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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Why Python When There Is Perl?
Date: 26 Mar 2024 03:45:01 GMT
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On Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:41:37 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:

> What did Greece have?... Did they sit and play with their balls and this
> led them to take the next step and devise Euclidean Geometry? Do you see
> the picture? Written history aside (which is always full of partiality
> and bullshit), the need for math must've arisen elsewhere, either in
> Egypt, or in Iran, or in India.

Written history and historical fiction would overlap on a Venn diagram. 
Was the Pythagorean Theorem really his? Did he really have a dim view of 
beans? Was he an Ionian?

And in the other corner we have Zeno, another one who exists mostly in 
hearsay. His paradoxes fascinated me as a kid. Much later I found 
parallels in Nagarjuna:

Motion does not begin in what has moved,
Nor does it begin in what has not moved,
Nor does it begin in what is moving.
In what, then, does motion begin?

So much guesswork and invention by later authors. Yesterday my wandering 
mind took me to the Amber Road. Several sources concluded Tutankhamen's 
bling contained amber from the Baltics. That would be about 1300 BCE. The 
Nordic Bronze Age lasted from c. 2000 to 500 BCE and engaged in a brisk 
import/export trade. No written records but physical evidence in the amber 
artifacts found in Greece and adjoining areas that didn't walk there 
themselves. Cultural similarities with the people of the Rigveda have been 
suggested but then you're getting into the whole Indo-European thing.

Yeah, it might have been the damn farmers. If the DNA fairy tales are to 
be believed I'm descended from hunter-gatherers who were doing just fine 
before the farmers arrived.