors” cancelled out.

If Saturn had ever been a supernova, the Earth would have been vaporized. And it doesn’t even faintly resemble a supernova remnant.

Velikovsky couldn’t even tell the difference between hydrocarbons and carbohydrates. A good thing for him, then, that he never tried to drink gasoline.

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

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Do you have proof that he never did? :slight_smile:

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Tom Dark says:

Sigh. Well, this whole argument is a salutary reminder to me that “general consensus of scholarly opinion” does not equal “trustworthy answer” in everybody’s mind. Nor should it, I suppose: we all bring our own biases into our work, and it’s good to be reminded of that, especially in the comparatively new and still quite chaotic subject of ancient astronomy. Still, I do think that we Teeming Millions who asked, or followed up on the answers to, the question “where do we get 360 degrees in a circle?” deserve to know what the general consensus of scholarly opinion on this subject is—although I quite agree that opposing viewpoints should get airtime as well. So let me recap the basic explicit claims I made in my answers, trying very hard this time to guard against implicit ones.

[ul][li]What I’ve been saying about ancient Babylonian and Greek astronomy comes from the work of academic Assyriologist historians of science, primarily Otto Neugebauer, Abraham Sachs, Erica Reiner, David Pingree, Hermann Hunger, and Francesca Rochberg(-Halton). I mention this not so much to intimidate people into accepting their Expert Opinions as because I think it really is important, for the sake of a fruitful discussion, to be as clear as possible about the sources of one’s opinion. This lets other people check up on the data you used and see if they think your conclusions are justified. I rely on these scholars’ interpretations of the data not because I think that someone who has an established academic position must therefore be always right, but because their credentials seem to me to be strong evidence that a) they can read the cuneiform sources in the original and b) they know a lot about ancient science and mathematics.[/li]
[li]As Abraham Sachs pointed out, Velikovsky could not read original cuneiform sources, and therefore his theories had to be dependent upon translations and interpretations made sometimes as much as 80 years before his own time, many of which current Assyriological scholarship had utterly rejected by the time he wrote his books. (Again, the remarks of Sachs, who was not only a respected expert in cuneiform studies but had read Velikovsky’s works carefully, are worth reading: they are available on the net at http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/vsachs.html .)[/li]
[li]The earliest detailed cuneiform source extant for mathematical astronomy is the series Enuma Anu Enlil, at least part of which (although there is a lot of uncertainty about many details) seems to have been established by about the middle of the second millennium BCE. (A record in one of the tablets of an omen in a known regnal year of the ruler Ammisaduqa, currently thought to have begun his reign around 1702 BCE, helps determine this chronology.) Recorded omens in Enuma Anu Enlil contain unambiguous references to intercalary months, indicating that at their compilation the year was not considered to consist of a fixed pattern of 12 30-day months.[/li]
[li]A fixed pattern of 12 30-day months does often appear in such contexts as tables of the lengths of daylight and nighttime for the 15th and 30th days of each month starting with Nisannu and ending with Addaru. This is considered not as proof that the Babylonians really used a fixed 360-day year at any point, but as a schematic system for approximately measuring the seasonal time changes. Another indication of the system’s basic roughness, at least in its early form, is that it gives the length of the longest day as being twice that of the shortest day: this would be accurate only for a latitude well north of Mesopotamia. (This illustrates a fundamental philosophical difference between typical scholarly interpretations and many drastically revisionist ones: the “standard interpretation” usually assumes that there are many schemes and methods of varying levels of accuracy jumbled together in the historical evidence, and that it is better to interpret something as an approximate or ideal scheme than to rewrite huge amounts of history or physics, contradicting many other accepted “facts” in the process, in order to interpret it as literally true. This makes sense if you think about how timekeeping schemes with varying levels of accuracy are jumbled together even in our own time; for example, if a historian 3000 years from now came across one of our 1999 calendars, he/she wouldn’t be justified in assuming from it that late-20th-century civilization believed in a fixed 365-day year.)[/li]
[li]In Enuma Anu Enlil we also see the time units of the “beru” (1/6 day) and the “ush” (1/30 beru) which make 360 “ush” per day. In texts after 1000 BCE we see some references to using “beru” and “ush” as “degrees” to measure distances along the horizon, and after around the middle of the first millennium the same units are used for distances along the celestial equator and the ecliptic.[/li]
[li]Greek adaptations of Babylonian astronomy included the 360-degree circle but apparently didn’t finally standardize it till maybe 150 BCE.[/ul][/li]
So the “general consensus of scholarly opinion,” as far as I’m able to interpret it, concludes that:
[ul]
[li]the vast majority of our evidence on Babylonian astronomy is later than around 1500 BCE;[/li][li]what appear to be the earliest texts do employ a schematic system of 12 30-day months in some contexts, but also refer to intercalary months, so they cannot be taken as evidence of a fixed 360-day year;[/li][li]a corresponding division of time into 360 ush per day is also used, but is also much more likely to be a convenient round number than hard evidence for an established 360-day year;[/li][li]around 700 BCE, there is evidence that these 1/360 time units are also being used as distance or angle measurements, and this practice continues and spreads over the next 500 years or so;[/li][li]after around 200 BCE, the 360-degree circle is a fixture of Greek astronomy and has been with us ever since. There is no good reason to think that it implies any accurate calendaric scheme, much less astronomical reality, involving a fixed solar year of exactly 360 days.[/ul][/li]
I repeat once again that this, like all history, is a hypothetical reconstruction based on incomplete evidence and subjective ideas of plausibility; but I firmly believe that it’s the best theory currently available, and that it’s based on much more data and much more consistent interpretations of the data than were accessible to Velikovsky. I will leave this discussion now so that those who want to present other views, or continue straightening out the physics aspects, can get on with it. Peace and goodwill to all,

