Google| Subject | Re: Queen mother (of Britain) has died |
| From | Graeme |
| Date | 2002-04-01 03:48 (2002-04-01 03:48) |
| Message-ID | <20020331204836.20500.00000964@mb-mn.aol.com> |
| Client | |
| Newsgroups | alt.fan.tolkien |
| Follows | Raven |
| Followups | Louis Epstein (2d & 11m) |
Corvus wrote:
somewhat at the equator by the Earth's spin into a hardly perceptible oblate-shape, and further modified into something thicker below the equator than above [1] when you get into the details?You had the roughly pear-shaped geoid in mind? Ie. a sphere, flattened
Yep, that's it. It wasn't until the 1950's that we really knew what the earth was shaped like. Until around 200 BC, it was considered flat. Though wrong, this answer was, in a sense, NEARLY right, considering that the curvature of the earth is only about 8 inches to the mile, and the measuring isntruments of the time were rather crude.
Then the ancient Greeks decided that it was round. But that was wrong too, and we moved to the idea that it was an oblate spheroid. Only that wasn't *quite* right either, since we found out in the 50's that the bulge was slightly bigger (and by slightly, I mean measured in *yards*, not miles) south of the equator.
So, in a sense, though it's true that science has gotten it wrong all this time, the wrong answers have been getting steadily closer and closer to the truth. It's not like they thought it was rectangular one century, doughnut shaped the next, and trapezoidal the century after that. They say that close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes, but I think it counts here too. 2+2=5 and 2+2=100 are both wrong, but the latter is much farther away from the truth than the former. And 2+2=Grant's Tomb is completely out of the park.
2002-03-30-
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