Beoing and many other organisation have published there data to show the difference that these processes make.
After the recent discussion on Slashdot of the futility of measuring productivity by lines of code, I am surprised to find this method still in wide use. The PSP/TSP Web site says: With code developed using TSP/PSP, they are saving approximately 120 hours/KLOC in integration, system, and field testing.
The methodology measures software quality in "defect density", that is, defects/KLOC
The site concludes: Although the productivity of individual engineers tends to remain unchanged after they adopt the PSP, overall productivity increases. Product cycle time is shortened and the productivity of projects is improved because integration and system testing costs are reduced.
Predictably, the report shows the savings ("$5.3 million to date") but no estimate of the cost of implementation. It shows an admirable determination to wring some meaning out of KLOC despite the apparent irrelevance of this metric.
The reason your system will fail is that users are not making frequent printouts of the documentation, photocopying them and distributing them to all interested parties. Each complete printout of the documentation should be stacked on a bookshelf and labeled with a Post-It note.
In places I've worked, the automatic stappling function on the photocopier has saved hours of valuable programming time that was otherwise spent in collating and stappling.
Shops that have laser printers without a stappling function aren't serious about documentation.
However, unless this power generation technique is competitive with burning petroleum at about US$33 per barrel, it won't be practical in the long run.
There are other ways of calculating the cost of energy. If you treat energy as a public works project like the Hoover Dam, the capital cost is paid off over many decades at a nominal rate of interest. Essentially, the cost of producing energy is the operating cost and maintenance of the plant.
Also, because a domestic source of energy is less likely to be interrupted by war in the Middle East, it would be worthwhile to have these plants for strategic reasons even if the cost is much higher than oil.
According to the April, 2002, issue of Harper's, the U.S. currently spends $50 billion a year protecting crude oil imports in the Middle East that are only worth $19 billion. These military costs are not included in the cost-per-barrel of oil. If the U.S. could replace Middle East oil by investing that $50 billion annually in R&D, the cost of the resulting energy might be offset by the lower cost of protecting it.
Oil industry subsidies and environmental costs distort the true cost of a oil as well. In the end, politics determines the cost of energy.
A pipe bomb in a crowded subway can kill more people.
Exactly. Some people don't seem to understand that when it comes to environmental damage, the issue is how many people get sick and die, not how much money the property insurance industry loses.
I'm sure if the people who lived in the path of Hurricane Camille had not known it was coming, or had stayed put rather than evacuated, the statistics you quoted would not have been quite the same.
What makes you so sure? According to the article cited in the post, the fatalities would have been in the 10,000 range if people had not left the area.
Apparently you don't know the difference between destruction and fatalities.
Apparently, you don't know the importance of the difference. No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to diminish the power of thermonuclear bombs by comparing them to hurricanes.
Do you know that a single hurricane can cause destruction on a scale that makes even our biggest nuclear bombs look puny?
Such hogwash. Huricanne Camille killed 143 people on the coast and 113 people as it moved inland. Compare those fatalities to Hiroshima, which wasn't even a big nuclear bomb.
In any case, it is an absurd line of argument. The fact than an asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs is not a license to poison our environment.
Like Microsoft, Sony is a ferocious competitor. I doubt if sportsmanship ever poses any kind of restraint on either of them.
In marketing, never be deceived by sportsmanship. It is employed only when it gets some favourable publicity. Behind every move is the desire to gain an advantage.
If Microsoft's tactic drove Sony from the show a few days early, score 1 for Microsoft.
Before asking how to measure programmer productivity, or anybody's productivity for that matter, one must ask who wants to measure it.
Programmers who are concerned about their own productivity usually take what measures they can to increase it. Managers, however, have their own political agendas that rarely have anything to do with a programmer's idea of productivity.
Whatever standard of productivity a company adopts, it will be changed when business conditions or company politics change. For instance, even in a well run department a new manager will come in with a mandate to cut costs and boost productivity. Or, a bad manager will cover for his demoralized staff to protect his own turf. Or he'll fire a few programmers to please his superiors.
I was recently standing in line at the food court and heard a woman behind me say to her friend: "They just hired 11 new programmers to replace the 5 good ones they laid off last year."
But people sometimes fail to realize how different they were from us.
If the United States would assume the place of Imperial Rome in the modern world, it might find the Roman virtues a better guide than the standards of consumerism and self-indulgence that popular culture offers.
