MythTickle by Justin Thompson for June 29, 2012

I wonder how many youngsters are not going to get this reference.

Years back, I had a very inexpensive inflated plastic globe: I had no idea how scientifically accurate it really was! (—If we believe this myth and don’t just dismyth it.)

“You can trust your car to the man who wears the star”

The way I remember it, the turtle is there only if there’s one elephant. If there are 4 elephants, it’s elephants all the way down.

DISCWORLD!!!

this has been a great story, we all miss ourselves that we were. And also our world we had as children is missed too.

What happened to the Ekert?

yes…love the tortoise.

25 cents a gallon!!!

When I came to LA they had GAS WARS !

22 cents per gallon or less!

Yes, those were the days. And I could rent a three bedroom house for $125 a month. But of course, I only made $125 a week… Still, it was a lot simpler then.

Think again. Eratsothenes inferred the earth was a sphere, not a hemisphere, from his measurements of solar position. The moon was known by the Greeks to be a sphere and by analogy the earth was considered to be one too. There were global maps of the world before the world was circumnavigated in the European Age of Discovery. Never to my knowledge did anyone anywhere believe the earth was a hemisphere; flat, yes; spherical, yes; but Platonic philosophy alone would’ve forbidden the “imperfection” of a hemisphere.There’s a reason why the “world orb” on royal and papal crowns was a sphere, not a hemisphere or a flat plate. People understood that the world was round and that’s why they tried to circle it – not the other way around.

That’s what the little old lady who challenged the astronomer said – not the myth. :) And of course it’s impossible if for no other reason than this: you can’t have an infinite series of finite events or distances. The mathematics is rather beyond me but it’s a Q.E.D.