Kimstu

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Kimstu blooped:

Whoops! As I said in my first post, the beru is 1/12 day. Sorry about that.

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Thanks to Kimstu for the intelligent remarks. The sidetrack into V’s theories I find interesting. Those specifically and much of the mean little bickering here seemed to be based on the misunderstanding that a 360 day (lunar) and a 365-365.25 day (solar) could not have been used simultaneously, which in fact they often were.

In Egypt in one way and elsewhere in another.

Accuraccy of predicting the annual innundation of the Nile (on approx. June 19th) was crucial to agricultural prosperity, and was early on seen to coincide to the heliacal rising of Sirius, this star being viewed as an avatar of Isis. In any case, a reliable Solar calendar was essential to prevent agricultural disasters. The 360 day year that was tied to the moon was made subordinate but observed as well. A 5 day “little month” was added to the 360 day year to make a 365 day year. After years of reading on Egyptology, I have never encountered a 360 Egyptian year which was allowed to repeat as such year after year.
The 365.25 day Sothic year (for all practical purposed the real solar year) was allowed to process through the 365 day year over the course of 1460 years. Why do I bring this up in this contaxt? Because it is a good indication that the Egyptians, NEVER had a 360 day year except in the context of that year plus the “little month” of 5 days - V’s ideas to the contrary. Otherwise the Sothic cycle would never have been established as it existed.

There was in addition, an administrative year, the least accurate, that typical to human progress, became most universal going into the middle ages.

Elsewhere, in the Middle East the 360 lunar calendar was allowed to “process” through the 365 or 365.25 day solar calendar, with a greater more radical need for intercalary months, witness the Jewish and Moslem calendar in particular.

I almost hesitate to comment here, as I have not posted on a discussion group in years, but ancient astronomy is a subject near and dear to me.

28

Velikovsky drinks a pint of gasoline.

Velikovsky runs exactly 360 feet, then collapses.

Conclusion: Velikovsky ran out of gas.

29

Great debate going on here! Now you boys turn off your computers and get yourself a nice glass of eggnog with rum.
Happy holidays.
Jill

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Pleased to see things rolling. dlv, you are not yet in danger of getting your butt kicked by one of the most vicious wits on the 'net, (if Ed Zotti oops I mean Cecil can play that way, so can I) but bless your heart, try harder.

I should be working on my column for http://www.subbrilliant.com/ but I am so impressed with kimstu’s reply I must take the time to respond again.

I went to the site you provided and began reading Sach’s reply to Velikovsky at that symposium. I got past his ad authoritatem self-introduction (I mean this descriptively)
and nearly stalled in my tracks when I read that Sachs had asserted that Velikovsky was unaware of the Akkadian list of kings. I nearly wondered if I was reading a joke. I believe V. used that list on which to refine his arguments about what was when.

