Over the week-end, I watched a youtube interview by Joe Rogan of Neil and I was shocked at the inaccuracies. I'm going to hunt up that video and fully document it, but during the interview as he was recounting the last voyage of Columbus to the new world, he said that Europe "had telescopes" which allowed them, among other things, to predict lunar eclipses. When asked, "Eyeglasses. Who came up with eyeglasses?" he replied, "I don't know, that was much later."

Now, I don't mind when, from his incredibly grandiose throne of eternal conceit, he vomits out inaccuracies whilst bloviating on subjects (like, say, biology) that he is not well schooled in, but "eyeglasses came after telescopes?" and "Galileo built his telescope before Columbus' last voyage?" For christ's sake, Columbus *died* 100 years before Galileo built his telescope. Eyeglasses, on the other hand, first appeared nearly 300 years *before* Columbus' first voyage. Perhaps he was thinking of the vastly improved eyeglasses that one Johannes Kepler invented? Those, too, were created 100 years after the death of Columbus, so he at least got the time right - assuming that's what he was thinking about. But he couldn't even remember Kepler's name? FFS, he's unfamiliar with Kepler's laws of planetary motion? Anyone who'd ever taken an introductory (even!) descriptive astronomy course and had the mental retention of a small stone would know immediately that Neil was full of crap. That this was on a topic *he plainly should have been familiar with* and he could be so obtuse about it was very disappointing.