Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2020

Desperate Mayors React to Coronavirus: A Timeline

Filed under: Government, Health, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 29 Apr 2020

The past few months have been difficult on politicians. It’s hard to look like you know what you’re doing when you have no idea what you’re doing.

Performed by Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton. Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Edited and Produced by Austin Bragg. Cameras by Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.

Music: “Wholesome,””Marty Gots a Plan,” “Anamalie,” “Anguish,” and “The Cannery” by Kevin MacLeod used under an Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

CITIZENS! Report any non-socially-distanced deviationist behaviour to this number immediately!

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Maclean’s, Jen Gerson admits that she has not (yet) reported any of her neighbours for their failure to obediently follow the rules of social distancing. She must be reported to the appropriate state authorities!

Commemorative badges of the German Democratic Republic’s Ministry of State Security (Stasi).
Wikimedia Commons.

Look, I know I’m going to get flak for this, but someone needs to say it: think twice before you narc on your neighbours.

Snitching may work, but the downsides to citizen-policing are grim — to say nothing of the historical antecedents.

Firstly, “you can play havoc with somebody just by snitching on them with an anonymous snitch line,” noted Sharon Polsky, the president of the Privacy and Access Council of Canada. In addition to the risk of malicious reports, if people of colour aren’t disproportionately subject to snitching, I’d be shocked.

Totalitarian states turned neighbour against neighbour and family against family, in order to maintain the illusion of social cohesion.

Authoritarians use this tactic because there are never enough police or soldiers to force compliance upon an entire population, not unless everyone consents to become an agent of his or her own mutual oppression.

The term “fascism” has an innocent history. It comes from the Roman term “fasces,” which means a bundle of sticks bound together. One stick breaks, but the fasces remains strong. It’s another term for unity. That’s what makes it so seductive, especially in times of uncertainty and mortal dread. We’re all in this together. Nary a stick shall stray.

“We are now living amid the very tactics that the West [once] criticized,” Polsky added. “With state controls on commerce, industry, speech, and media.”

The federal government, for example, is already considering legislation that would bar the spreading of misinformation about COVID-19 online.

“Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and it is about protecting the public,” Privy Council President Dominic LeBlanc told reporters with a line that should give any student of history the creeps.

“This is not a question of freedom of speech. This is a question of people who are actually actively working to spread disinformation, whether it’s through troll bot farms, whether [it’s] state operators or whether it’s really conspiracy theorist cranks who seem to get their kicks out of creating havoc.”

No doubt LeBlanc et al are operating under the noblest of intentions. But repressive measures buy conformity at a terrible price. Snitch lines turn us against one another. They teach us to fear the people we need to survive, thus making us more dependent on the apparatus of the state.

April 29, 2020

“The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Arthur Chrenkoff on the sudden decision that the World Health Organization is the ultimate arbiter of what we’re allowed to say on social media platforms like Twitter and YouTube:

There is of course no evidence that the video represents any disinformation. It relates to legitimate scientific research by a medical company conducted in association with a respected hospital to develop a novel treatment of possibly crucial importance in the current conditions and into the future. The only problem with the video is that is indirectly supports Trump’s flight of fancy speculation about using light and chemicals to “disinfect” the body. Ergo, according to a NYT journalist it represents a problem and YouTube agrees. YouTube now has a standing policy of removing COVID information that goes against the World Health Organisation’s guidelines. Putting aside the question of the WHO’s credibility in the wake of the pandemic, we are not talking here about some guy in a tinfoil hat talking about 5G towers spreading the virus; this is a video relating to ongoing, respectable scientific research. Will it work? Probably not. But perhaps neither will any of the 150 or so COVID-19 vaccines being currently developed around the world. We won’t know until we know. But in the meantime, scientific news should not be censored, period.

[…]

Goldsmith and Woods are correct in pointing out not only the greater role that governments have been playing in regulating speech but more importantly how much of that effort has been embraced and driven by the big tech — and by the private individuals enabled and encouraged by the big tech — what I have previously called the “democratised censorship”. The difference is that people like Goldsmith and Woods think that’s a good thing.

