Why is Galileo's discovery of Jupiter's moons always touted as having disproven geocentrism? I mean, the Ptolemaic system already incorporated epicycles, which provide a neat (and correct) definition of a moon's orbit. Always puzzled me, that has. (The phases of Venus, on the other hand, and which he also discovered, do provide support for heliocentrism.)
Did you know that the tune of The Star Spangled Banner was originally that of an English drinking song?
Okay, so Superman and Lois Lane get horizontal… Wouldn't Superman's super-ejaculation be, to say the least, a bit bloody dangerous to poor Lois?
Why do hedges need funds?
Who decided that possessive pronouns don't need apostrophes?
On the subject of apostrophes, apparently (I found out somewhere or other a few days ago) it is permissible to use them on unusual plurals in order to avoid confusion; p's and q's, if's and but's.
The sound of one hand clapping is an extremely quiet "swssh." So that's that cleared up.
Why do the media insist on using murderers' middle names? (If a member of this family ever goes on a killing spree, there'll likely be a sudden world-shortage of newspaper-ink.)
Many hands make light work it easier to blame someone else for the bit that goes wrong.
There is a certain smug satisfaction to be had, when a speed-freak pulls up next to you at the lights and does that revvy-engine "I'm gonna beat you" thing, in revving your engine and looking determined… and then pulling away from the lights in a perfectly staid and normal manner.
The Earth is flat. Don't believe me? Okay, draw a line one kilometre long, at a tangent to its surface.
Now, using the mean radius of the Earth, 6371 km, let's consult Pythagoras:
a2 = 63712 + 12
a2 = 40589642
a = 6 371.00008 km
0.00008 ÷ 1000000 = 80 mm
I'd say a deviation of eighty mil in a kilometre counts as flat enough for most purposes. Wouldn't you?
When you begin to notice that it's easier to find a song you want to listen to on YouTube than to find it in your own music collection; it's time to tidy up your music collection.
Shelving: poor-person's anti-gravity.
The grand old Duke of York could've given those ten thousand men something useful to do. Or even a day off. The bastard.
And that, Gentle Reader, is quite enough of that, for now.
—Daz
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The reason a hedge needs a fund is probably the same as why skeets need the Society for the Preservation of Skeets and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Card-carrying-member-of-the-NATIONAL-SAVE-THE-SKEET-FOUNDATION/245686915466161.
Aww… how sweet of you to remember the 200th anniversary of the Star Spangled Banner. Yes, I did know it was based on an English drinking song. It should be pretty obvious that it sounds significantly better when drunk.
As far as Galileo goes, I didn’t have an answer for that, so I looked it up.
So basically, it aided Galileo’s own confirmation bias. Thing is that’s hardly ever mentioned. Both in books I read and documentaries I watch, people continue to claim that Jupiter’s moons really did confirm heleocentrism, when they did no such thing. They don’t even need Tycho’s compromise system to explain them: they fit right into the Ptolemaic system too, if you picture them on epicycles centred on Jupiter.