
When Pirates Studied Euclid - Thevet
https://aeon.co/essays/how-european-sailors-learned-celestial-navigation
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lgeorget
A wonderfully written article, very instructive and enjoyable to read. It's
fun to see how a lot of things never really changes, like the teachers trying
to sell their own textbooks, teaching for the exams for the students they know
are only there for the diploma anyway and not the curriculum...

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Abishek_Muthian
It is interesting to see is knowledge, skills based teaching methodology soon
becoming examination oriented, when the onus is on clearing it for greater
benefits.

Centuries later, it hasn't changed much.

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ggm
Fed Hoyle write astro books for kids and mine starts "you are marooned on an
island with a piece of string..." and leads through simple trig to
astronomical trig, the equinoxes, time, distance..

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Iv
My dad stated that one of the key influence to him seeking an engineering
career was The Mysterious Island, by Jules Verne, where a bunch of people,
including an engineer, get stranded on an island after escaping a situation on
a balloon and caught in a storm.

The engineers, thanks to one of the character's on-time watch, and some solar
observations, which are described in the book, calculates their latitude and
longitude so that they can send messages and guess at their chances if they
build a boat (one of the character was a navigator).

Many characters have useful skills, but the engineer really shines. At one
moment he leads the people into a geological expedition to find interesting
chemicals and ends up doing explosives so that they can dig a good stone
shelter.

That was written in the 19th century with the specific purpose of getting kids
interested into acquiring knowledge and it was a blast.

A bit sad it states wrong things that were considered true at the time
(namely, that land masses form from the accretion of coral) but that's
actually an excellent lesson in the process through which science states
hypothesis that are sometimes wrong in order to find the truth.

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ysavir
One of my favorite books, and had a major impact on my life. It taught me a
lot about resilience and ingenuity, and gave me a love for learning how to do
things on my own--in case I ever find myself stranded on a remote island, of
course.

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Iv
Just look at maps of this time, the use different projections, different
techniques, gather incomplete testimonies, often from a single expedition.

If you were an explorer, it was essential at the time to understand how the
maps were made and what their weaknesses were. And instruments failures and
bad weather could combine to prevent you from knowing your position for days.
You needed to hack a measurements from 4 stars visible in a hole in the
clouds.

If you were military, it was possibly even more crucial. Being able to quickly
move from one point to the other, to avoid critical reefs or better: navigate
through them, guess where a given ship will end up at which time, etc... were
crucial skills.

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Maven911
Wow this is quite fascinating, are there other such articles that go in-depth
into medieval or renaissance time education with this level of novel facts?

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PaulAJ
The reference to log and trig tables is significant. At the time these tables
were compiled by hand, and accurate tables were considered as necessary as
accurate charts. Babbage's work on the Differential Engine was initially
prompted by the need to compile better tables.

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monkeycantype
did they do it in R :)?

    
    
        ```{r}
        # Naive Euclid algorithm by msuzen
    
        gcd <- function(a, b)
        {
          rk_1 <- a;
          rk_2 <- b;
          # Recurrence Formula:  r_k =  r_k-1 modulo r_k-2
          # Increment k until r_k-2 == 0 
          while(rk_2 != 0) {
          rk      <- rk_1%%rk_2; # remainder
          rk_1    <- rk_2;       # proceed in recurrence
          rk_2    <- rk;
         }
         return(rk_1)
        }```

~~~
pjmlp
Although the REPL was a bit slow, going through all the mechanical widgets.

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triplee
Oh hey, this is essentially a plot point in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle
books.

Well, getting away from pirates, that is, but same idea.

