James Burke : Connections, Episode 2, "Death In The Morning", 2 of 5 (CC)

[PahaLukki]

A square sail can and will go upwind. It depends on sail cut and more importantly, the hull and submerged foils to create lift. For 1900s windjammers, no problem. I've been there next to the full-rigged Mir as it started off from Utö to Riga on a beat to upwind in Tall Ships race of some year ago. Our sloop could point higher, but once Mir got going, we had nothing against the speed of that lengthy hull, and the power of square sails. Later, I heard Mir won the race to Riga.

[mkoszyca]

@MeatPopsicleHomey learn to spell first, before you start to criticize.

[montypythonfan777]

This has failed to mention the contribution of North European sailing technology, especially the that of the viking longships

[Ricalsin]

Thank God for James Burke, who showed that love and respect for technology can be articulated with wit and insight outside the constraint and taint of religion - yet exposing it's influence upon it. The overly religious discussion of Christianity and the Dark Ages belongs elsewhere - perhaps on a site of your own making? Then you can jitter each other back and forth in the confines of your own passionate beliefs, perhaps garnering more than 40k viewers - as hate and mean speech seems to do.

[PippaMyGoddess]

@Ricalsin

Youtube comments - the playground of polemics. At least you have your head screwed on, and yes, thank goodness for James Burke.

[adrastea99]

Viking boats had stern rudders, as did egyptian

Basically anything that sailed a river

Don't know why he assumes they came from China...

[oker59]

@adrastea99

I would guess the dark ages may have needed to reintroduce some of these elements of boating; yes, the Vikings; well, right after the Vikings period was the Greek books being reintroduced from Arab Spain which then had guys like Marco Polo going east to explore.

One thing is for sure, the great open water sailing didn't really get going till the 1500s.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

There is no such thing as the Dark Ages, it is putting a negative connotation on a value neutral idea, a period which involved great advances in technology, manufacturing, farming and so on

[oker59]

@adrastea99

Francesco Petrarca coined the age "the dark ages" around 1330; i'll take his word over yours!

[oker59]

@adrastea99

I'd hate to rehash this whole video series to argue the point about the dark ages; but well, it must be said that James Burke did not mention Euclid's "Elements", Apollonius's "Conics", and Archimedes collected works; maybe you just don't understand the difference between the rational mind and the anti-rational christian mind . . .

[oker59]

@adrastea99 . . . and the fact that there was this Roman world which figuratively speaking 'fell.' And, when it did, people didn't make any progress in or even know about Greek mathematics. It had to be "re-introduced." I think your at least missing that above all else.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

People didn't make any progress? Are you crazy?

Everything from architecture to metallurgy got a huge boost

Dark ages implies that the entire world was embroiled in this, but the reach of the Vatican was rather short and did not stop innovation, a lot of the things we depend on today (cam etc) really came into use then

Just because people thought there was some "golden age" under Rome doesn't mean that development ground to a halt without it

Petrarch did not have our 20/20 vision

[oker59]

@adrastea99

The cam, the cathedrals, did not come around till after 1000A.D. as I've tried to explain.

I've yet to find any metallurgy developments even after around 1000 A.D.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

If you are to believe in the "dark ages", they began about 400 and lasted until the Renaissance

We usually refer to it as the middle ages because "dark" has a negative connotation which doesn't describe the period all too well

Do you want a list of inventions, art pieces, structures, social improvements, the population boom in 600 etc? The hourglass, better farming methods, blast furnaces, lab distillation, lens making, clocks, societal hygiene, military stuff such as crossbows etc...

[oker59]

@adrastea99

I've already indicated the extent of the dark ages when mentioning the Arab Spain translations. I've already pointed out that things were re-introduced; you've done nothing to change things I've mentioned about re-introductions; you've just ignored and played your conditioned card. I'm just going to point out a few more things

[oker59]

@adrastea99

The great quote of the dark ages was "there's nothing new under the sun" (i think it's a biblical quote from ecclesiastics; but, i'd have to go find it again).

