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]
This gets more bananas. That was a marginal tax rate. As in, each increasing amount of tax only applies to the chunk of change you earn over each income level. There was then a super tax that applied only to the most extreme high income earners.
So the Beatles got mad, they wrote Taxman, and they ended up forming a couple of corporations to avoid the income tax rates and pay corporate tax rates that maxed out at 30%… and turn most of the profits into capital gains. Those corporations were formed around their songwriting, and therefore the corporations held the rights to their songs.
Pretty shorty after that, they took the companies public, sold shares in the stock market, and they all sold a bunch of their shares to avoid a new capital gains tax. Suddenly, the Beatles held between 1.6% and 15% of the rights to their own songs.
And then Michael Jackson came along with his scads of money and bought up the rights. So he held more of their song rights than they did.
I’d heard the last part of the story, always as a “woe, poor Beatles” narrative. But today I learned that they ended up in that situation because of pure greed that stretched and strained and did every legally and morally gray thing possible to avoid paying their goddamn taxes…keeping the taxes for their highest earning bracket that were supposed to be helping middle income and struggling citizens out of the economy, while those same people scraped together their money to buy their albums.
I find myself with very little sympathy for rich white men who want to be richer.
This is a huge thing ESPECIALLY with kids. To the parent, they lashed out when they were mad and forgot about it, expecting the kid to forget too. To the kid? It was a big moment that defined your relationship with your parents. Stuff my parents don’t remember doing or saying were things that to me spoke very, very loudly, that I was not safe to be open and honest with my parents.
I MET THE WORLDS SHARP EDGES BREAD-SOFT, EXPECTING TO BE TORN FOR THE GREATER GOOD, BUT INSTEAD THE MEANNESS AND HARDNESS BECAME GENTLE UPON MEETING MY SURFACE. I STILL HURT, BUT I DID NOT DIE OR KILL OR DIE OR KILL OR DIE.
(THEIR NAME IS LITTLE SOFTNESS)
So... i just got a post blow up because I said I wanted trans masc rep and the terfs found it. Do you have any advice for dealing with a) tons of notes b) being sexually harassed by terfs?
can’t help you with the notes thing, but with the terfs, i suggest blocking all of them immediately instead of responding. if you do want to respond, don’t respond to them directly. keep a list of their names, maybe screencap their comments, and then publish a recommended blocklist in a month, when the current fuss has died down and they’re not expecting it.
the thing is: terfs are sadistic. they wouldn’t be doing all this if they didn’t enjoy hurting people. their whole motive and method is that they feel better by making other people feel worse–they get off on the self-righteous rush of punishing social transgressors–so they are hurting you with deliberate intention to feed on your pain.
I am Silver Tongue, I am an artist. I have many characters and you can check out my art in the art tag. I occasionally practice witchcraft though I don't do anything too complicated. I am girl 2 and don't know what else to put here.
