At time of writing, BoB was citing Genesis
Would this be the biblical one or the musical one?
A US rapper has embarked on a mammoth tweet fest to correct at least 500 years of misinformation that the world is not flat, slamming amateur and professional astronomers in the process. BoB, also known as Bobby Ray Simmons Jr, has occasionally pontificated on matters astral in the past, but some time on January 24 kicked into …
No me neither. Genesis, in any of it's "phases" didn't seem to say much about the earth being flat or otherwise and I can't remember those who left the band saying anything on the subject in their solo careers.
As for the Bible I can't think of a reference in the book of Genesis. The only reference I, not a bible scholar, can think of is Isaiah 40:22 which refers to the circle or possibly globe of the earth so I think Mr BoB will have to go it alone on this one.........
"He'll be someone who thinks he's a musician too."
Next he'll be saying something like...oooh, I don't know....imagine something completely ridiculous, you know, absolutely totally fuckwitted, like, erm, he's the greatest living rockstar or something...
"He'll be someone who thinks he's a musician too."
Do rappers consider themselves to be musicians? I'm not sure but they might not, based on a statement, if I correctly recall it, from Public Enemy, "we're not musicians and we don't respect musicians."
I like to use then as ammo for arguments with other kooks (I think there was an xkcd comic along those lines). For instance, when the local member of the tinfoil hat brigade was filling us all in on the Russian soldiers that Obama (whups, sorry "Bama" ) had living in the secret tunnels under the Denver airport, you point out that they couldn't possibly do that because the Ebola that Bama genetically engineered to wipe out 80% of the US population would have killed them.
"The thing to do with these kooks... I like to use them as ammo for arguments with other kooks"
Whether flat-earthers or 9-11 Truthers, creationists or "alternative-medicine" enthusiasts, they aren't going to change their minds, and you aren't change their minds for them. So why do you bother?
"'[... they aren't going to change their minds, and you aren't change their minds for them.] So why do you bother?' Everybody needs a hobby."
That's a shitty excuse. It's scarcely better than having gone to see Wesley Willis perform, or going to a David Icke lecture. And you end up being... not too different from them.
Find a better way to reinforce your self-esteem.
"You're not one of those gullible people who believe there are no conspiracies are you?"
Obviously there are conspiracies - the word wouldn't exist without the concept. What do you think PRISM and TIA and Ed Snowden's whistleblowing was all about? Those were real conspiracies.
But like many other things they run the gamut from the real to the ridiculous. There's the proven ones, like the NSA spying regime and the corruption of tax-evading corporate cartels; then there's the unprovable but questionably plausible ones like the CIA being behind Kennedy's assassination and the Bush administration knowing about 9/11 before it happened but doing nothing about it; and finally there's the outright Stan Deyo-level woo, such as the world being secretly ruled by chemtrail-spraying reptoids and NASA covering up evidence of polar holes leading to a hollow-world Agharti.
How far up that tree you want to carry your beliefs is entirely up to you of course, but if you want to retain any degree of credibility I recommend looking up the 7 warning signs of bogus science as a starting point to establish whether a given conspiracy is feasible or not.
+1 for the link to Dr Park's "Seven Signs". My hobby now: posting that link on a metric shedload of kooky YouTube videos :)
More seriously, a proper sociologist could have a field day with conspiracy theorization [1]. Why are such ideas so attractive to certain individuals, and so enduring? It must be something to do with the gloating pleasure that the believer gets from feeling superior to the "sheeple". The very existence of that word is a data point. It would be interesting to know how many people believe in two or more scientifically unrelated conspiracy theories.
[1] Pedant warning: may not be a real word
We know that the Moon disappeared, after a vast explosion in 1999. What we now see, is merely a projection, put there in order to reassure us. Done by NASA in conjunction with Roscosmos, ESA and I'm sure that the Lizard-Person himself, Brian Cox, is also involved.
"Who the hell cares?"
That is an excellent question.
Although a few of these comments are genuinely funny, when some of these people see someone with Down's Syndrome, for example, do they then go home and point out to their friends and family how much smarter they are?
Not only Eratosthenes but also Aristotle himself, who noticed that the round shadow of the Earth on the Moon during lunar eclipses, regardless of how low over the horizon the Moon was, could only be explained with a spherical shape of our home.
And Aristotle was a founding stone of the medieval Church teaching. So it seems medieval monks were more advanced in science then millennial generation rappers.
Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) deduced that the Earth was round
He also believed that whales and dolphins weren't fish, and that the northern cryosphere was replicated at the south pole. And he correctly described the sexual habits of sea urchins, a fact not appreciated until the 19th C.
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produced by leftists, liberals and fundamentalist progressives and their ilk.
In Orwellian fashion, they also think one plus one equals three.
