<HTML>Robert G. Bauval <starvlingb@aol.com> writes:
[...]
>Seems I'm wasting my time with you.
If you are trying to get me to abandon critical thinking and join the
ranks of the inanely credulous, then yes, you most certainly are.
> You again misunderstand the problem of
>precision. With Orion's belt apparent size and tilt angle, the sighting
>precision achieved by the AE and its tranferral on the ground at Giza is
>remarkable.
Yes, you keep asserting that, but your reasoning is spurious in the
extreme. One of your early statements is that the match was
<b>exact</b>. It isn't. You seem to confuse evidence with assertion.
> You are confusing the precision achieved for base alignment,
>which involves a length of 230 meters aligned to a point at infinity,
> with
>the precision achieved in correlating something like Orion's belt which has
>an apparent size of 3 cm.
This last phrase is entirely meaningless and is typical of people who
misunderstand simple astrometry. Stellar separations (and, in fact, the
separations of anything whose distance you do not know) cannot be given
in linear units; they are expressed in the angles that they subtend.
3cm? 3cm at what distance? Without giving the distance at which they
subtend 3cm, the statement is meaningless.
And no, I'm not confusing the two. What you seem to be determined to ignore is that measurement of angles to better than 30 arcmin is not an overly demanding task, even with simple kit.
However, we <b>can</b> take your new definition of <i>perfect match</i>
(i.e. <i>symbolic representation</i>) and apply it to 3 stars in Cygnus.
Hey! We now have the Cygnus Correlation Theory. So what? Correlation
(even when it does exist) does not imply causation, as you should know.
Or, in other words, the only way to know which three stars (if any) the
relevant pyramids represent if there is a 'perfect match' (for normal
definitions of 'perfect'), unless there is strong evidence elsewhere of
the 'symbolic representation' that you seem to equate with 'perfect
match'.
> If you know anything about engineering scaling and setting out
>(which I pretty sure you don't),
I only studied engineering for a couple of years before changing track,
so I'm no expert, but I know sufficient about it to know that it is
actually a surveying problem. Now, I know a little about that topic as I
occasionally teach basic surveying, and manage to teach 15/16 year olds
to work to precisions of better than half a degree.
I'm in the process of moving house at the moment and a lot of my stuff
is inaccessible, but I'll tell you what, Robert, by the time we're
resettled, Orion will be up earlier and I'll measure the separation of
those stars with my two straight sticks and see how good a result I can
get -- at their separation, I reckon I can probably manage better than
15 arcmin -- but we'll see, I may surprise myself and be wrong...
>I really have better things to do than to constantly repeat these points.
You may well do, but repetition of an assertion doesn't make it true,
although it is a well known phenomenon that if a anything is repeated
frequently enough, a significant cohort of the inanely credulous will begin to believe it.
--
Best,
Stephen</HTML>
