NavList:

Terrific story Frank. Thanks. I know that Bowditch said he found numerous errors in existing tables. Again, it would be nice to find some documentation about even ONE of these errors, even if it didn't cause a documented disaster.

I even once used an OCR program to tabulate in Excel the entries from a page of a Victorian era log table to see if, perchance, there was an error. Having the program recognize these antique fonts was a challenge but it was successful after some 'learning' on its part. I found no errors.

I gave a presentation to the Oughtred Society comparing Napier's original tables with what Bill Gates said the numbers should be. Napier was spot on, or was it Bill? My quip was that we really haven't come all that far in all these 400 years, have we. But there are many instances of this. My wonderful 19th century sextant vernier which reads to 10 seconds. 10 seconds is a mighty small angle (what a US quarter coin looks like at 1/3 of a mile (1/2 km)

Norm
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