NavList:

Ah, whaddaya know! The article is from the same group that published that (goofy!) paper about dung beetles navigating by the Milky Way. Clearly, their group has found the "secret key" to getting even their most minor articles published... and publicized. Their proposal here that the so-called "Viking sun compass" might have been used for finding latitude is not particularly convincing nor even really all that interesting. Myself, I have little doubt that the Norse navigators sailing to Iceland and Greenland used the Sun for latitude in some fashion. It is not a difficult observation, and the navigation required no great accuracy. Those are BIG targets. The suggestion that this device could have yielded latitude accurate to a tenth of a degree is probably over-stating the case.

-FER

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