Re: RE: VMs: Pleiades Occultation Further Date Refinement

Hi Jan,

Well, I'm sorry if I got your back up. Please append anything I say in my posts with IMHO - of, course, humble opinions being the best that any of us can offer, and we should offer them freely to boot. To your charge of Ruggism, I confess, perhaps I am mildly guilty, but not negative, no, never, not me sir :-)

... Having re-read my post I can see how some clumsy word choices (no doubt the result of having to compile the post in a 45 minute lunch break in a room full of miscreant 15 year olds) suggested that I was condemning an area of current research and stating unverifiable absolutes. ALL the research that is done is valid and interesting, I simply wished to add a pinch of salt to a discussion that appeared, to me, to assume rather too many things. Seems I grabbed the pepperpot instead.

Rob

jan <hurychj@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hello Rob,

======= You wrote:
>Whilst these dates are interesting, I don't feel they are particularly useful. The 'identification' of
the Pleiades has not resulted in a reading of the label next to them . . .

Well, the identification was not done by label, only by number of stars. Of course until you
solve those labels for us, we have to use our our assumptions, so please hurry :-).

>I tend to think that, like the botanical drawings, the cosmo drawings are, if not totally a work of
the imagination, at least grossly inaccurate. The drawings are crude - the circles rough, the
'straight' lines crooked.

Bad drawings are seldom results of imaginations, actually the good ones are. Ask
art teachers, they know the difference. Inaccuracy is the feature we cannot based any
reasonable conclusion on, in most cases it is only ! the result of non-talented artist
who cannot draw. On the other hand, it could be Picasso :-). You are mixing together two different
terms: is it inaccurate as a drawing but it is imagination as an art. So what it is?
And of course, if you are looking for accurate
drawings, you picked the wrong manuscript and if you look for good imagination,
you picked the wrong artist :-). There was already the suggestion the VM is a work of madman,
but those suggestions do not lead anywhere - we can not use the Roscharch test on them.

The name of the game here is of course different: assuming
the author had in mind certain constellations, he possibly draw them the way you would draw
out of hand say Big Dipper. We all probably will agree it is good enough for recognizing it.
The question is: can we deduce anything out of pictures in the VM? You may say
"no", but for instance the pictures of comets are already used as valuable data. You may be
r! ight in the end, but stating it a priori as na objection is putting the wagon before the horse.
And if we recognize the constellation, the question is what next?

> Angles between the 'spokes' in the diagrams seem to have been guesstimated rather than
carefully measured. Drawings of the moon are invariably cosmetic rather than informative.

If the author intended to show the symbol of the Moon, do not look for Mare Serenitatis.
Do not expect too much - the VM is not scientific book per se, you have to take any such
request up with the author of the manuscript :-). The REAL question is: did the author want to
say something by that and what it was? How can you expect to get exact measurements from
drawings which apparently were not even made to scale? But you know all that :-).
With the VM, there are no easy solutions - Gordon Rugg took one and look where is he now:
only in old newspapers.

>If there was any serious astronomy ! going on, more care would have been taken.

Well, apparently the astronomers took the same stand - but nobody really says the VM was
meant to be serious astronomy - I think we all past that naive assumption :-). But as you claim,
there "no accurate pictures", so let's add "no serious herbal", we do not know what the pictures
of the "plumming" mean - keep on going and you end up with Gordon:
there is no serious text either :-).

> . . There are plenty of examples of 'astronomers' filling out the gaps on their works with
random stars, imaginary constellations or superabundant moons, and there's no reason to
assume the VMS authors did not do so too.

There you have a problem: tell us where are those fillings and where they are not and we can take it from
there. Or if they are all imaginations, what do they really mean? Maybe we should then ask
doctor Freud then?

I am really amazed with negativity lately oozing from this lis! t, but I am surprised
that you too joined the "rejection club". It seems that the world soon forgotten Gordon Rugg, but
here his ghost is still marching on . . .

Jan

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