There are always some gems to be found on WUWT where apes have been scooping up handfuls of mud to fling:
Gkell1 on January 25, 2014 at 3:36 am
The Pompous Git wrote –
“The Dialogue was approved by the censors in 1630 and published in 1632. It was only then that Galielo’s enemies noticed that Galileo had ridiculed the pope, something the pope himself had missed when he read the book.Galileo, in criticising the pope, had left himself open to his enemies, who were not the cardinals of the church, but his fellow academics (The Pigeon League). The cardinals decided that ridiculing the pope was not heresy, but brought in a verdict that Galileo was “vehemently suspected of heresy”.”
At last somebody with enough common sense to partition a political decision from a scientific or theological one. It does not excuse the Church from the effects of that decision which still plague this era by effectively jettisoning its astronomical heritage for some moral dictatorship and leaving the valid objections unresolved.
Perhaps the most influential work in respect to the tides occurred 23 years before everything went sideways with Newton’s overreaching agenda. This originally took the form of a letter from John Wallis to Robert Boyle in 1666 where Wallis uses experimental analogies in tandem with planetary dynamics and lunar influences to outline his ideas as to why the tides change daily,monthly and annually.
http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/1/1-22/263.full.pdf+html
Most readers who live on the Western Isles of Europe now know that the huge storms that rolled in during late December and January wiped out beaches and man-made defenses because of the orbital influences on tidal fluctuations but the same readers here positively refuse to accept the uneven surface rotation to the central Sun which is most pronounced as the planet starts to speed up from 6 months of slowing down.
This surfaces in part on page 277 of Wallis’s commentary where he freely admits that he doesn’t have an idea what the cause behind the natural noon variations are but today that secondary surface rotation can be identified to a 100% certainty and when allied with daily rotation causes the seasons,annual variations in the tides and so on.
It is actually possible to talk like men and disagree,not to defend an agenda but to come to a cleaner and clearer technical and historical view and why we inherited exceptionally poor ideologies built on others that were equally poor. To untangle knots means sometimes going back to simplicity and see where the tangles occurred.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Gkell1 on January 25, 2014 at 9:17 pm
The Pompous Git wrote -“Indeed! And many thanks for the link to Dr John Wallis’s excellent essay. I was not previously aware of it.”
That letter of Wallis written in 1666 concerning the tides is instructive for many reasons yet within a decade all that good work was lost due to a series of events which displaced that back and forth reasoning between analogies at a human level and experiences on a large terrestrial or astronomical scale.What really began modeling as we know it today was the emergence of fairly accurate watches and in 1677 John Flamsteed announced to the world that he had proved the planet’s rotation was constant using a foreground reference and the daily return of a star in stellar circumpolar motion -” Flamsteed used the star Sirius as a timekeeper correcting the sidereal time obtained from successive transits of the star into solar time, the difference of course being due to the rotation of the Earth round the Sun. Flamsteed wrote in a letter in 1677:-… our clocks kept so good a correspondence with the Heavens that I doubt it not but they would prove the revolutions of the Earth to be isochronical…”
http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/HistTopics/Longitude2.html
It is so difficult to quantify just how bad that conclusion is other than to bring the whole thing up to date and show its relevance to our era and what is going on presently.In our times they announce that watches are now so accurate that they no longer rely on the Earth’s daily motion yet they have altered the story to a new fiction by jettisoning the ‘solar vs sidereal’ scaffolding on which Flamsteed based his conclusion. They have created a non cyclical astronomical framework and conjured a conclusion out of thin air thereby totally ignoring the ‘solar vs sidereal’ ideology they held up to then -“At the time of the dinosaurs, Earth completed one rotation in about 23 hours,” says MacMillan, who is a member of the VLBI team at NASA Goddard. “In the year 1820, a rotation took exactly 24 hours, or 86,400 standard seconds. Since 1820, the mean solar day has increased by about 2.5 milliseconds.” NASA
I see a lot of ‘curve fitting’ terminology attached to this thread however what it really represents is fiction creation on an industrial scale and this has been going on for a number of centuries with the narrative becoming more and more unstable with time. In this respect the call for simplicity is also a call for some sanity and this does not allow for mob activity on either side of this mess we inherited.