Even a modern day Christian knows the earth is not flat or only 6,000 years old. The only ones who think that kind of idiocy are the hell fire and brimstone types like the Westborough Baptist Church.
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Many 'modern day christians' believe a god sent himself (but also his 'son') to earth to "save" us from going to a place he made (hell), which we do if we follow our natural human instincts, apparently. Only it didn't work because 2000 years later we're still mostly bound for hell, or so I'm told,and apparently this saddens said god.
Compared with that, it's easy to be forgiving about underestimating the age of the universe.
Bridge substructure symbionts exist thanks only to.the nourishment provided by repetion and endless discussion* of their mindless drivel ... feeding them should be made a flogging offence (at the very least!).
*Oops! I guess I'm next in line for a flogging now!
Conan Doyle gives Sherlock Holmes a nice line. “I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order."
But however you stock your mind, don't forget to include humour.
p.s. As for the original joke, doesn't a plane's inertial guidance system need to include precisely the constant downward correction mentioned in order to fly at constant altitude.
If earth is flat (round, square, oval, irregular, doesn't matter--just "flat"), I want to know exactly how thick it is! Because if it is flat, it can't be infinitely thick, or the gravity would be infinite, and we'd all be infinitely much shorter. All we have to do is find an edge and climb past it. This could be great if you're into real estate. And if, in fact, the earth has a finite thickness, and there's also a vacuum above us, then there has to be one below, too. That's nervous-making, IMO, so I don't like the idea of a vacuum. But if there isn't a vacuum, we should be able to just fly to the moon in jets (if there's a moon, which I believe is the case), but we don't, we use rockets--but maybe that's just to get to the space station, which has to exist, so there's Elon Musk. And I want to know what he's up to, and whether he's part of the conspiracies, or is creating his own. And another thing...
I note the qualifier, but...
That the earth was round has been known for millennia, and most likely goes way back into prehistory. No successful seafaring people could have believed the world was flat: seeing other ships approaching over the horizon trivially proved that wasn't the case.
In the relativity of wrong.
[
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients. The tiny difference between 0 and 0.000126 accounts for the fact that it took so long to pass from the flat earth to the spherical earth.
http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
]
John I think you'll find that Sean's take is closer to the truth.
People throughout the millennia who have stopped to actually observe and think about what they have observed have deduced that the world is spherical---it ain't rocket science. The ancient Greek philosophers worked it out, and no doubt others did before them. Asimov was very late to that party. At the same time, throughout the ages, people who haven't bothered to observe carefully, or think carefully about what they have observed, have chosen to trust whatever view captured their imagination, a popular one being the idea that the world is flat.
Without wanting to be unkind or cynical this only goes to prove the very mean spirited, but pragmatic, saying: nobody ever went broke under-estimating the gullibility of the buying public.
"one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients."
They almost certainly noticed that ships disappeared over the horizon hull first and reappeared mast first. The Greeks esp. would have noticed that as you climb up a mountain tips of other islands appear and as you climb higher you see more of them . All of these are powerful clues to the inquiring mind.
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Mainmonides (1135-1204) pointed out the the spherical shape of the earth is deducible from the curvature of the horizon. He was not necessarily the first to make this deduction.
"Beginning in the Nineteenth Century, a historical myth arose which held that the predominant cosmological doctrine during the Middle Ages was that the Earth was flat." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_Flat_Earth
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth generally.
Have you ever seen the curvature of the horizon? I never have been able to convince myself that I had, and ever since the arrival of the fish-eye lens I have seriously doubted the validity of such observations.
Ships coming and going over the horizon is easy to observe.
get to the top of a tall building like the Shard (300 Metres) and you can see the curvature on a clear day...
If you don't believe all those videos that were taken from the international space station...
more incredibly stoopid peeps here..
https://youtu.be/l-7tPfVvo_0
But of course Eratosthenes (276-194 BCE) did measure the Earth's circumference, and did come up with a very respectably accurate figure. He did this by noting the angular discrepancy between the sun angles at two points separated by a large known distance. Not for nothing is this man known as the originator of geography.
Ref: Eratosthenes' method for determining the size of the Earth [wikipedia.org]
The curvature of such a sphere is about 0.000126 per mile, a quantity very close to 0 per mile, as you can see, and one not easily measured by the techniques at the disposal of the ancients.
Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth ca. 240 BC. If you assume he used the Attic stadium (185 m) as his unit of measure, then he was off by ~16%. However, Eratosthenes was living in Egypt and used the distance between two Egyptian cities at solstice for his calculation. The Egyptian stadium (157.5 m) produces a value of 39,375 kilometres, less than 2% off the modern value of 40,041 km.
Christopher Columbus believed that the Earth was ~20,000 km in diameter. He got lucky and the Americas saved his bacon just as he was running out of provisions.
i.e. Discworld...