I would particularly commend the public virtues of Patience, Courage, and Clemency and the private virtues of Dignity, Prudence and Duty. These would pass for traditional American virtues today and Americans might do well to be more like Romans than less.
It was only after Greco-Roman thought was re-introduced via Islam that Western European civilization started its upswing.
This statement is plain wrong. Christianity is a synthesis of Hebrew and classical Greek philosophy. If Christianity did anything, it preserved the thought of classical antiquity. Classical authors were widely cited by early Christian thinkers. The idea of theology -- a rational inquiry into the nature of God -- is a Christian invention based on Greek thought.
The Arabs contributed to medieval thought by making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. However, their sources for Aristotle were Christian sources in Constantinope.
The Church has been in conflict with science thoughout its existence but it is probably no accident that the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) were all believing Christians.
Or perhaps you have heard of the Third Punic War, which basically amounted to a campaign of genocide.
This description of the Roman Empire is equivalent to judging Germany solely by Nazi era and ignoring Goethe and Beethoven.
The reason that Roman was able to hold the loyalty of most of the provinces of Italy when Hannibal invaded was because of the fundamental fairness of its rule. Cathages' provinces in North Africa were anxious to revolt when Rome provided an opportunity because of Carthages' brutality.
But they were not the nice people you seem to imagine.
The Roman Empire had its faults but its rule was enlightened by the standards of the time. Within the Empire there was period of peace and prosperity unmatched until modern times.
Let's all sit here on this one little godforsaken planet...
When you see how difficult it is keep tiny research stations in Antarctica in operation, never mind self-sustaining, and then consider that Mars is somewhat less hospitable then Antarctica and that Mars is far and away the most hospitable place in the solar system after Earth, it's doubtful that one increases the long-term chances of the species surviving by putting it in extra-terrestrial colonies.
The best place to try to ride out a global catrastrophe is Earth. Whatever the technology that would allow people to survive off of Earth (e.g., self-contained cities, terraforming) it could be deployed with a greater chaance of success on post-apocalyptic Earth than anywhere else.
At best, one might want to store some gear on the moon as kind of off-site backup for civilization. In the event of global catastrophe, some or all of the inventory could be launched automatically to return to Earth.
...the most stable and widely-used banking system on the planet...
But the accounts in those banks are generally in U.S. dollars. It's not the banking system, but the currency that's important. Swiss law strictly limits use of its currency because it's economy is not large enough to support a large float.
I believe in all the world The U.S. has the only one national treasury bond that is rated as having zero risk.
as people grow older they want to put up with constantly changing technology less and less...
This observation is as true for the tech-savvy as for the anyone else. Every few months there's a new protocol, paradigm, or platform that makes one's working knowledge obsolete.
Many years ago I looked with pity on mainframe programmers struggling with their new microcomputers. I know what younger programmers with their whizbang GUI IDE must think of me with my quaint command line and vi.
after the first time that you don't use a nuclear weapon in response to an apparent breach, you lose considerable credibility.
Credibility is a difficult thing to calculate, particularly when dealing with essentially irrational opponents like Al Qaeda. If enemies like Al-Qaeda were unimpressed by Desert Storm and the Serbian bombing, or Hiroshima for that matter, I can't imagine how America's credibility enters into their calculations.
It is likely that careful use of nuclear munitions could have made collapsing many of the tunnels much easier...
According to the newspaper articles, which constitute my complete knowledge of the subject, the caves were widely dispersed over 10 square miles. Using tactical nukes to carpet bomb caves sounds like massive overkill. If the location of the caves were known, as they apparently were, conventional ordinance should have been more than enough to deal with them.
Modern TNW minimize the size of their fireballs, while maximizing blast overpressure. This has the effect of placing immense pressure against the target while leaving almost no fallout.
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons appears to be online here. I'm not claiming to be an expert but the paper seems to say that for zero radiation to reach the ground from a 20 kiloton weapon, the device would have to be detonated 2 miles in the air. If this height did not produce the cave-crushing shockwave you need, it would have to be detonated lower, which would produce radioactive debris. In addition, Tora Bora is mountainous terrain, which means that to affect a cave near the base of a mountain, the nuclear explosion would necessarily be nearer the top of the mountain, which would therefore produce fallout. Further, the higher the altitude of the explosion, the fewer caves would be affected by the explosions and the more nuclear explosions would be necessary.