It was nearly enough that Sachs was said to have “bested” Velikovsky by, so far as I gathered, merely asserting that Velikovsky’s time scheme was wrong. (To back up – V. claimed that there are 8 or 900 years of time placed in mideastern history that don’t belong there.) Radiocarbon dating has shown that he was closer to the truth of the order of historical events in the ancient mideast than the “standard” time scheme that had been “always” there that Sachs was defending.

But not enough. Sachs was defending a contrived-by-concensus time-scheme of ancient events that was itself at least “80 years old,” a rather unsupportable bit of reasoning in the face of his arguing that Velikovsky must be all wrong because he relied on cunieform translations that old. That time scheme of the ancient world necessitated Egyptian dynasties and an entire civilization that simply never existed, and remained officially “a mystery” as to its origins. If I recall, this was the Hyksos – or the Hyksos were mistaken for an entire other peoples. I should go back and look. But that would mean a trip to the second-hand bookstore, and I have a column to write.

V. in the 40’s had personal friendships with experts in ancient languages, incidentally, besides his own training since childhood in Russian, French, German, Latin, ancient Hebrew, and I think Greek.

Anyone who has perused a few versions of the Bible (outside the confines of religious ritualread, that is) would automatically object that just because a translation is more recent than 80 years old, it must categorically be faultier. I have no way of knowing that cunieform translations are NOT subject in some similar way to the intramural polemics that create horrific mistranslations in the Bible.

(For instance, the passage that says “There were giants in those days” was construed by the makers of the New American Bible to mean “there were evil people in those days,” or “there were people who were exceptionally evil.” Obviously an attempt to cover up one of hundreds of embarrassments this official religious tome contains, relative to the cultural taboos of the society that chooses to fetishize it)

Sachs’ criticism may be rendered pointless for that reason: the more “modern” a translation, the greater the chances it has been translated in the terms of the cultural mores or terms or viewpoints or narrowed scientific or artistic agenda of the translator. It also fails to address the fact of V.s comparative study, where accounts referring the same events were written in Latin or Greek or Hebrew or Egyptian or Sanskrit. He was indeed an expert in some of the languages.

I did not read of the extent of Sachs’ knowledge of other languages beyond cuneiform. But the temper of his speech that night indicated he had no wish to “believe” any of Velikovsky’s conclusions in any case.

Velikovsky did not merely pick and choose from an unassorted clutter of badly translated historical reports as Sachs would have liked to impugn, but rather formed what we who had New Math as kids would call Union Sets of existing historical accounts from around the world. Where he could not rely on his own impressive lingual expertise, he had prodigious bodies of ancient information that “blared” with similarities.

Again, I’d prefer you go dig up a copy of WORLDS IN COLLISION. It’d be fun to debate with someone who isn’t huffy and ignorant as fellow Know-It-All Kennedy is portraying himself. I gave mine away some time ago, and I forget. Except that, quite beyond Babylonian cuneiform, V. cited the 360-day-year in use as such, until a certain historical point. After which, confusion world-wide until eventual settlement on the 365 1/4 day year, just about everywhere.

There is no reason to suppose that civilizations whose constructions show such amazing exactitude and precision, should they count the degrees in their circle as a reflection of the number of days, would not have made a circle of 365 and a quarter degrees. Just keep multiplying it until there’s no pesky fraction to deal with.

If not from the number of days it took to circle the sun, whence comest the number? A dream of some king? And a sigh from me, why should there have been “intercalary months” sporadically appearing among 30-day-months? Was the 30 day number, obviously not appropriate for an annual cycle, also merely assigned from the dream of some king? 30 days was plainly too long for a lunar cycle. So where did it come from? Somebody flipped a coin? We are talking a peoples who took these things as the most somber high holy ceremony, and matters of life and death. We are talking people who worshipped the movements they recorded as tracks of huge living, aware creatures called Gods. It is probably a mistake to distill away the cuneiform records into modern mechanistic terms of understanding.

Incidentally, V. also pointed out that the ancients were aware that the earth was round and orbited the sun. Pliny said so. Therefore we should cancel half of Columbus day, and the raft of scientists still dating the “modern scientific belief” from the Nina and Pinta and Santa Maria.

