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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (67898)	12/21/1999 8:11:00 PM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 108807

I thought that was interesting, myself. It prompted me to run a search on SI using Y2K as the search term. I was not aware that the Fed didn't raise rates because of the desire to facilitate a smooth transition due to Y2K. Not sure what that means, but I am increasingly amazed at the stock market, so my lack of understanding may not be significant. On rationality/irrationality, it seems to me that it's not always possible to tell whether an idea or belief is rational or irrational. I am reading Umberto Eco's essay on "The Force of Falsity," the power that false ideas have to shape history. For example, did you know that Christopher Columbus did not attempt to prove that the earth is round? It had been widely accepted for centuries that the earth was round, by such religious scholars as Augustine, Origin, Ambrose, Alburtus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John of Holywood, Nicholas Oresme, and Jean Buridan, "to name but a few," says Eco. Of course the ancient Greeks believed the world was round, too, such as Eratosthenes, Pythagorus, Parmenides, Eudoxius, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Aristarchus and Archimedes. Even Ptolemy knew the world was round, he just thought it was the center of the Universe. No, the disagreement that Columbus has with the sages of Salamanca was that he thought that their calculations were off, and that the world was much smaller than they thought, so it wasn't foolhardy to sail across the Atlantic to get to the Orient. And, in fact, he was wrong about the size of the earth, but luckily there was a continent that no one realized was there. Just an example of the difficulty in telling when someone is rational or irrational.