Ok, I know you know this. But, it's a rant I love to go on and no one is physically going to stop me.
So the whole, the world is flat thing. Important thing to know: you can not navigate a ship any distance at all if you think the Earth is flat. The distances will be off, your charts will be inaccurate, you will not arrive at your destination. There is not, and has never been, a sailor who thought the Earth was flat. So what's with all the boats sailing over the edge of the horizon I want to pretend I'm hearing you ask. Well, have you ever seen someone sent in search of headlight fluid? Or a bucket of Ohms? Or maybe a left handed shovel? Farmers don't have to deal with the horizon, or navigating very often. It was an easy joke to identify the people in the know vs. those who didn't need to know these things. And the only context you see the sailing off the edge is in the same context you would see sending someone off to fetch a bucket of darkness.
Another simple thing is the calculation for the circumference of the Earth. The derivation for that, which is surprisingly difficult to Google. The internet likes the overly simplified version which only works if you assume the Earth is a sphere. The old math method was a little more complicated and the most common error students make is not cancelling a pi divided by pi squared. For an example of that see Christopher Columbus. Who left an extra factor of pi in and as a result divided his circumference by basically three.
Interesting thing about the Earth the Atlantic, and Pacific oceans and North America combined work out to basically two thirds of the Earth's circumference. So, Columbus, who was the sort of idiot who when he comes to a conclusion that is not in line with all the worlds scientists and mathematicians, he believed that that could only mean he was right and had discovered something they'd all missed. So with his math China could only be a two or three week sail West of Europe.
So he goes from royal court to royal court trying to get a few ships together to prove the rightness of his being smarter than everybody. But, there's a conspiracy against him. All the nerds and merchants of the world are, somehow, profiting from spending extra money taking this crazy long route.
Actually kings, who mostly are more interested in hunting, booze, politics, and not math, are just talking to their guy who knows these things. All of those guys are just saying "oh, he's an idiot, here's the mistake he made. Super common mistake, everyone does it at some point. That way is really twice as long as the way everyone else is going. That's why everyone who, you know, makes a living doing this stuff. Does it this way." And the kings say "yeah, that makes more sense than this moron being the smartest man in the world."
So Columbus gets laughed out of every king's court in Europe until the queen of Spain happens to be into himbos.
So the king of Spain turns to his admirals and says "suicide mission eh?" And they say, "one in a billion odds the ships come back, and worse odds the crew doesn't mutiny and kill him by the end of the month." And the king says "I like those odds. Make it happen."
So the worst, most worn out, crap ships they can get their hands on are filled with all the guys their superior officers would be happy to never see again.
And the moron gets lucky beyond all human comprehension. He isn't right of course. The Earth was still three times bigger than he thought. There was still no way to sail to India in two months from Spain. That's just not an option. And Spain knew that on minute one of his arrival. But, the important thing when Columbus got back was not Columbus. It was getting him distracted by some rattling keys for a few decades so they could get some work done.
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Date: 2022-04-19 06:04 am (UTC)So the whole, the world is flat thing. Important thing to know: you can not navigate a ship any distance at all if you think the Earth is flat. The distances will be off, your charts will be inaccurate, you will not arrive at your destination. There is not, and has never been, a sailor who thought the Earth was flat. So what's with all the boats sailing over the edge of the horizon I want to pretend I'm hearing you ask. Well, have you ever seen someone sent in search of headlight fluid? Or a bucket of Ohms? Or maybe a left handed shovel? Farmers don't have to deal with the horizon, or navigating very often. It was an easy joke to identify the people in the know vs. those who didn't need to know these things. And the only context you see the sailing off the edge is in the same context you would see sending someone off to fetch a bucket of darkness.
Another simple thing is the calculation for the circumference of the Earth. The derivation for that, which is surprisingly difficult to Google. The internet likes the overly simplified version which only works if you assume the Earth is a sphere. The old math method was a little more complicated and the most common error students make is not cancelling a pi divided by pi squared. For an example of that see Christopher Columbus. Who left an extra factor of pi in and as a result divided his circumference by basically three.
Interesting thing about the Earth the Atlantic, and Pacific oceans and North America combined work out to basically two thirds of the Earth's circumference. So, Columbus, who was the sort of idiot who when he comes to a conclusion that is not in line with all the worlds scientists and mathematicians, he believed that that could only mean he was right and had discovered something they'd all missed. So with his math China could only be a two or three week sail West of Europe.
So he goes from royal court to royal court trying to get a few ships together to prove the rightness of his being smarter than everybody. But, there's a conspiracy against him. All the nerds and merchants of the world are, somehow, profiting from spending extra money taking this crazy long route.
Actually kings, who mostly are more interested in hunting, booze, politics, and not math, are just talking to their guy who knows these things. All of those guys are just saying "oh, he's an idiot, here's the mistake he made. Super common mistake, everyone does it at some point. That way is really twice as long as the way everyone else is going. That's why everyone who, you know, makes a living doing this stuff. Does it this way." And the kings say "yeah, that makes more sense than this moron being the smartest man in the world."
So Columbus gets laughed out of every king's court in Europe until the queen of Spain happens to be into himbos.
So the king of Spain turns to his admirals and says "suicide mission eh?"
And they say, "one in a billion odds the ships come back, and worse odds the crew doesn't mutiny and kill him by the end of the month."
And the king says "I like those odds. Make it happen."
So the worst, most worn out, crap ships they can get their hands on are filled with all the guys their superior officers would be happy to never see again.
And the moron gets lucky beyond all human comprehension. He isn't right of course. The Earth was still three times bigger than he thought. There was still no way to sail to India in two months from Spain. That's just not an option. And Spain knew that on minute one of his arrival. But, the important thing when Columbus got back was not Columbus. It was getting him distracted by some rattling keys for a few decades so they could get some work done.