A day of work

Spent a few hours this morning working on next week's History of Science seminar. As expected, I have concluded that to simply work through Kuhn is a mistake. So instead, I am trying to focus a little more on some of the measurements that ancient astronomers were able to make to very high accuracy. When I was about 10 I became really interested in astronomy - perhaps my longest lasting lifetime interest and I remember coming across a book in Kenilworth library which included some discussion of observations made by ancient astronomers. And over the next four or five years, I made hundreds of observations of my own. So I am thinking about including something about how to measure, with the naked eye, the lunar month top great accuracy.

It would have been nice to have been able to produce a powerpoint presentation for next week, but so far I have been producing so many drawings than hand drawn ones will have to do. Today I just about finished what I want to say about the sun and am ready to start on the moon.

And during the day today, my copy of T..E. Heath's Aristarchus of Samos arrived. This is the book I got out of LSE library last week and it was a real surprise to find this still available, even if the cover is incredibly garish.

For the last few days I have been without my main PC as it succummed to a virus attack last weekend. The good news is that it seems to have been fixed ok but it still needs loads of testing apparently. No news on whether my old music files have been lost - all my downloads from emusic.com and various other sources were on this machine.

The afternoon was mainly spent on finishing the book on intelligent design that I downloaded off the LSE library website last week. Not as good as Kitcher's Abusing Science, but not bad. It still looks to me like there is room for more work on this theme. Another possible thesis topic perhaps?