The dirty little secret is that a great number of leftists, progressives and even centrist technocrats and activists look at China, with its authoritarian government, social credit score system, ubiquitous surveillance, and the ability to “get things done” and done quickly and supposedly efficiently (in China, bullet trains run on time, I hear), and pine for such a system to be applied in their own countries — as long as, of course, they are the ones in power and decide what is right, important and valuable. The left’s objections are rarely against authoritarianism and its means and methods per se, just with the possibility that someone else — like Trump — is the one behind the wheel, implementing their, not the left’s, agenda.

The war on ultraviolet radiation because it might help Trump is an educational moment. One could say, first they came for crazy conspiracy theorists and I said nothing because I’m not an anti-vaxxer or anti-5G activist — and so on. The problem with censorship is that it keeps creeping up on everyone else. And those who do the censoring — who decide what the ignorant masses should and shouldn’t be allowed to read — are not some detached and impartial spiritual beings but people with political agendas. People who think that ideas and beliefs of one half of the society are harmful and offensive. People who will censor news that doesn’t fit the agenda and support the narrative.

And then they came for ultraviolet radiation… You have been warned.

“If it saves just one life…”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan on the rallying cry of the Karens of all genders:

In times of crisis, politicians want to look like they’re doing something, and don’t want to hear about limits on their authority. In times of crisis, people want someone to do something, and don’t want to hear about tradeoffs. This is the breeding ground for grand policies driven by the mantra, “if it saves just one life.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invoked the mantra to defend his closure policies. The mantra has echoed across the country from county councils to mayors to school boards to police to clergy as justification for closures, curfews, and enforced social distancing.

Rational people understand this isn’t how the world works. Regardless of whether we acknowledge them, tradeoffs exist. And acknowledging tradeoffs is an important part of constructing sound policy. Unfortunately, even mentioning tradeoffs in a time of crisis brings the accusation that only heartless beasts would balance human lives against dollars. But each one of us balances human lives against dollars, and any number of other things, every day.

Five-thousand Americans die each year from choking on solid food. We could save every one of those lives by mandating that all meals be pureed. Pureed food isn’t appetizing, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. Your chance of dying while driving a car is almost double your chance of dying while driving an SUV. We could save lives by mandating that everyone drive bigger cars. SUVs are more expensive and worse for the environment, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing. Heart disease kills almost 650,000 Americans each year. We could reduce the incidence of heart disease by 14 percent by mandating that everyone exercise daily. Many won’t want to exercise every day, but if it saves just one life, it must be worth doing.

Legislating any of these things would be ridiculous, and most sane people know as much. How do we know? Because each of us makes choices like these every day that increase the chances of our dying. We do so because there are limits on what we’re willing to give up to improve our chances of staying alive. Our daily actions prove that none of us believes that “if it saves just one life” is a reasonable basis for making decisions. Yet, when a threat like the coronavirus emerges, we go looking for an imaginary cure that will save lives without tradeoffs.

QotD: “Ethical” ways to prevent scientific progress

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Health, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The stigmatization of science is also jeopardizing the progress of science itself. Today anyone who wants to do research on human beings, even an interview on political opinions or a questionnaire about irregular verbs, must prove to a committee that he or she is not Josef Mengele. Though research subjects obviously must be protected from exploitation and harm, the institutional-review bureaucracy has swollen far beyond this mission. Its critics have pointed out that it has become a menace to free speech, a weapon that fanatics can use to shut up people whose opinions they don’t like, and a red-tape dispenser that bogs down research while failing to protect, and sometimes harming, patients and research subjects. Jonathan Moss, a medical researcher who had developed a new class of drugs and was drafted into chairing the research-review board at the University of Chicago, said in a convocation address, “I ask you to consider three medical miracles we take for granted: X-rays, cardiac catheterization, and general anesthesia. I contend all three would be stillborn if we tried to deliver them in 2005.” The same observation has been made about insulin, burn treatments, and other lifesavers.