RobRoy, V’s evidence of the Egyptian 360 day years is because they said so. Also there’s a temple still standing whose main gate faces the west and rear gate faces the east, set at an angle of 30-odd degrees. The instructions for building the temple say that the Main gate faces the rising sun, and the rear gate faces the setting sun. You don’t suppose the Mafia was in the construction biz back then too, do you? How then this mistake?

The Velikovsky controversy is multi-layered, and hardly over yet. The criticism that “laws of physics can’t have been different back then” can only lead one to see that people really do expect such laws to be enforced. How dare anything accepted by concensus wrong. And how dare history not conform to acceptable cultural views of the hour.

So, Kennedy, since when if Saturn “novated” would it vaporize this planet? According to which of your books? Or PBS shows?

Weird. Some half-wit back in the fifties made the same quarter-witted remark that Velikovsky didn’t know the difference between carbohydrates and hydrocarbons. Then came the Mariner probe. Surprise surprise. And what were people like you puffily expecting to find on Venus back then? Happy, happy rainclouds! You betcha.
Lastly, as to Cecil’s remark about the Babylonians casually fudging the facts, no one here has presented a better argument so far than he has. If they or anybody got it from the days of the year, that’s the ONLY answer. They fudged it around some… and that’s how they handled building all those temples and ziggurats. And now we know what happened to those great old ancient buildings. They fell down. Woops. So much for ancient civilization.

My argument’s the only one that stands a chance agin’ it. If I win, I hear that I will get Zotti’s – oops – Cecil’s old car next time he buys a new one.

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Fooey. I meant “…it must categorically be less faulty.” You’ll see it. Any other errors, I’m late. So live with 'em. You know, we have Xmas lights as an ancient way of trying to prevent Saturn from exploding again. Think I’ll use that for my Snippy SuBBrilliant column this week.

Merry Xmas to all.

32

I stand corrected. Velikovsky ran 365 yards in 12 seconds before returning to his native Saturn.

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BAD try, dlv. Bad. You must be a girly-man. Moderator! Moderator! Tell this person to be funny or at least irritably cantankerous, which is appropriate to any discussion where the name “Velikovsky” is introduced.

But I nearly forgot to spoot another rebuttal at Kennedy, here: who are you trying to kid, Jocko? To wit: “The prediction of Neptune was quite accurate as to location. That’s why it took only hours to find it when astronomers were told where to look.”

Go shell a peanut. The rest of you note that it takes only a second to sweep the entire sky with the naked eye, which in spotting anything in it, allows for trillions of light-years of plus-or-minus tolerance. Setting up a 19th century telescope and sweeping the sky for a couple of hours looking for Neptune hardly sounds like the instrumentalist was handed a pinpoint “You Are Here” starmap.

The two mathematicians who postulated Neptune’s existence using Newton’s math, Mssrs. Adams and Leverrier, came up with wildly differing figures on where to look for Neptune. And both of them were dead wrong, unless one and one does not need to equal two, so to speak. They were millions and millions of miles wrong each.

I play the Powerball lottery. I guess about 1 number right every week. If I were entitled to the tolerance in proportion to that handed Adams or Leverrier, they’d give me the damn money, because that would be plenty close enough. Highly accurate, in fact.

Yet this event sealed Newton’s unintended bid for Sainthood in Scientism.

What were those “millions of predictions” correctly figured by Newtonian mechanics, again? Are we sure the word shouldn’t be “countless”? Come on, name me 900,000. And don’t include any that were already old-hat in tables set up by astronomers who lived lawlessly before Isaac “Smoove N” Newton. Such as the Babylonians.

Saaaaay… Newton was an astrologer. Yet you guys canonize him. What’s the deal? Does this mean you believe in Joan Quigley, too? Wasn’t she running the White House through Nancy Reagan, awhile?

34

Johann Kepler and Tyho Brahe too did astrology for a living. Not everyone is born independently wealthy. Foo on you for holding it against them. Merry Xmas.

35

Clueless about modern history, too, huh?

John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams

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[[Moderator! Moderator! Tell this person to be funny or at least irritably cantankerous, which is appropriate to any discussion where the name “Velikovsky” is introduced.]]

I would, but it’s so esoteric I find the whole thing funny.
Jill

37

Genesis 1:14 is commonly mistranslated. A better translation would be: God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate day from night; they sall serve as signs for the set times – the days and the years – and the degrees in a circle.”

