NavList:

Peter, it is rather amusing watching you loosening shots that backfire: About seating arrangements you should read your own posts. It was you who assigned other members to the "gallery", remember?

 

And thanks for the "batty". I just can't follow your reasoning Whyit should be such, but maybe that's because it's upside down due to the curvature of the earth.

 

Wolfgang

----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: NavList@fer3.com [mailto:NavList@fer3.com]Im Auftrag von Peter Fogg

Gesendet: Samstag, 24. November 2007 00:29
An: NavList@fer3.com
Betreff: [NavList 4039] Re: AW: [NavList 4035] Re: Bauer's book, was Re: Newton and Halley

But is it so daft, Wolfgang? And why the back benches? Has someone placed you in charge of the seating here? And what does your catty comment add up to, apart from a general announcement that I am not your old friend? Do we need to know this? Who cares?

Robert has made what seems a fairly sensible statement:
"Bauer's book was not intended to be an exhaustive treatise on the history
of the development of the sextant. The chapter in question was intended to
give the reader a brief historical and contextual overview which would lead
into the meat of the book: which is sextant maintenance and repair."

What seems a little more batty is your response:
"... in a book that is meant to inform about sextant
maintenance and repair you may include factual errors in the section about
the history of the sextants and its forerunners and you are not to be
corrected because you are a practical sailor?"

Huh?  Aren't you bolting off into a quite irrelevant hole of your own making here, my dear old friend Wolfgang? (if you insist on all this faux chummy business - seems silly to me but there you go, dif'rent strokes for dif'rent folks I guess).

 The topic is whether a practical tome about the care and maintenance of sextants should be criticised for omissions in an introductory section about history, as I understand this story. Now you want to introduce so called "factual errors".  Haven't you just invented these?  Where is your evidence?

While our other old friend (this could get tedious) Nicolàs has alluded to unspecified "erorrs" he has yet to name them, apart from what seems a fairly minor matter: a photo of "... a Davis Quadrant with the horizon vane assembled in the wrong way".  For you to jump to a conclusion of "factual errors" from that vague and inconclusive base seems unsound, to say the least. Apart from determinedly missing the point.

Somewhat lacking, it seems, in the necessary intellectual rigour one might have hoped for from a pedantic nit-picker. If that is how you wish to present yourself. Although from the front benches, apparently.

Could you publish a plan of the seating arrangements here, for the edification of us all?