Status Updates From A Scheme of Heaven: The His...

DNF was really getting worse by the day

This book is so slow and not really good. It can't stay focused and the writer keeps going on diary entries - I mean tangents - I mean passionate ramblings that has nothing to do with the premise of this book! Not sure if I'll finish it.

the invention of the mechanical clock somewhere around 1300 is so cool T_T so mysterious and so medieval

"a great deal of Arabic science was the work of individuals who may not have been Arab or even Muslim" so nice to see this being recognised more!!!

"Trying to figure out which story, if any, is hiding in your data is challenging expressly because there are usually multiple stories which can be crafted, and deciding which one to emphasise rarely has anything to do with the data itself...as with exploring the world, so too with data: all too often, you find only what you were looking for."

Astrology remains absolutely wild to me, particularly the fact that all our "star signs" are a couple of thousand years out of date thanks to the precession of the equinoxes, and this author takes it more seriously than I do. But the mathematical/scientific details cover a ton of the same ground as THE LIGHT AGES which is helping immensely.

"Astrology was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained for centuries by some of history's most brilliant minds... Just consider that for much of the last two thousand years, the word "mathematician" (mathematicus) simply meant an astrologer; there was no distinction"

On hold on 28 June 2024.
Back to Steven Forrest's "Inner Sky".