In fact, a nuclear use might have sent an important message with regard to US policy in regard to the "war on terrorism".
There must be better ways of sending such a message without appearing to legitimizing the use of weapons of mass destruction and conceding the the moral high ground in the mind of America's allies.
I was personally surprised not to see a tac-nuke strike on Tora Bora for this reason; a tenet of deterrent policy had been that a large-scale assault on mainland America would result in maximum retribution.
First, the nuclear deterent was aimed at countries with nuclear weapons. Second, the 9/11 attack was not large scale in any usual sense of the term. Third, the Al Qaeda troops at Tora Bora was not the sort of concentration for which tactical nuclear weapons are effective. Fourth, there are several villages in the area that would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Fifth, Tora Bora is within 10 miles of the Pakistani border, which would certainly have received some of the fallout.
More important, the wider implications of using a nuclear bomb would have enormous and would certainly have alienated the America's allies. I can't believe that most world leaders wouldn't have been very surprised if the the U.S. had used a nuclear weapon in Afghanistan.
The Army and Marines would be expected to run through the immediate results of nuclear strikes in some cases, so its easy to see why they don't like it very much!
...which is another reason to be surprised if a nuclear weapon had been used in Afghanistan.
I don't know about a single Icelander that died in WWII
Icelandic losses on the seas during World War II were proportionately as great as the number of solders lost by the United States. The economy of Iceland depended on suppling fish to Britain during the war and many trawlers were sunk by U-boats.
Trawlers were also sunk rescuing survivors of allied ships that had been torpedoed by U-boats. An example was S.S. Goðafoss, which was sunk by a German U-boat in November, 1944. The ship had stopped to rescue 19 men from a burning English tanker when it was torpedoed. It sank within 7 minutes and took with it 24 people (10 passengers and 14 crewmembers), among them a family of 5 (2 doctors returning from US and their 3 children), along with 14 of the rescued British seamen.
In addition, Iceland had a famous ace, Thorsteinn Jonsson, in the RAF who shot down 8 German planes over Europe and survived the war to fly humanitarian missions in Biafra.
No doubt it is Sri Lanka. I was merely trying to turn a hopeless case into a weak one.
Erasthosthenes was head of the library of Alexandria so if there had been any record of Egyptians visiting Australia, presumably he would have known about it. Even in the haphazard record keeping of the time, the Egyptians probably wouldn't have lost a whole continent. The fact that Australia isn't on the map is further evidence that Egyptians weren't aware of it.
"The ancient Egyptians discovered Australia" made an amusing tabloid-style headline but the chances of it being true were remote. There is no reputable source on the Web for the story and other Web sites that refer to the story only quote the one page I linked to in my comment.
Why some people are inclined to believe rather than doubt these sorts of anomalous stories is another question. Whatever the reason is, it makes life easier for charlatans and hoaxers.
...which is why Eratosthenes would have heard of it.
Because Eratosthenes was head of the library of Alexandria, I surmised he might have heard of ancient Egyptian voyages to Australia and included it on his map. However, the evidence for the ancient Egyptian voyages is probably a hoax so really all we're left with is his prime number algorithm.
The island labeled Taprobane is the wrong size and completely the wrong shape for Sri Lanka, which is teardrop-shaped. Except for the label, it more closely resembles the size and shape of Australia than Sri Lanka.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch. Taprobane is the classical Greek pronounciation of Tambapanni, the local name for Sri Lanka. Presumably, it was important enough for trade that Eratosthenes would have included it in his map.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Actually, the Egyptians discovered New South Wales between 1779 and 2748 BC. Hieroglyphic carvings in Hunter Valley, 100 km north of Sydney, relate how Djes-eb, one of the sons of the Pharaoh Ra Djedef, died from a snake bite.
Australia also appears on the map of Eratosthenes, compiled in 194 BC. This Erasthosthenes was the same person who devised the famous method of calculating prime numbers, still used as a benchmark today.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean: Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes?
Beoing and many other organisation have published there data to show the difference that these processes make.
After the recent discussion on Slashdot of the futility of measuring productivity by lines of code, I am surprised to find this method still in wide use. The PSP/TSP Web site says: With code developed using TSP/PSP, they are saving approximately 120 hours/KLOC in integration, system, and field testing.