The hobbling of research is not just a symptom of bureaucratic mission creep. It is actually rationalized by many bioethicists. These theoreticians think up reasons that informed and consenting adults should be forbidden to take part in treatments that help them and others while harming no one. They use nebulous rubrics like “dignity,” “sacredness,” and “social justice.” They try to sow panic about advances in biomedical research with far-fetched analogies to nuclear weapons and Nazi atrocities, science-fiction dystopias like Brave New World and Gattaca, and freak-show scenarios like armies of cloned Hitlers, people selling their eyeballs on eBay, and warehouses of zombies to supply people with spare organs. The University of Oxford philosopher Julian Savulescu has exposed the low standards of reasoning behind these arguments and has pointed out why “bioethical” obstructionism can be unethical: “To delay by 1 year the development of a treatment that cures a lethal disease that kills 100,000 people per year is to be responsible for the deaths of those 100,000 people, even if you never see them.”

Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.

April 27, 2020

Entrepreneurs beyond the atmosphere

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Doug Bandow reacts to Donald Trump’s executive order that begins to clear the way for private enterprise in space:

Taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, at mission time 075:49:07 (16:40 UTC), while in orbit around the Moon, showing the Earth rising above the lunar horizon.

Despite the current chaos caused by the coronavirus, Washington still must consider the future. Which explains the president’s new executive order that would allow private resource development on the moon and asteroids. It clearly rejects the “common heritage of mankind” rhetoric deployed by the United Nations on behalf of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which four decades ago created a special UN body to seize control of seabed resources.

The Future of Space Exploration

The EO issued earlier this month explained that

    Successful long-term exploration and scientific discovery of the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies will require partnership with commercial entities to recover and use resources, including water and certain minerals, in outer space.

The measure began the process of revising an uncertain legal regime which currently discourages private sector development.

The administration pointed to the 1979 Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (known as the Moon treaty) and the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of State in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (typically called the Outer Space Treaty). Neither is friendly to entrepreneurs or explorers with a commercial bent.

In response, the president announced that

    Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons. Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.

Space is a Long-Term Prospect

The document’s main directive is for the Secretary of State, in cooperation with other agencies, to “take all appropriate actions to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space.” The secretary is to “negotiate joint statements and bilateral and multilateral arrangements with foreign states regarding safe and sustainable operations for the public and private recovery and use of space resources.”

Obviously, the administration’s attention is directed elsewhere at the moment. However, the potential benefits of turning to space are significant. The value of scientific research is obvious and continues to drive government agencies such as NASA. Launch services and space tourism have caught the interest of private operators. Such activities offer fewer legal and practical difficulties than attempting to establish some sort of long-term presence in the great beyond.

More complex development of space is a longer-term prospect. However, that makes it even more imperative to encourage innovation by creating institutions and incentives that encourage responsible development of what truly is the “final frontier.”

Prehistory Summarized: Evolution

Filed under: History, Humour, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 Dec 2015

Third video in a week? Good lord, what have they been feeding us?

Anyway, Blue’s back, this time with more history! The exciting conclusion to the three-part video series! Our “Return Of The King”! Our “Return Of The Jedi”! Our… wow, a lot of “part three”s are the return of something or other, aren’t they? Let’s pretend this is “The Return Of Bruce”.

April 26, 2020

“If it saves just one life…”

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hector Drummond illustrates the moral failure of falling back on the “if it saves just one life” trope as a justification for any and all restrictions on free people:

Not actually the official symbol of Britain’s National Health Services … probably.

Let me ask you a question. Would you give up your job, your savings, your kids’ economic future, your pension, your parents’ current pension, your house, and your mental health, if I told you that doing so may possibly extend my old, sick grandfather’s life by a year or two? I don’t suppose you’d be too keen, would you? In fact, even the most mild-mannered of people is likely to get angry at the sheer effrontery of such a request.

