Things learned today
Jan. 19th, 2006 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
learnteach...of not any great use! Therefor,
1. Currants are hard to get in the US due to the eradication of them to save white pine forests from White Pine blister. I had wondered. Currently, Cran-current juice gets the juice from Poland; this will change. Many states have laws against /ribes/ species.
2. Maps of the Middle Ages: If you look at them with the knowledge that they were produced by monks from historic documents by hand, and keep in mind that the goal was to place Man in the Universe, not Man's Position in the World physically, they make a lot more sense. Note that the Circle world with a T in the center fits the Bible a lot better, puts Jerusalem at the center, and looks religous to a Catholic (tau cross). I really should do a short Collegium class on this, in persona...
2.5 Maps changed due to the rise of legal courts rather than feudal courts, and the rise of printing (woodblock and moveable type press eventually.) The need to convince a lawyer or judge who has never ridden the bounds leads to technology to make it more believable.
2.7. And the need for merchants to have accurate ways of fufulling multinational contracts.
2.8 Until that change, the course of a river or the location of a village precisely wasn't that important, as God owns the Universe, the Fuedal Lord owned the Land, and the precise shape of it didn't matter as one level up owned it--or it was a buffer zone.
3. Columbus' assumption that he had made it to Asia is a LOT more believeable if you remember that Ptolemy made the globe slightly smaller, and Marco Polo doubled the length of the journey (doesn't it always feel like that?)
4. Conquest of the Aztec, with 14 small cannon, in 1520 and 21, was helped enormously by the fact that all the coastal tribes were tired of sending tribute to the center of the country. Cortez was a good politician.
5. If I'm not out of the house by 8 AM, or get on the computer for more than an hour, the day is wasted. Waaaaaaaaaasted.
1. Currants are hard to get in the US due to the eradication of them to save white pine forests from White Pine blister. I had wondered. Currently, Cran-current juice gets the juice from Poland; this will change. Many states have laws against /ribes/ species.
2. Maps of the Middle Ages: If you look at them with the knowledge that they were produced by monks from historic documents by hand, and keep in mind that the goal was to place Man in the Universe, not Man's Position in the World physically, they make a lot more sense. Note that the Circle world with a T in the center fits the Bible a lot better, puts Jerusalem at the center, and looks religous to a Catholic (tau cross). I really should do a short Collegium class on this, in persona...
2.5 Maps changed due to the rise of legal courts rather than feudal courts, and the rise of printing (woodblock and moveable type press eventually.) The need to convince a lawyer or judge who has never ridden the bounds leads to technology to make it more believable.
2.7. And the need for merchants to have accurate ways of fufulling multinational contracts.
2.8 Until that change, the course of a river or the location of a village precisely wasn't that important, as God owns the Universe, the Fuedal Lord owned the Land, and the precise shape of it didn't matter as one level up owned it--or it was a buffer zone.
3. Columbus' assumption that he had made it to Asia is a LOT more believeable if you remember that Ptolemy made the globe slightly smaller, and Marco Polo doubled the length of the journey (doesn't it always feel like that?)
4. Conquest of the Aztec, with 14 small cannon, in 1520 and 21, was helped enormously by the fact that all the coastal tribes were tired of sending tribute to the center of the country. Cortez was a good politician.
5. If I'm not out of the house by 8 AM, or get on the computer for more than an hour, the day is wasted. Waaaaaaaaaasted.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 12:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 02:00 am (UTC)I love the fact that even after the new maps are introduced, people are arguing that they are wrong because the physical landscape is *less true* than the conceptual/biblical landscape. Says a lot about the importance of the spiritual to medieval mindsets.
no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 06:13 am (UTC)