The methodology measures software quality in "defect density", that is, defects/KLOC
The site concludes: Although the productivity of individual engineers tends to remain unchanged after they adopt the PSP, overall productivity increases. Product cycle time is shortened and the productivity of projects is improved because integration and system testing costs are reduced.
Predictably, the report shows the savings ("$5.3 million to date") but no estimate of the cost of implementation. It shows an admirable determination to wring some meaning out of KLOC despite the apparent irrelevance of this metric.
store all the files on the users hard drive...
The reason your system will fail is that users are not making frequent printouts of the documentation, photocopying them and distributing them to all interested parties. Each complete printout of the documentation should be stacked on a bookshelf and labeled with a Post-It note.
In places I've worked, the automatic stappling function on the photocopier has saved hours of valuable programming time that was otherwise spent in collating and stappling.
Shops that have laser printers without a stappling function aren't serious about documentation.
However, unless this power generation technique is competitive with burning petroleum at about US$33 per barrel, it won't be practical in the long run.
There are other ways of calculating the cost of energy. If you treat energy as a public works project like the Hoover Dam, the capital cost is paid off over many decades at a nominal rate of interest. Essentially, the cost of producing energy is the operating cost and maintenance of the plant.
Also, because a domestic source of energy is less likely to be interrupted by war in the Middle East, it would be worthwhile to have these plants for strategic reasons even if the cost is much higher than oil.
According to the April, 2002, issue of Harper's, the U.S. currently spends $50 billion a year protecting crude oil imports in the Middle East that are only worth $19 billion. These military costs are not included in the cost-per-barrel of oil. If the U.S. could replace Middle East oil by investing that $50 billion annually in R&D, the cost of the resulting energy might be offset by the lower cost of protecting it.
Oil industry subsidies and environmental costs distort the true cost of a oil as well. In the end, politics determines the cost of energy.
A pipe bomb in a crowded subway can kill more people.
Exactly. Some people don't seem to understand that when it comes to environmental damage, the issue is how many people get sick and die, not how much money the property insurance industry loses.
I'm sure if the people who lived in the path of Hurricane Camille had not known it was coming, or had stayed put rather than evacuated, the statistics you quoted would not have been quite the same.
What makes you so sure? According to the article cited in the post, the fatalities would have been in the 10,000 range if people had not left the area.
Apparently you don't know the difference between destruction and fatalities.
Apparently, you don't know the importance of the difference. No matter how hard you try, you aren't going to diminish the power of thermonuclear bombs by comparing them to hurricanes.
Do you know that a single hurricane can cause destruction on a scale that makes even our biggest nuclear bombs look puny?
Such hogwash. Huricanne Camille killed 143 people on the coast and 113 people as it moved inland. Compare those fatalities to Hiroshima, which wasn't even a big nuclear bomb.
In any case, it is an absurd line of argument. The fact than an asteroid destroyed the dinosaurs is not a license to poison our environment.
Talk about bad sportsmanship though...
Like Microsoft, Sony is a ferocious competitor. I doubt if sportsmanship ever poses any kind of restraint on either of them.
In marketing, never be deceived by sportsmanship. It is employed only when it gets some favourable publicity. Behind every move is the desire to gain an advantage.
If Microsoft's tactic drove Sony from the show a few days early, score 1 for Microsoft.
Before asking how to measure programmer productivity, or anybody's productivity for that matter, one must ask who wants to measure it.
Programmers who are concerned about their own productivity usually take what measures they can to increase it. Managers, however, have their own political agendas that rarely have anything to do with a programmer's idea of productivity.
Whatever standard of productivity a company adopts, it will be changed when business conditions or company politics change. For instance, even in a well run department a new manager will come in with a mandate to cut costs and boost productivity. Or, a bad manager will cover for his demoralized staff to protect his own turf. Or he'll fire a few programmers to please his superiors.
I was recently standing in line at the food court and heard a woman behind me say to her friend: "They just hired 11 new programmers to replace the 5 good ones they laid off last year."
But people sometimes fail to realize how different they were from us.
If the United States would assume the place of Imperial Rome in the modern world, it might find the Roman virtues a better guide than the standards of consumerism and self-indulgence that popular culture offers.