Second thing to mention is the Byzantine's considered the west backwards and barbaric. The Arabs also felt they were remarkably culturaly backwards.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

I don't care what the popular saying in the Dark Ages was, they were depressed and quite frankly did not have the 20/20 hindsight we do now

Nor do I care what wiki says, where nationalist losers spend their time pumping up their country

Now, I offered to post inventions and discoveries and you got mad at me, well screw you

If you can't have a reasonable discussion and accept that you're wrong, maybe you shouldn't be talking to people at all

[oker59]

@adrastea99

I've looked up water clocks and metalurgy on wiki; there's nothing outside of Arab Spain, China, and the Byzantines. Bows and arrows! Your really grasping at straws just like all the western europe during their dark ages. Your just a conditioned person or a conservative who doesn't like the fact that the Dark ages corresponds to Christian rule.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

>conservative who doesn't like the fact that the Dark ages corresponds to Christian rule.

I'm not American, and I'm agnostic

By the way, all the early astronomers, physicists, biologists, engineers, mathematicians and so on were priests, some of the oldest observatories in the world are found in Churches when a boom in the invention of better lens making allowed observation of the "heavens"

[oker59]

@adrastea99

It must be said that Charlemagne was a responce to the Arabs about to take out the rest of Western Europe because the Arabs viewed them as 'easy prey.' Charlemagnes efforts were certainly heroic by any measure; but, then, the barbaric Vikings destroyed his efforts and put Western Europe back into the dark ages till the first Renaissance due to the Arab Spain translations of ancient Greek literature in 1000 A.D.

[oker59]

In other words, the Vikings were advanced compared to Charlemagnes young upstart empire(the Vikings were also a retaliation from the Christians forcing conversion to Christianity.)

[oker59]

@adrastea99

You know most people point to the Irish christians(who had a peculiar non-jesus christ and other lack of regular christian symbols . . . christianity) as those who preserved knowledge and literacy. Not that this is true. The Arab Spain translations were the real keepers of knowledge. Those translations were what put knowledge back into western europe and not the Irish psuedo-christians.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

What the Arab world did was a travesty, they copied ancient books, made the ideas fit with their faith and then burned the originals

The west only managed to recover snippets because wondrous sites such as the library of Alexandria were destroyed by the early Caliphs

It would have been better had the books been buried, surely then they would have survived

I dont care about Charlemagne

My point is that the "Dark Ages" were more advanced than most people think, and history agrees

[oker59]

@adrastea99

no, you were angry first, and your ignoring everything that hasn't been convenient for you. You just don't get it; in fact, your crazy!

[oker59]

@adrastea99

I didn't even ask you for your nationality; the fact that you felt you had to address it shows your crazy; i have no doute your going to come up with more crazyness; i'll just say, you win cause your crazy; i won't bother replying to whatever more you post in reply here or elsewhere.

[adrastea99]

@oker59

*you're

*doubt

I named examples while you flapped around like a fish on dry land

[MrJonathanSwift]

@adrastea99 You're right. The "Dark Ages" people were not totally ignorant. Lawrence Principe dicusses some of the accomplishments in the Middle Ages, such as the work of the "Oxford calculators." Lawrence Principe's series is available from THE TEACHING COMPANY for $ 265.95 for the cd series or 199.95 via download. I'm going from memory about the price. Anyway it is not cheap. So one may want to wait for it to go on sale.

[Indrius]

wind power!

[SteffanLlwyd]

It is NOT a lateen sail!

[KevinByrne2]

5:12 -- "portolan" (not "porterland") charts

[valgehiir]

@MeatPopsicleHomey, and if you wish to bring back, say, an Eskimo, you have to do it yourself

[richintalent]

8:40 "Bring out yer dead!"

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Never heard that saying ;). I've always said "If you want to get something done, and done right, have to do it yourself.

Never rely on someone to do it for you. They won't. They'll bitch and complain that a ubiquitous "they" *should* do this, or that.

Stop whining and just do it man!