What if I told the world the same thing? What if I told the world that if everyone in every country gave up their wordly possessions, and spent the rest of their lives in grinding poverty, then it’s possible that my grandfather might get to see Christmas? And suppose that there was some bare plausibility to this, based on a computer model developed by scientists at Imperial College. What do you think the world is likely to say to me? The polite response would be, “Sorry to hear about your grandfather, but we’re not going to do this”. The less polite response would be more like … well, just incredulous laughter, and slammed doors.

The reason I bring up these hypothetical scenarios, though, is that all over social media we are hearing about the Covid-19 lockdown being “worth it if it saves just one life”. But would the people saying this really be willing to give up, say, their own house, car and possessions and teenage daughter to someone who is suicidally depressed over their lack of prospects in life? No. Would they be prepared to serve ten years in jail if it saved the life of someone at risk of being killed by gangsters? No. Would they be happy with having the government forcibly remove a kidney from them to extend the life of someone with failing kidneys? No. Economic ruin and loss of liberty is not something we generally regard as a fair trade for a stranger’s life. Generally even the bleeding hearts among us will say, and rightfully so, “I’m sorry for this person, but they are not entitled to this, and I will not damage my life to any great extent for them”. Charitable donations are one thing. So is volunteer service. But that’s it.

Another thing I am seeing is people who say, “Anything is worth it if it saves lives”. Anything? Really? Shall we ban alcohol then? Because some people die from alcohol. Cars? Paracetamol? Steak knives? Shall we ban mobile phones, because terrorists might use them to communicate with? Shall we lock up for life anyone convicted of a minor juvenile crime, in case they turn out to be a killer? The whole idea is too ridiculous for words, yet all over the world there are fearful people hiding in their homes and posting such thoughts. It is one thing to feel sorry for them, but their stupid ideas shouldn’t pass unchallenged.

QotD: Bio-engineering

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In any case I don’t think we’re really going to have strange new hybrid species; it’s more likely people will seek some sort of body modification that will make today’s tongue studs look as tame as Hello Kitty temporary tattoos. I’m guessing that young guys will go for the elk horns, which at least would make bar fights more interesting. Young women would opt for a Bambi tail. Gastronomes would shyly ask their doctor if they could get some cow genes — multiple stomach chambers, one for each course! — and geeks would request those agile monkey toes that come in handy when you’re up all night writing viruses. We’ll be shocked at first; they’ll be ostracized. In 2064 a presidential candidate will be forced to withdraw when someone digs up college pictures that show him sporting a scaly tail. Hey, all the kids had them. It fell off. I have no idea where it is now. But by 2096 we’ll not only be used to it, we’ll have a governor with a unicorn horn.

Unless we stop now. And I know what you’re saying: Oh, it’s easy for you to say, Mr. Stop-the-progress-of-science-for-some-ridiculous-ethical-reason. Actually, no, it’s not easy for me to say. This forked tongue I got from the snake gene implant is not exactly working out. On the other hand, I don’t have to change clothes; I just molt twice a year. On the other, my wife hates finding that thing in the hamper.

James Lileks “In the genes department”, Star Tribune, 2005-02-06.

April 25, 2020

Professor Neil Ferguson – “I wrote the code (thousands of lines of undocumented C) 13+ years ago to model flu pandemics…”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An anonymous guest post at Hector Drummond’s blog pivots on the disturbing quote in the headline from one of the key advisors to the British government on the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic:

To say I was gobsmacked at his admission is an understatement. He’s one of the experts advising the government about the Covid-19 pandemic, and was consulted in previous health crises such as Foot & Mouth disease. Like the approach to combating that, we’re seeing a kind of scorched earth approach to containing another transmissible disease.