I would particularly commend the public virtues of Patience, Courage, and Clemency and the private virtues of Dignity, Prudence and Duty. These would pass for traditional American virtues today and Americans might do well to be more like Romans than less.
It was only after Greco-Roman thought was re-introduced via Islam that Western European civilization started its upswing.
This statement is plain wrong. Christianity is a synthesis of Hebrew and classical Greek philosophy. If Christianity did anything, it preserved the thought of classical antiquity. Classical authors were widely cited by early Christian thinkers. The idea of theology -- a rational inquiry into the nature of God -- is a Christian invention based on Greek thought.
The Arabs contributed to medieval thought by making Aristotle known in Christian Europe. However, their sources for Aristotle were Christian sources in Constantinope.
The Church has been in conflict with science thoughout its existence but it is probably no accident that the founders of modern science (Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton) were all believing Christians.
Or perhaps you have heard of the Third Punic War, which basically amounted to a campaign of genocide.
This description of the Roman Empire is equivalent to judging Germany solely by Nazi era and ignoring Goethe and Beethoven.
The reason that Roman was able to hold the loyalty of most of the provinces of Italy when Hannibal invaded was because of the fundamental fairness of its rule. Cathages' provinces in North Africa were anxious to revolt when Rome provided an opportunity because of Carthages' brutality.
But they were not the nice people you seem to imagine.
The Roman Empire had its faults but its rule was enlightened by the standards of the time. Within the Empire there was period of peace and prosperity unmatched until modern times.
Let's all sit here on this one little godforsaken planet...
When you see how difficult it is keep tiny research stations in Antarctica in operation, never mind self-sustaining, and then consider that Mars is somewhat less hospitable then Antarctica and that Mars is far and away the most hospitable place in the solar system after Earth, it's doubtful that one increases the long-term chances of the species surviving by putting it in extra-terrestrial colonies.
The best place to try to ride out a global catrastrophe is Earth. Whatever the technology that would allow people to survive off of Earth (e.g., self-contained cities, terraforming) it could be deployed with a greater chaance of success on post-apocalyptic Earth than anywhere else.
At best, one might want to store some gear on the moon as kind of off-site backup for civilization. In the event of global catastrophe, some or all of the inventory could be launched automatically to return to Earth.
But the accounts in those banks are generally in U.S. dollars. It's not the banking system, but the currency that's important. Swiss law strictly limits use of its currency because it's economy is not large enough to support a large float.
I believe in all the world The U.S. has the only one national treasury bond that is rated as having zero risk.
Isn't this quote technically by Graham Greene...
According to Ebert, Greene credited Wells with this speech.
as people grow older they want to put up with constantly changing technology less and less...
This observation is as true for the tech-savvy as for the anyone else. Every few months there's a new protocol, paradigm, or platform that makes one's working knowledge obsolete.
Many years ago I looked with pity on mainframe programmers struggling with their new microcomputers. I know what younger programmers with their whizbang GUI IDE must think of me with my quaint command line and vi.
Yeah, if I was upper class...
I believe the correct response is "touché".
after the first time that you don't use a nuclear weapon in response to an apparent breach, you lose considerable credibility.
Credibility is a difficult thing to calculate, particularly when dealing with essentially irrational opponents like Al Qaeda. If enemies like Al-Qaeda were unimpressed by Desert Storm and the Serbian bombing, or Hiroshima for that matter, I can't imagine how America's credibility enters into their calculations.
It is likely that careful use of nuclear munitions could have made collapsing many of the tunnels much easier...
According to the newspaper articles, which constitute my complete knowledge of the subject, the caves were widely dispersed over 10 square miles. Using tactical nukes to carpet bomb caves sounds like massive overkill. If the location of the caves were known, as they apparently were, conventional ordinance should have been more than enough to deal with them.
Modern TNW minimize the size of their fireballs, while maximizing blast overpressure. This has the effect of placing immense pressure against the target while leaving almost no fallout.
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons appears to be online here. I'm not claiming to be an expert but the paper seems to say that for zero radiation to reach the ground from a 20 kiloton weapon, the device would have to be detonated 2 miles in the air. If this height did not produce the cave-crushing shockwave you need, it would have to be detonated lower, which would produce radioactive debris. In addition, Tora Bora is mountainous terrain, which means that to affect a cave near the base of a mountain, the nuclear explosion would necessarily be nearer the top of the mountain, which would therefore produce fallout. Further, the higher the altitude of the explosion, the fewer caves would be affected by the explosions and the more nuclear explosions would be necessary.
