NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: 1851 Bowditch
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2003 Feb 1, 20:35 -0500
From: Jared Sherman
Date: 2003 Feb 1, 20:35 -0500
Bruce-I think many of us (myself included!) have some conceptual problems caused by the way we have learned basic terms and concepts. For instance, you say "Greenwich time" but doesn't that actually just mean "my longitude" ? Yet, most of us think of "time" as a concept, not as a *position*. I know that a was taught spherical trig and radians in high school and promptly and gratefully forgot all about it. Years and years later when a friend was explaining navigational concepts to me, one day it went "AHAH!" and radians made terribly good and obvious sense. All of which I suppose is one reason why it can be some fun to read older texts, because they expose us to the viewpoint of people coming from different cultures and times, which in turn may broaden our own perspectives.