Even though the “C” programming language that Ferguson used is nearly 50 years old, the language chosen isn’t the problem. Undocumented means that modules and other code fragments are not commented, so their purpose may be unclear to someone unfamiliar with the code. In the worst case it means that modules and variables don’t have self-documenting names. For example, an accounting program could have the variables BalanceBroughtForward and BalanceCarriedForward, but a sloppy programmer might call them B1 and B2 instead – a sure recipe for confusion.

The “C” language is good to work with but has some inherent issues which can lead to subtle bugs affecting the output without causing an error. A common problem is the conditional which uses two equals signs rather than one.

To compare variables A and B for equality you would write this: if (A == B). However, it’s easy to accidentally write this: if (A = B). The latter always returns true and assigns the value of variable B to A. I have no idea whether Ferguson’s code contains any bugs, this is just one minor example of the need for strict testing.

The reason for commenting code extensively and properly is so that the programmer himself, and anyone else who maintains it, can understand what it does and how it works, reduce the chance of mistakes and avoid unnecessary effort. During my IT career I would have terminated the contract of any contractor working for me who wrote thousands of lines of undocumented code. Not only is such code a nightmare for others to work on, it can be difficult for the original programmer to maintain if coming back to it after a long time. Sloppiness in the coding raises the worry of a concomitant lack of rigour in testing, although that’s not to assert Ferguson’s code isn’t working as intended and/or wasn’t tested.

April 22, 2020

Can We Build A Space Elevator? | Earth Lab

Filed under: Economics, Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 5 Aug 2013

Getting to space in a rocket is expensive! One of the most popular alternative ideas is the space elevator, but is it really possible?

Here at BBC Earth Lab we answer all your curious questions about science in the world around you. If there’s a question you have that we haven’t yet answered or an experiment you’d like us to try let us know in the comments on any of our videos and it could be answered by one of our Earth Lab experts.

April 21, 2020

One of the few good things happening during the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic – deregulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Patrick McLaughlin, Matthew D. Mitchell, and Adam Thierer on the benefits of suspending many existing regulations during the ongoing epidemic:

As the COVID-19 crisis intensified, policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels started suspending or rescinding laws and regulations that hindered sensible, speedy responses to the pandemic. These “rule departures” raised many questions. Were the paused rules undermining public health and welfare even before the crisis? Even if the rules were well intentioned or once possibly served a compelling interest, had they grown unnecessary or counterproductive? If so, why did they persist? How will the suspended rules be dealt with after the crisis? Are there other rules on the books that might transform from merely unnecessary to actively harmful in future crises?

In many cases, rule departures or partial deregulations undertaken during the crisis are tantamount to an admission by policymakers that some policies that were intended to serve the public interest fail to do so. “The explanation for many of these problems is that outdated 20th-century rules stymie 21st-century innovation,” noted former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial. “In an emergency, many of those rules can be waived by executive order. After the crisis, there will be momentum to challenge the stale rules that hindered our response. This is likely to go well beyond dealing with pandemics,” he argued. Similarly, lawyer and commentator Philip K. Howard has asserted that “the same kind of energy and resourcefulness will be needed to get America’s schools, businesses, government agencies and nonprofits up and running again” and has suggested the need for a “temporary Recovery Authority with a broad mandate to identify and waive unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles to recovery.” In addition, Wall Street Journal columnist and Brookings Institution Senior Fellow William A. Galston has called for a “Coronavirus 9/11 Commission” to study the governance failures witnessed during the crisis, arguing that “the immediate effects of Covid-19 are bad enough. Failing to learn from it would be criminal negligence for which future generations won’t forgive us.”

The crisis has been a stress test for American institutions. It has laid bare the outdated, overlapping, and often contradictory morass of rules that make it difficult for public and private organizations to respond to changing circumstances. In many cases, these rules persist not because they protect the public from danger but because they protect organized interest groups from new competition. Rules also persist because agencies rarely prioritize retrospective reviews aimed at eliminating unnecessary or potentially harmful rules. On the contrary, agencies typically have a vested interest in maintaining regulations that often took years to generate. Agency employees who have developed expertise in those rules, just like their counterparts in the private sector, have a financial interest in preserving these rules. In this way, “Agencies are stakeholders with respect to their own regulations.”