In fact, a nuclear use might have sent an important message with regard to US policy in regard to the "war on terrorism".
There must be better ways of sending such a message without appearing to legitimizing the use of weapons of mass destruction and conceding the the moral high ground in the mind of America's allies.
I was personally surprised not to see a tac-nuke strike on Tora Bora for this reason; a tenet of deterrent policy had been that a large-scale assault on mainland America would result in maximum retribution.
First, the nuclear deterent was aimed at countries with nuclear weapons. Second, the 9/11 attack was not large scale in any usual sense of the term. Third, the Al Qaeda troops at Tora Bora was not the sort of concentration for which tactical nuclear weapons are effective. Fourth, there are several villages in the area that would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion. Fifth, Tora Bora is within 10 miles of the Pakistani border, which would certainly have received some of the fallout.
More important, the wider implications of using a nuclear bomb would have enormous and would certainly have alienated the America's allies. I can't believe that most world leaders wouldn't have been very surprised if the the U.S. had used a nuclear weapon in Afghanistan.
The Army and Marines would be expected to run through the immediate results of nuclear strikes in some cases, so its easy to see why they don't like it very much!
...which is another reason to be surprised if a nuclear weapon had been used in Afghanistan.
I don't know about a single Icelander that died in WWII
Icelandic losses on the seas during World War II were proportionately as great as the number of solders lost by the United States. The economy of Iceland depended on suppling fish to Britain during the war and many trawlers were sunk by U-boats.
Trawlers were also sunk rescuing survivors of allied ships that had been torpedoed by U-boats. An example was S.S. Goðafoss, which was sunk by a German U-boat in November, 1944. The ship had stopped to rescue 19 men from a burning English tanker when it was torpedoed. It sank within 7 minutes and took with it 24 people (10 passengers and 14 crewmembers), among them a family of 5 (2 doctors returning from US and their 3 children), along with 14 of the rescued British seamen.
In addition, Iceland had a famous ace, Thorsteinn Jonsson, in the RAF who shot down 8 German planes over Europe and survived the war to fly humanitarian missions in Biafra.
It looks too thin and elongated to be Australia.
No doubt it is Sri Lanka. I was merely trying to turn a hopeless case into a weak one.
Erasthosthenes was head of the library of Alexandria so if there had been any record of Egyptians visiting Australia, presumably he would have known about it. Even in the haphazard record keeping of the time, the Egyptians probably wouldn't have lost a whole continent. The fact that Australia isn't on the map is further evidence that Egyptians weren't aware of it.
"The ancient Egyptians discovered Australia" made an amusing tabloid-style headline but the chances of it being true were remote. There is no reputable source on the Web for the story and other Web sites that refer to the story only quote the one page I linked to in my comment.
Why some people are inclined to believe rather than doubt these sorts of anomalous stories is another question. Whatever the reason is, it makes life easier for charlatans and hoaxers.
Because Eratosthenes was head of the library of Alexandria, I surmised he might have heard of ancient Egyptian voyages to Australia and included it on his map. However, the evidence for the ancient Egyptian voyages is probably a hoax so really all we're left with is his prime number algorithm.
All I see is Taprobane...
The island labeled Taprobane is the wrong size and completely the wrong shape for Sri Lanka, which is teardrop-shaped. Except for the label, it more closely resembles the size and shape of Australia than Sri Lanka.
Admittedly, it's a bit of a stretch. Taprobane is the classical Greek pronounciation of Tambapanni, the local name for Sri Lanka. Presumably, it was important enough for trade that Eratosthenes would have included it in his map.
And although Captain James Cook was credited with discovering Australia for the British Empire in 1770, the Chinese had mapped the island continent 337 years earlier.
Actually, the Egyptians discovered New South Wales between 1779 and 2748 BC. Hieroglyphic carvings in Hunter Valley, 100 km north of Sydney, relate how Djes-eb, one of the sons of the Pharaoh Ra Djedef, died from a snake bite.
Australia also appears on the map of Eratosthenes, compiled in 194 BC. This Erasthosthenes was the same person who devised the famous method of calculating prime numbers, still used as a benchmark today.