Thony Christie (he/his/him)

Culture is part of the unholy trinity—culture, chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. – Filipe Fernández–Armesto "Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration"

@PhillipHelbig @LizaRosen0000 The climate crisis hasn’t gone away and has in fact got worse

@LizaRosen0000 Whatever one thinks of Greta, or the claim she is repeating, that claim was not that humanity would be wiped out in five years, but rather that it would be wiped out at some point unless fossil fuels were phased out in five years. It‘s really easy to find worse stuff she‘s said.

@TimONeill007 @afro_hamza Then I misunderstood your Tweet, 🙃

@rmathematicus @afro_hamza Mate, I know. I noted the significance of Arabic translations and scholarship. I simply corrected the idea they were the *only* conduit for Greek Classical texts.

The christian philosphers and much of europe really learnt Greek philosophy from the muslims And its because Under the Abbasid Caliphate, the “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma) translated almost the entire Greek corpus (Aristotle, Plato, Galen, Euclid) into Arabic. These works were even being studied in Africa before much of Europe could properly access them. By the 1500s, Timbuktu was a global hub for the book trade. Manuscripts on astronomy, mathematics, and logic were imported from Egypt and the Maghreb. Euclid’s Elements was a staple of the advanced curriculum at the Sankore Madrasah. Arabic was the lingua franca of science at the time. This created recurring awkward moments for missionaries and explorers. They often arrived assuming they were bringing “civilization” and “science” to a vacuum, only to discover they were speaking to polyglots and mathematicians. One story I remember reading is when the British explorer Hugh Clapperton visited Sultan Muhammad Bello of Sokoto. Clapperton brought a copy of Euclid’s *Elements* as a prestigious gift, intending to impress the Sultan with Western knowledge. To Clapperton’s shock, the Sultan didn’t just recognize the book he pointed out that he already owned a copy and had studied it extensively. Bello, like many West African intellectuals of the time, had access to the vast libraries of Timbuktu and the wider Islamic world, where Euclid had been translated into Arabic centuries earlier, long before he was widely available in Latin Europe.

@IanWrisley @TimONeill007 You are telling an established medieval historian to do his homework!?

@TimONeill007 "Do your homework!" 😂😂😂😂😂 [the superfluous ellipsis is kind of funny, too]

And so it begins … 🙄😱😱😱😱

@TimONeill007 The same procedure as every year

@TimONeill007 @afro_hamza The translations from Arabic remained in circulation and were widely read and quoted for several centuries.

@rmathematicus @afro_hamza Umm, that’s exactly what I said.

@TimONeill007 @afro_hamza Unusually, I must contradict you Tim. Beginning in the 12th century European translated a substantial number of both Greek and Arabic scientific texts into Latin. Direct translation of original Greek texts into Latin didn’t take off till a century later. /2

@afro_hamza This is a pop history overstatement of the importance of translations of Arabic editions of Classical Greek works as a source for these texts in the Medieval Latin West. After some initial transmission this way, medieval Europeans quickly went to the better and more direct …

@odradesh And you just an undefined it that crawled out from under a stone

Dibble and this specimen are “he/his or she/her” afflicted. Agenda driven lefty loonies.

@afro_hamza Although there was substantial translation in Baghdad from Greek and Persian into Arabic in the 8th & 9th centuries, the House of Wisdom is a myth

@hogster @Kekius_Sage The under the Earth disc is actually one argument used to explain where the Sun went at night in a flat Earth model, another was that it was hidden behind high mountains around the edge of the Earth disc

@hogster @Kekius_Sage Actually, Chinese astronomers used an argument, very like the one Eratosthenes used to determine the size of the Earth, to prove that it was flat

Flat Earther, please explain this

@dwarkesh_sp The Copernican model was not less accurate than the Ptolemaic model, they were about equally inaccurate

When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism in 1543, it was actually less accurate than Ptolemy's geocentric model - a system refined over 1,400 years with epicycles precisely tuned to match observed planetary positions. It took another 70 years before Kepler, working from Tycho Brahe's unprecedentedly precise observations, replaced Copernicus’s circles with ellipses - finally making heliocentrism empirically superior. Terence Tao's point is that science needs a high temperature setting. If we only fund and follow what's most state of the art today, we kill the ideas that might need decades of work to surpass some overall plateau.

@TimJosling @dwarkesh_sp You are spouting crap, the epicycles and offset circles, correct term, eccentrics are original Ptolemy

> Coperrnicus was worse than Ptolemy initially I think though it is fair to point out that the Ptolemaic system was rife with tampering and overfitting. It did not intially fit well but then they added epicycles and offset circles etc. So much so that a model that is overfitted it often referred to these days in shorthand as "epicycles".

Henry Billingsley is the first person to publish an English translation of #Euclid's Elements. His work is so unique that he put pop-up 3-dimensional models to explain geometric models and mathematical theorems in 1570.

The Celts were immigrants not original inhabitants so they are foreign not British gods

@hogster @arisroussinos Believe! Believe? It’s a well known fact that English is the original language of the Bible!

@arisroussinos Do giants count? Gogmagog (spellchecked to Tomato). I think because the British believe God speaks English there isn’t much demand for earlier versions.

Everyone in Britain is heir to an extremely complex & ancient Celtic mythological cycle of native gods & heroes, just like Ireland, but set in the country in which they live, yet the British educational system actively ignores it. I doubt 1/10000 children could name a British god

@MichalYouDoing @moveincircles As long as you accept that many of the facts in the summarising are false

@moveincircles Well no, not really, LLMs are very good at summarising and shortening.

One of the strongest signals that someone is writing their own posts, rather than delegating to the shoggoth, is being able to make their point while keeping within the now-optional 280 character limit

@ianfmusgrave @vegastarr The North Pole is a magnetic mountain on a island, Mercator says so, so it must be true

@rmathematicus @vegastarr I should have guessed but <shrugs and points to the burning stupid on twitter> it can be hard to tell.🫢

This Won’t Make Sense To Everyone… Only To Those Who Know 👁️✨

@ianfmusgrave @vegastarr I was pulling your leg, Ian 🙃

@rmathematicus @vegastarr I've been above the article circle, no sign of it also a lot of people have famously been to the north pole and we have satellite images

@ImJohnDaugherty Almost everything claimed in this video is simply wrong

In the 4th century, Hypatia stood as a beacon of ancient history in Alexandria, lecturing on mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy. She was one of the last influential philosophers connected to the Library of Alexandria.✨ #ancientwisdom #ancienthistory #womeninhistory