Once the COVID-19 crisis subsides, there is likely to be considerable momentum to review the rules that have slowed down the response. Some of those rules should probably be permanently repealed and others amended to allow for more flexible responses in the future.

April 20, 2020

“New York City subways were ‘a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection'”

Filed under: Government, Health, Politics, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Randal O’Toole wonders why the lone sacred cow of mass transit is still running, despite its potential role in spreading disease:

MTA NYC Subway 1 trains at 125th St., 14 May, 2018.
Photo by Mtattrain via Wikimedia Commons.

Sit‐​down restaurants and bars have been shut down. Public officials are discouraging or even forbidding people from doing “unnecessary travel,” even if it is to visit a second home where they might be able to socially distance themselves better than in their first, more urban home. All sorts of other rules are being passed, all supposedly for our own good.

So why are urban transit systems still running? A 2018 study found that “mass transportation systems offer an effective way of accelerating the spread of infectious diseases.” A 2011 study found that people who use mass transit were nearly six times more likely to have acute respiratory infections than those who don’t. Not surprisingly, a study published a few days ago found that New York City subways were “a major disseminator — if not the principal transmission vehicle — of coronavirus infection.”

Transit agencies say they are helping “essential workers” go about their business. But if they are so essential, isn’t it important to find them a safe way of getting to work? If we truly cared about people’s safety, then transit services should have shut down at the same time we closed other non‐​essential businesses and asked people to stay at home.

[…]

Unfortunately, the transit lobby has successfully turned government‐​subsidized transit into a sacred cow. Transit is supposedly greener than driving when in fact it’s an energy hog. Transit is supposedly needed to help poor people get to work when in fact the people most likely to commute by transit are those earning more than $75,000 a year.

When the pandemic took away most of transit’s customers, instead of shutting down, which would have been the responsible thing to do, transit agencies demanded that Congress give them $25 billion, tripling federal support to transit this year. Thanks to transit’s sacred cow status, Congress agreed without any serious debate.

Effectively, Congress rewarded the agencies for spreading disease. It would have been better to use that money to help transit‐​dependent essential workers buy a car so they could have a safe way of getting to work.

New York City subway system.
Image by Jake Berman (maps.complutense.org) based on information from the MTA, via Wikimedia Commons.

Prehistory Summarized: Early Life

Filed under: Humour, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 1 Dec 2015

Blue’s back with more sweet, sweet prehistory! Today, Bruce explores the wonders of life.

QotD: The Columbus myth

Filed under: Americas, Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My conclusion was that the Rabbi’s view of the history of the ketubah fitted a pattern I have seen in other contexts — moderns believing in bogus history that supports their self image of superiority to those ignorant and unreasonable people in the past.

My favorite example is the Columbus myth, the idea that the people who argued against Columbus were ignorant flat-earthers who thought his ships would sail off the edge. That is almost the precise opposite of the truth. By the time Columbus set off, a spherical Earth had been the accepted scientific view for well over a thousand years. Columbus’s contemporaries not only knew that the Earth was round, they knew how big around it was, that having been correctly calculated by Eratosthenes in the third century B.C.

By the fifteenth century they also had a reasonably accurate estimate of the width of Asia. Subtracting the one number from the other they could calculate the distance from where Columbus was starting to where Columbus claimed to be going and correctly conclude that it was much farther than his ships could go before running out of food and water. The scientific ignorance was on the side of Columbus and those who believed him; he was claiming a much smaller circumference for the Earth and a much larger width of Asia, hence a much shorter distance from Spain to the far end of Asia. We will probably never know whether he believed his own numbers or was deliberately misrepresenting the geographical facts in order to get funding for his trip in the hope that he would find land somewhere between Spain and Japan, as in fact he did.

David D. Friedman, “Slandering the Past”, Ideas, 2018-02-14.

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