bipch erastosthenes schooled b.o.b. 2,230 years ago
Ok so this is cool but I always wondered how they knew the shadows were different at the same instant. I mean it is not like they had phones. How did they sync up that instant. I feel like that would be interesting to know but no one ever says.
^^^Does anybody know this one? How, that far apart, the time at which the shadows were observed was synced up? I am genuinely curious, not a goddamn moron asking a gotcha question. High/Low tide? (I live in the middle of the country I do not know for the precise habits of tidal activity.) The appearance of a star (or planet) in the sky? Something as utterly mundane as sunrise?
Well, first of all, it wasn’t actually pillars! Eratosthenes was told about a well in Syene that, in the summer solstice every year (June 21st) would be illuminated at the bottom entirely and without any cast shadows. This indicated that the sun was directly overhead. Going off that well known curiosity and an intelligent hunch, our dude Eratosthenes waited until high noon of the summer solstice to measure the angle of a shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria. (Sidenote: Eratosthenes was a librarian of the infamous Library of Alexandria.)
His next course of action was to hire bematists, surveyors of the time whose professional specialty was to measure distance by walking with equal length steps. They measured a distance between Alexandria and Syene of about 5000 stadia. (Guess where the word stadium comes from.) Once he had that measurement, Eratosthenes did his math-y thing, and there you have it.
ANSWER EVEN COOLER THAN I HOPED!!
Eratosthenes’ work was thorough enough that by the time he finished revising his calculations, he ended up only 66 km off of the actual polar circumference of the Earth, or an error margin of 0.16%. [wiki]
Not to sound like an old fart here but my philosophy about video games is like. A kid living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no internet access for miles should be able to purchase a game from walmart, take that game home, put it in their console, and play the whole game with all of its features and the only thing lack of internet affects is the inability to play online with others. Nothing else. They shouldn’t be missing entire chunks of the game becuase they can’t download a patch. The game shouldn’t be borderline empty or unplayable without a patch.
i can not stress how important it is that we maintain tumblr’s reputation as the birthplace of overbearing SJWs because if the right wing “my free speech is being threatened by twitter’s terms of service” crowd ever finds out about what a fucking lawless wasteland this website actually is and decide to take advantage we will never get rid of them
keep being weird where redditors can see you and repost screenshots making fun of you. the balance of our ecosystem needs it. godspeed
I hate linguistic anthropology. Why? One of the most influential experiments in linguistic anthropology involved teaching a chimp asl. One of the most influential linguistics is named Noam Chomsky. You know what the chimp’s name was?
Nim Chimpsky.
Fucking monkey pun.
And this is in textbooks, in documentaries, everywhere. And everyone just IGNORES THIS GOD AWFUL PUN cause of how important the experiment was. But
BUT LOOK AT THIS SHIT. FUCKING NIM CHIMPSKY. I HATE THIS WHOLE FIELD.
Its not just the linguistic anthropologists.
There’s a group of very important genes that determine if your body develops in the right shape/organization… they are called the hedgehog genes, because fruit fly geneticists are all ridiculous. The different hedgehog genes are all named after different hedgehogs. And then someone decided to get clever and name one “sonic hedgehog” because this is just what fruitfly geneticists do.
Well sonic hedgehog controls brain development, and now actual doctors are stuck in the position of explaining to grieving parents that their child’s lethal birth defects or life-threatening tumors are caused by a “sonic hedgehog mutation”.
And this is why no one will invite the fruit fly people to parties.
Biogeochemical scientists, upon discovering the complex mechanisms that govern the storage and use of molecular iron on our planet, decided to call this cycle “the ferrous wheel”. We groaned about that for at least five solid minutes.
The phenomenon of sneezing when exposed to sudden bright light is called an Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio Opthalmic Outburst. ACHOO.
Brennan Lee Mulligan has made so many rpg moms and yet they all feel so real and they’re so thoughtfully made and they all fit with the circumstances the family is in and he’s just. so. good at it.
cannot express how much I respect erika ishii for making us all think danielle was just going to be a hippy stoner, then establishing in a single episode that
for a hot minute she was totally on board with resurrecting kalvaxus
her moms run(?) a commune that is definitely not a cult in order to escape the oppressive shackles of capitalism
she has committed multiple acts of organized eco terrorism alongside bud cubby
