
Title text: "And thus was smallpox introduced into the previously Undying Lands."
http://xkcd.com/843/
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Quicksilver wrote:Reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yckqyg75oE
"I have always read that the world comprising the land and water was spherical, and the recorded experiences of Ptolemy and all the others have proved this by the eclipses of the moon and other observations made from East to West, as well as the elevation of the Pole from North to South. But as I have already described, I have now seen so much irregularity that I have come to another conclusion respecting the Earth, namely, that it is not round, as they describe, but of the form of a pear, which is very round except where the stalk grows, at which part it is most prominent; or like a round ball, upon part of which is a prominence like a woman's nipple, this protrusion being the highest and nearest the sky, situated under the equinoctial line, and at the eastern extremity of this sea. [He is in the Gulf of Paria, to the north or the north-west of the mouth of the Orinoco.] . . . Ptolemy and the other philosophers who have written upon the globe thought that it was spherical; . . . but this western half of the world, I maintain, is like half a very round pear, having a raised projection for the stalk, as I have already described."
Ghost Story wrote:Seriously--nipple-shaped. He says it twice.
Evil Midnight Lurker wrote:In fact, Ferdinand and Isabella were the only monarchs uneducated enough to believe Chris's crackpot theories and fund his obviously doomed expedition.
Klear wrote:It bugs me how people tend to assume flat and round are opposites. Just look at pizza!
Actually, I believe even back when people thought it was flat, they knew it was round. Round and flat.
Ghost Story wrote:What Columbus actually thought is so unexpected and...
Seriously--nipple-shaped. He says it twice.
Ghost Story wrote:What Columbus actually thought is so unexpected and fantastic you couldn't make it up. This is from a letter on the third voyage collected in _The Four Voyages_:
Seriously--nipple-shaped. He says it twice.
Washington Irving's 1828 biography of Columbus popularized the idea that Columbus had difficulty obtaining support for his plan because many Catholic theologians insisted that the Earth was flat. In fact, most educated Westerners had understood that the Earth was spherical at least since the time of Aristotle, who lived in the 4th century BC and whose works were widely studied and revered in Medieval Europe.
...
The king submitted Columbus's proposal to his experts, who rejected it. It was their considered opinion that Columbus's estimation of a travel distance of 2,400 miles (3,860 km) was, in fact, far too low.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus
dalcde wrote:Klear wrote:It bugs me how people tend to assume flat and round are opposites. Just look at pizza!
Actually, I believe even back when people thought it was flat, they knew it was round. Round and flat.
C'mon, "round" is just a lazy way to say "spherical"1
1Technically speaking, ball-shaped
cellocgw wrote:dalcde wrote:Klear wrote:It bugs me how people tend to assume flat and round are opposites. Just look at pizza!
Actually, I believe even back when people thought it was flat, they knew it was round. Round and flat.
C'mon, "round" is just a lazy way to say "spherical"1
1Technically speaking, ball-shaped
Oh, yeah? Tell that to the many denizens of DiscWorld.
Ghost Story wrote:What Columbus actually thought is so unexpected and fantastic you couldn't make it up. This is from a letter on the third voyage collected in _The Four Voyages_:
Seriously--nipple-shaped. He says it twice.
project2051 wrote:Ghost Story wrote:What Columbus actually thought is so unexpected and fantastic you couldn't make it up. This is from a letter on the third voyage collected in _The Four Voyages_:
Seriously--nipple-shaped. He says it twice.
Well, he was on long sea journeys with all male crews.
Klear wrote:cellocgw wrote:dalcde wrote:Klear wrote:It bugs me how people tend to assume flat and round are opposites. Just look at pizza!
Actually, I believe even back when people thought it was flat, they knew it was round. Round and flat.
C'mon, "round" is just a lazy way to say "spherical"1
1Technically speaking, ball-shaped
Oh, yeah? Tell that to the many denizens of DiscWorld.
Indeed. While "round" is just a lazy way to say "spherical", it is also a lazy way to say "disc-shaped".
dalcde wrote:C'mon, "round" is just a lazy way to say "spherical"1
1Technically speaking, ball-shaped
Earthling on Mars wrote:It drives me crazy when I hear somebody say that Columbus proved the world was round. I mean, hello, people, you can't exactly prove that something is spherical1 by sailing partway around it!
xtifr wrote:... and orthogon merely sounds undecided.
Pfhorrest wrote:From what I've read, the reason everyone else was hesitant to fund Columbus was because they knew the world was round and how big it was and that no ship could survive such a long journey on the open sea as it would take to sail all the way from Europe to Asia the long way around, if it was nothing but water the whole way.
dalcde wrote:Quicksilver wrote:Reminds me of this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yckqyg75oE
When I saw the Great Wall of China I thought it was the only-man-made-object-visible-from-space nonsense
da Doctah wrote:Everybody knows that when Columbus came to the New World, he landed in Ohio.
wumpus wrote:The two embarrassing parts for Spain were that nobody bothered to check the distance/curvature between Madrid and Toledo (even though the Greeks who wrote about the size of the Earth describe how they figured it out) and that every Portuguese captain* (and anybody else who knew the trick of running the Latitudes) knew exactly how big the Earth was.
* wouldn't you hate to explain where all this gold was coming from when you *knew* that China and India were 10,000+ miles away (note that sailing down the horn of Africa seems to be the shorter route).
SlyReaper wrote:What I love about that misconception is that there are plenty of man-made objects visible from space, and the Great Wall of China isn't one of them.
davidstarlingm wrote:Could one of the ISS astronauts see a laser pointer at night if it was trained on the ISS?
xtifr wrote:... and orthogon merely sounds undecided.
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