Criticism
Mecca is not aligned with the North Magnetic Pole. As the geomagnetic field of the earth continuously changes the deviation of the compass needle from true north (known as the magnetic declination) also slowly changes. In the past there were epochs when the compass needle at Mecca pointed true north (and there will be future epochs when this is true again) but at the moment the line of no compass deviation is located somewhat to the southeast of Mecca. In 2012 the magnetic declination of Mecca will be 3.10° East and will continue to increase at about +0.07° per year.
The opponents say that the center of the land hemisphere is located in France, near the city of Nantes (about 4700 km from Mecca). Others argue that Nantes is just the mean of land hemisphere, which is just the land mass on the earth excluding the water hemisphere, not the whole globe.
During the 1884 International Meridian Conference, when Greenwich was established as the initial meridian, the Ottoman Empire, at that time controlling Mecca, voted with the majority for Greenwich.
The concept of Mecca Time was described as "a beautiful example of cargo cult science" by PZ Myers in reaction to the news of the building of the Mecca clock.
Read more about this topic: Mecca Time
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)