[klaptongroovemaster]

"that gutsy disregard for convention that we today describe as... criminal."

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Hehe, I know. That's a classic line ;)

[PaulUmbarger]

It's a wing thing. Sort of like when you shoot an orange seed across the room by squeezing it between your finger and thumb. The wind on one side of the sail squeezes the Keel Board against the water and the boat is, in effect, squirted forward.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Hmmm... I think I'd need to see a diagram.

Certainly it can't be maintained or else there'd be some problem with energy conservation.

Basically, if I understand you, you'd have a perpetual motion machine... just use the extra speed to push the wind ahead of you faster, and then put up another sail in front and so on till you're moving at infinite speed.

- JBW

[PaulUmbarger]

Yeah, at first it does sort of sound like perpetual motion but, it's actually based on the idea that air has to travel faster on the top side of a wing than the flatter, bottom of the wing. Faster moving air causes a low pressure area which more or less pulls the boat along. Yeah! LOL! A diagram would be pretty useful here. It's called the Vernelli effect. (sp). If you Google it, they probably have a diagram there that would make it make more sense. A Latine sail is an amazing nivention! LOL!

[JamesBurkeWeb]

You sure you don't mean "the Bernoulli effect"? If so, I know it well... actually derived it once long ago (just for for my own personal satisfaction). I think all I needed was some very basic thermodynamics "19th century knowns" (like PV = nRT, that kinda stuff).

- JBW

[PaulUmbarger]

That's the one I was meaning to say! LOL! I dion't knwo why I always want to call it wrong like that.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Apparently Richard Feynman mispronounced it all the way until he entered university.

Story goes that he was explaining how it applied to a thermodynamics problem some 3rd year students were struggling over and eventually, when they finally realized what he was using, they corrected him. In pronunciation only - he still had to show them how to solve the problem because they didn't understand the *principle*; knew the name alright, but had no clue about the concept.

- JBW

[ScottfromTexas]

If you are trying to explain how a sailboat can sail partially in to the direction of the wind it is a simple matter of vectors.  The keel is simply to keep the boat relatively upright.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

That would be my assumption. I can't see how you could go in the *opposite* direction without violating some conservation law.

I have sailed before btw. Learned how to zig-zag along when the wind is going *nearly* opposite to the direction you want to go.

- JBW

[ScottfromTexas]

When I was a child my Dad would sometimes drag me to flea markets. I found a book at one one day and asked my Dad to buy it for me. I still think of this book to this day. It was titled "Man and Power." There is a very abbreviated wikipedia article that nevertheless shows the proper cover. Man, oh man, what a wonderful book. It got me excited about science which I carried out through college (but largely abandoned for a career). It described clearly how this whole sailing stuff worked.

[ScottfromTexas]

(cont...) This introduction to vectors gave me a huge head start when we started covering them in high school trig. It made sense to me - had a practical application. The 1961 book was pretty popular - if you ever get a chance to get one snap it up. Someone who likes this Connections series would like this book and vice versa.

[PaulUmbarger]

@ScottfromTexas I knew that sooner or later someone would come along that could explain it better than I could! LOL! Thanks!

[abbesieyes]

@ScottfromTexas In order to sail partitially into the wind (or even at optimal angle to the wind), a keel (a dagger board on small sailboats) is needed on a displacement hull to establish a point of leverage and thus prevent loss of energy in sideways motion. All attempt to sail into the wind fails due to lack of differential pressure on both sides of the sail. 'Vector' is only direction, after all.

[PaulUmbarger]

Prof. Burke did leave out one fact about the Latine sail... not only that you could sail almost directly into the wind but, you could actually sail FASTER than the wind too. Also, some say that it was the origin of the flying wing as well.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Hm. But would that not mean that the wind would be pushing you in the opposite direction? I'm not sure how one would accomplish that with *any* kind of sail (except maybe with some uh achem... well-"trained" oarsmen).

Please explain (equations and geometry are not only allowed, but preferred)

- JBW