Thus, the assignment of 360 degrees to a circle and 360 days to the year was Divinely decreed (known as the Degree-Decree).

The TRUE year has 360 days, the addition of 5 days (and a quarter) was a device of the satanists (five extra days for the five-pointed devil-star) and Pentagists (a secret society that worships the pentateuch), and has been insidiously throwing us off from the true calendar.

These extra five days are the way that the government can keep massive conspiracies out of the public ear (like alien visitors), because they have FIVE EXTRA DAYS that the rest of us aren’t aware of, to do all their nefarious deeds.

The dispute between the creationists and the evolutionists can be resolved, too, because in the course of destroying the annual calendar, the Pentagists also have been secretly added a billion years to the age of the earth. They do this every thousand years, so that we won’t notice, and thus the true age of the earth is 6,000 years (as the creationists believe) plus two billion years secretly added by the Pentagists.

After I have my morning coffee, I’ll explain how these extra five days each year have been used by the communists to destroy the American economy. [/sarcasm]

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This thread reminds me of a pice o testimony I heard the last time I served on a jury. A teenage girl testified that she went inside the house for just two seconds while her boyfriend (the deendant) allegedly stabbed the complaining witness. Then she said she was inside the house for two minutes. So the ADA asked her, which was it? And she said (in a very irritated voice): Two seconds, two minutes, what’s the difference?

(Somehow this doesn’t sound as hilarious written down as it did in the courtroom.)

Is 360 days on 12 cups of coffee a good gas mileage for a Velikovskyite?

39

So! I turn my head for two seconds and turn back and the place is spattered with sophomoric sarcasms. (or was it two days?) Even the moderator can’t be trusted. Get a bucket and a mop. I am going to peel some of you PBS Couch Potatoes.

dlv confesses that Kepler and Brahe were also astrologers. Fine. And now on to the subject that Carl Sagan was a SERIOUS pot head. They were afraid to cremate his remains for the huge cumulus of THC it would have raised over Tompkins County. Children live there, you know.

That’s why Sagan would know first-hand the import of his Meant-For-History Pontification that “the only thing infinite is mankind’s capacity to delude himself.” Like wow, man… Look at da planets go round and round and round and round and round and… mus’ be bullions and bullions of 'em. All meaningless and random, too… like a lava lamp, only more stable…

Kennedy agrees, if uncomfortably. Kennedy? What happened, were they shooting your dad the day you were supposed to learn the little elementary school song about how Columbus “proved” the world was round? And no one before? I’m glad they shot your dad, then.
Here comes the Muppet Minnesingers:
Back in 1492/Columbus sailed the ocean blue/ To make the world round and true/ For little Johnny Kennedeeeeeeeeeee! And Youuuuuuuuu!

CKDextHavn, whatever THAT phonetic jumblatt is supposed to denote (I suspect some relationship to the illegal drug “Ecstasy”), you seem to be satirizing your own cranial confines. Probably a fine idea. But what exactly do your jokeoids have to do with the subject, even in sarcasm? Did your parents used to make you go to church, or something? Still not over it? See somebody about that, okay? Hurry.

Just to recap it for you, there were once 360 days in a sidereal year and that’s where the number of degrees in a circle originated. Then the earth got booted out of orbit and there were 365+ days in the year. But the math still worked fine. Now then, try satirizing that. I’ll wait.

So, Cecil is wrong; nobody back then who meant anything had lax mathematical standards; in addition, the reason he is wrong is STAGGERINGLY EARTH SHATTERING. Now WHAT, moderator, is “esoteric” about that? You’d think Zotti – er, Cecil HIMSELF would be pleased to be wrong with knowledge that correction of his smallest error could change the face of Science and rock the entire solar system repeatedly.

I’m no “Velikovskyite.” I’m just here to amuse myself until the taxi shows up. It’s handy to have a subject where just about everybody else in the world probably IS wrong. Less fun when they don’t deny that, though. This is why Kimstu has gone home. He could be wrong, and no fun at all. C’mon, Kennedy, flatulate us some more “facts.” Throw us a curve.

Hey. “Jokeoids.” Very good. Okay, I claim copyright on that one.

40

Guys,

Velikovsky’s got nothing to do with “Comments on Cecicl’s colummns”, please use a more appropriate venue: http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000475.html