Trivia winner: DrakeStraw!!: Only U.S. state whose state motto is in Greek?
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ZolotoyRetriever — 1 year ago(July 11, 2024 09:53 PM)
California is correct. Eureka!
That could also be the basis for another trivia question, something like, "Which U.S. state has a city in it with the same name as its official state motto?"
*It was Archimedes who said "Eureka!"
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∂³∑x² — 1 year ago(July 11, 2024 10:19 PM)
It's "
Eratosthenes
" and he had someone travel a specific distance and stick a pole in the ground, measure the shadow of the pole at a certain time of day and then travel back and tell him how long the shadow was.
He then matched that against the shadow of a same length pole stuck in the ground elsewhere at the exact same time.
Using a thing called "Numbers and shapes" he figured out the circumference of the Earth at the equator
Knowing this allowed a lot of people to plan their holidays and helped spice up a lot of otherwise bland food across the world
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∂³∑x² — 1 year ago(July 12, 2024 12:41 AM)
I'd have to have placed the posts myself MMC as trusting someone to have travelled as far as they did and make the measurements exactly when they should have massive room for error.
And of course I've got all the education which didn't exist back then and so I'd have a huge head start on him with only needing to follow formulas to get to the same conclusion.
But, even armed with absolute knowledge on the posts' shadows and the geometry skills required I don't think I'd be as accurate as he was
So we either have a team of highly disciplined people who insist upon accurate readings on arduous tasks creating the basis for our understanding of what mathematics is or it's been forged at some future point to look like we did.
When you look around these days it's easy to fall onto the latter there but I like to think that when needed, we each of it in us to get to those foundations which we all enjoy the output from
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DrakeStraw — 1 year ago(July 12, 2024 12:48 AM)
Actually, he figured the circumference of the earth along a meridian, slightly less than at the equator. Either way he was close enough for Ancient Greek work!
BTW, the flat-earthers hate the guy!
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DrakeStraw — 1 year ago(July 12, 2024 12:40 AM)
"'Twas a not so unusual play. As an old native-born Californian would say, "it's a not so unusual play."
Found this while looking for lyrics. I'm the one who's a native-born Californian:
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Schrodinger's Cat walks into a bar, and doesn't. 