The North Star is North in the Flat Earth model. To find the direction of North the Chinese just had to find the North Star. It's the brightest one. Simple!
Really? The North Star is the brightest? Are you sure about that?
This statement helps support my hypothesis that the main problem with FE'ers is that they don't get out much, and didn't spend much time outside as kids. People that spend much time outside at night (e.g. camping, star-gazing, or just hanging out) understand things like the basic geometry of celestial bodies, sunrises and sunsets, the relative apparent brightness of objects such as polaris, etc. (All using the Zetetic method.)
Ha ha! I hadn't noticed that blunder. But indeed, Polaris is the 53rd brightest star and the 24th brightest in the northern hemisphere.
If you find the brightest star (Sirius) and follow that, you'd sail round in circles.
I think I can forgive Tom for this one though...it's a claim that's untrue in both FET and RET - so we'll just call it a mistake. In truth, to navigate by Polaris, you have to find the right constellations and locate it from there. In the patch of the sky it occupies, Polaris is quite bright and it's hard to mistake it for some other star once it's been pointed out to you.
Bad problem is, if you use Tom's approach, in FE you sail along a circular route that's much longer than the shortest route.
What makes him BADLY wrong about this one is that he's assuming that navigation is all about using the stars as a compass...which is kinda pointless since you already have one of those. Navigation is about finding POSITION - which in RET means latitude and longitude - but in FET, it's a horrible mess because the huge optical distortions implied by "The Bishop Equation" make stellar navigation quite impossible without fully understanding that the earth is flat - and the seamen of yesteryear either didn't know that or there was a conspiracy back in the 1600's and throughout the long history of chinese sailors that would have encompassed vastly too many people to be plausible.
Exactly, on celestial navigation. Tom can't answer that one, other than to grossly mischaracterize celestial navigation.
But his gaffe on polaris is an important and illuminating clue, IMO. I don't think it was a gaffe. I think we should read it exactly as he wrote it, and take him at his word. I think he literally has no idea how bright it is, and thinks that it is an important star because it is literally "the brightest". In the whole sky.
In the ten years I've read his posts (mostly off and occasionally on), it seems painfully, pitifully obvious that he doesn't get out much. He has a profoundly naive understanding of basic physical and geometric things in the world - not even relating to flat vs spheroid earth - that anyone who has spend much time outdoors, intrinsically understands. (Like the relative brightness of Polaris.) I think he literally sits inside all day stewing over the RE conspiracy and watching Youtube videos - completely oblivious to things like the movement of trees in the wind, the flocking of birds, the resistance of water to your body in it, the eerie glow of moonlight in a forest. (Though I seem to recall he had a professional occupation at one time, maybe still.) I haven't compiled a list, obviously, it's just an impression I've formed over the years. Via the Zetetic Method. He seems "booksmart" (arguably), but profoundly - dangerously - naive. I mean, he seems to not have noticeable cognitive deficiency - he seems to be not brain-damaged or mentally impaired. And yet at times you're left scratching your head, asking, "what the f--- is he talking about? Has he ever
once been outdoors"?
I feel profoundly sorry for him. But back to the topic at hand: In summary, I don't think at all that the Polaris flub was a grammar mistake or other failure to adequately communicate. Besides, he has a long history of picking apart and dismissing arguments, based on obvious, trivial grammatical mistakes, and using it as pretext to abandon a debate that is leading to intellectually uncomfortable places. "Intellectual dishonesty" is his trademark. I'm not calling him a liar. There's a difference. He uses intellectually dishonest tactics to avoid honest, legitimate, fact and issues-based debate. And rather than submit his own theories to detailed analysis and constructive debate, he uses hand-wavy assertions, vague ad hominem attack, puts forth strawmen attacks that he clearly knows are such, and puts forth blatantly pedantic arguments to pick apart imperfect presentations of well-established RE arguments.
And yet, for those reasons, he's the perfect FE advocate. Also, he's online 24-7, 365, for the last ten years. (It would seem at least from random sampling.)
(He also uses an avatar photo that is at least ten years old, and I strongly suspected was that old then. Nothing wrong with being "old", just be honest. I don't use an avatar because 1] I don't plan on being here for years or even months, 2] I don't want anyone knowing that the real me even has time to engage such lunacy, etc. But I'm not dishonest in my presentation of who I am. I have a cousin who is seriously cognitively impaired not only from birth but through decades of heavy drug use. He believes that aliens are everywhere and abducting people all the time. He is very active online and uses a 30 year-old photo of himself! He was a reasonably handsome middle-age man then. Now he just looks like a fat old useless blob. That's not proof that Tom's photo is 20 years old. But if his avatar was, say, that of a 300 lbs 75 year-old man with a droopy stroke-face on one side, I'd have a heck of alot more empathy for him!)