The Anomalist

Okay, the other day I went to the friendly, but not exactly in the neighborhood, used bookstore. Among other things, I found and purchased the first issue of a publication titled The Anomalist. It says it's the summer 1994 issue, and I have no idea if any others have been published or if it's still a going concern. I'm still working my way through it, but the first article that I read was Martin Kottmeyer's "The First Extraordinary Claim", a sort of debunking of certain myths surrounding the round Earth hypothesis.

The short version is, yes the earliest round-Earthers were the ancient Greeks, particularly the Pythagoreans, but the round Earth hypothesis was advanced more from poetic, aesthetic, mystical, and religious reasons than from any scientific observational data. In fact, Democritus, one of the Earliest scientific thinkers in the modern sense, was a flat-Earther when the round Earth hypothesis began to circulate.

The next article to catch my attention was "The Perils of Erasing Astrology From the Past" by Ingo Swann. It's partly a defense of astrology and partly simply points out that up until the middle Renaisance there was no practical difference between astrology and scientific astronomy. When those ancient Greeks, we so admire for getting the ball rolling on the science thing, looked to the skies, their main interest was in predicting things here on Earth.
So basically, this looks like fun reading, and I might have to start scouring ebay for more back issues.