Now where are the turtle riding elephants eh?
Why are sea levels rising? Are we now talking a negative curved earth, convex even and its filling up like goldfish bowl rather than the excess ocean running over the edge?
Basic local geometry also allows for spheres. Are spheres also not round? I think we have a round vs flat confusion theory going on in parallel.
Yikes - social media is, I am sure, making people more dumb...
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Only if you give this attention seeking dickwad column inches.
I don't know what he is smoking. The drugs I took as a youngster distorted my perception of reality in so many ways as to make me question just about everything. However, perhaps I am lucky in that they never replaced my perceptions with bullshit... Or did they? After years of abstinence, I really need a spliff icon now.
In as much as Terry Pratchett was almost right as well.
We do in fact live on a 'Disc World' which is circular with two flat sides and a zero length edge. It spins through space about its centre but follows a Two Dimensional trajectory as do all the other observable apparently spherical things floating about out there which are also circular with two flat sides and zero length edge.
In fact we live on a Two Dimensional World in a Two Dimensional Universe.
What we perceive as being three dimensional is in fact the result of space, time, dimensional and gravitational distortion that results from the nature of the matter our Two Dimensional existence is made from.
The Three Dimensions are in fact an 'illusion' which only exist because it appears to be the best explanation we can come up with which fits in with what we think we 'see' and 'experience'.
However what we 'see' and 'experience', and indeed can measure and interpret, is distorted by the nature of the thing we exist in interfering with that measurement and ultimately our interpretation of it as limited by our ability to perceive the possibility of a different conceptual reality.
We have become 'intellectually' comfortable with our apparent Three Dimensional existence even though it is Two Dimensional and yet we posit the possibility of Zero, Single, Two and Multidimensional existences.
However who is to say we are not living in a Zero, Two, Three or Multidimensional existence but limited by our 'experience' as imposed by its action upon us and our 'intellect' to perceive or understand and conclude that it 'must' be Three Dimensional?
If we only live in two dimensions, how come I get fat when I drink too many pints? (Or fall down for that matter)
That's just your 'perception'.
In your Two Dimensional world being 'fat', at certain locations of your body, can be constrained to a 'perception' of the X/Y dimensions of it as imposed by the nature of the Two Dimensional world you live in and the way you sense and interpret it.
As to 'Falling Over'...
Consider that 'Standing Up' minimises the X/Y locations as you sense and interpret them within that Two Dimensional world. You are still allowed to be 'fat'. Standing up just reduces your X/Y profile.
Rather than using 'Falling Over' consider going to bed. You expand yourself in one dimension and contract in the other having orientated yourself first but perceive that you are lying down. It's a gentle and controlled process and you are still allowed to be 'fat'.
My gut also looks better when I think I am lying down.
Of course if you choose to get wrecked and then 'fall over' the process is less likely to be gentle or controlled but you will not know much about it until the next morning whereby, if you did manage to do some damage to your Two Dimensional body as a result of the rate of imposed dimensional changes either exceeding its design limitations or hitting another Two Dimensional object as you changed your Two Dimensional shape you could experience a bit of pain along with the headache.
If we only live in two dimensions, how come I get fat when I drink too many pints? (Or fall down for that matter)
Hmm Two Thumbs Down.
"Copernicus was a Cunt."
"No, he's a Witch!"
"How do we prove it?
"Drown Him!!!!!!!"
"What if he floats?"
"Witch!!!!"
"Burn Him if He Floats!!!!!1"
"He'll be wet!?1"
"Copses are made of wood!"
"What!1?"
"Transliteration Mate. Copernicus = Copse."
"He is made of Wood. Witch!! Burn Him!!! Burn Him Now!!11"
Just to expand on 'standing up'... That's going to take you a bit of energy to move yourself away from the other items in your Two Dimensional world assuming there is an attraction between the bits involved.
Whilst we're talking dimensions, has anyone else stumbled upon a short si-fy-ish story about a one dimensional "dot" who visited a 2 dimensional world where he met a line and they both travelled to a 3 dimensional world and, I forget what happened next....
Aaaah! I think I've found it thanks to later commentards. Have a pint.
...when you see comments like Bob's. He is probably a lifetime member of the Flat Earth society. I have yet to have any of these people show me where the edge of the earth is so I can look over the side to see the rest of the universe and where their car must have fallen.
I think it's about time someone raised this important issue! Someone must Do Something™ - and who if not the Americans? Here's a preliminary plan:
Have some censorship expert make an expensive revolutionary movie exposing this sinister conspiracy. Start giving out diplomas on geomorphology. Maybe a conference somewhere on Hawaii, make the less scientifically advanced countries limit sea travel and contribute to the fund for protecting The Edge from crumbling.
That sort of thing.