A Matter of Degrees

[William Karlin]

Doug, thanks for the egyptian info.  I had never heard that. 

  I didn't mean to suggest that the ancients were idiots.  In many cases
they seem to have known more about the night sky than we do...it being
completely washed out anymore by light pollution.

  The few tidbits I do know about ancient astronomy astound me.  There's
that old stonehenge (which they still don't know what all it measured),
and several New World peoples which made observatories of all kinds.  The
Incas, Mayans, the Anasazi (I just read about theirs, really cool stuff  
-- I don't have the info handy at the moment, and it probably isn't too
relevant anyhow) and a tribe in what is now the western U.S.  Their
science was quite sophisticated.  

  The point I was trying to make was that the systems of measurement they
devised in "harmony" with the earth are not any less prone to difficultly
than the more "scientific" ones developed later on.  Speaking as a student
of science, I apprieciate the managability of the metric system -- the
overabundance of various units (and all the associated conversions) is a
small annoyance....  

cheers,

 will