Aremo Shitai Koremo Shitai Onna no Ko ni Mietatte

Watch: Carl Sagan schooled B.o.B. on his flat Earth theory more than 30 years ago

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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]

Hey All,

I've been away for some time, as we've been working really hard on something quite exciting:

let me present to you the world's first ever global ocean drainage basin map that shows all permanent and temporary water flows on the planet.

This is quite big news, as far as I know this has never been done before. There are hundreds of hours of work in it (with the data + manual work as well) and it's quite a relief that they are all finished now.

But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of you asking? A couple of years ago I tried to find a map that shows which ocean does each of the world's rivers end up in. I was a bit surprised to see there is no map like that, so I just decided I'll make it myself - as usual :) Well, after realizing all the technical difficulties, I wasn't so surprised any more that it didn't exist. So yeah, it was quite a challenge but I am very happy with the result.

In addition to the global map I've created a set of 43 maps for different countries, states and continents, four versions for each: maps with white and black background, and a version for both with coloured oceans (aka polygons). Here's the global map with polygons:

I know from experience that maps can be great conversation starters, and I aim to make maps that are visually striking and can effectively deliver a message. With these ocean drainage basin maps the most important part was to make them easily understandable, so after you have seen one, the others all become effortless to interpret as well. Let me know how I did, I really appreciate any and all kinds of feedback.

Here are a few more from the set, I hope you too learn something new from them. I certainly did, and I am a geographer.

The greatest surprise with Europe is that its biggest river is all grey, as the Volga flows into the Caspian sea, therefore its basin counts as endorheic.

An endorheic basin is one which never reaches the ocean, mostly because it dries out in desert areas or ends up in lakes with no outflow. The biggest endorheic basin is the Caspian’s, but the area of the Great Basin in the US is also a good example of endorheic basins.

I love how the green of the Atlantic Ocean tangles together in the middle.

No, the dividing line is not at Cape Town, unfortunately.

I know these two colours weren’t the best choice for colourblind people and I sincerely apologize for that. I’ve been planning to make colourblind-friendly versions of my maps for ages now – still not sure when I get there, but I want you to know that it’s just moved up on my todo-list. A lot further up.

Minnesota is quite crazy with all that blue, right? Some other US states that are equally mind-blowing: North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. You can check them all out here.

Yes, most of the Peruvian waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the maps of Peru, if you want to take a closer look.

Asia is amazingly colourful with lots of endorheic basins in the middle areas: deserts, the Himalayas and the Caspian sea are to blame. Also note how the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra are divided.

I mentioned earlier that I also made white versions of all maps. Here’s Australia with its vast deserts. If you're wondering about the weird lines in the middle: that’s the Simpson desert with its famous parallel sand dunes.

North America with white background and colourful oceans looks pretty neat, I think.

Finally, I made the drainage basin maps of the individual oceans: The Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian and the Pacific. The Arctic is my favourite one.

I really hope you like my new maps, and that they will become as popular as my river basin maps. Those have already helped dozens of environmental NGOs to illustrate their important messages all around the world. It would be nice if these maps too could find their purpose.

...Huh.

I have always thought of Arctic and Atlantic as "the cold oceans" and Pacific and Indian as "the warm oceans" (probably the Northern hemisphere bias, Everyone Knows South Is Warm). It's kinda weird to see this division map onto the "cold" two having much larger drainage basins. I mean, map projections can lie, so - is that right? Blue and green seem to penetrate a lot deeper into land than yellow and pink?

It sure looks like they do, and the dividing lines seem to be large mountain ranges (particularly the Rockies/Andes in the Americas, although I also notice the Himalayans between India+Tibet and China).

The watershed divide in the Americas is related to the plate tectonics and mountain ages. The Rockies and Andes are new, as massive mountain ranges go. They haven't been eroded much compared to the Appalachians. They formed near the west coast as oceanic plates moved toward and then under the American continents, forcing continental plates up into big mountains. East of them, it's all downhill until you hit the Atlantic (or an endoheic basin).

The Arctic and Atlantic oceans are half on the North American Plate and half on the Eurasian Plate. Those plates are moving away from each other, which doesn't make crumple zones like the Rockies or Andes. Without new big mountains, water can go from deep inland toward those coasts.

Presumably the Indian plate smushing into the Eurasian Plate and forming the Himalayas is why India mostly drains into the Indian Ocean. I'm not sure why the Indian ocean's watershed doesn't extend further inland in Africa, though. The Nubian Plate and Somali Plate are moving away from each other (the East African Rift), with the wacky Victoria microplate trying to spin around. I can't tell if the mountains that divide the oceanic basins are preexisting or a result of the rift.

Hey All,

I've been away for some time, as we've been working really hard on something quite exciting:

let me present to you the world's first ever global ocean drainage basin map that shows all permanent and temporary water flows on the planet.

This is quite big news, as far as I know this has never been done before. There are hundreds of hours of work in it (with the data + manual work as well) and it's quite a relief that they are all finished now.

But what is an ocean drainage basin map, I hear most of you asking? A couple of years ago I tried to find a map that shows which ocean does each of the world's rivers end up in. I was a bit surprised to see there is no map like that, so I just decided I'll make it myself - as usual :) Well, after realizing all the technical difficulties, I wasn't so surprised any more that it didn't exist. So yeah, it was quite a challenge but I am very happy with the result.

In addition to the global map I've created a set of 43 maps for different countries, states and continents, four versions for each: maps with white and black background, and a version for both with coloured oceans (aka polygons). Here's the global map with polygons:

I know from experience that maps can be great conversation starters, and I aim to make maps that are visually striking and can effectively deliver a message. With these ocean drainage basin maps the most important part was to make them easily understandable, so after you have seen one, the others all become effortless to interpret as well. Let me know how I did, I really appreciate any and all kinds of feedback.

Here are a few more from the set, I hope you too learn something new from them. I certainly did, and I am a geographer.

The greatest surprise with Europe is that its biggest river is all grey, as the Volga flows into the Caspian sea, therefore its basin counts as endorheic.

An endorheic basin is one which never reaches the ocean, mostly because it dries out in desert areas or ends up in lakes with no outflow. The biggest endorheic basin is the Caspian’s, but the area of the Great Basin in the US is also a good example of endorheic basins.

I love how the green of the Atlantic Ocean tangles together in the middle.

No, the dividing line is not at Cape Town, unfortunately.

I know these two colours weren’t the best choice for colourblind people and I sincerely apologize for that. I’ve been planning to make colourblind-friendly versions of my maps for ages now – still not sure when I get there, but I want you to know that it’s just moved up on my todo-list. A lot further up.

Minnesota is quite crazy with all that blue, right? Some other US states that are equally mind-blowing: North Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming. You can check them all out here.

Yes, most of the Peruvian waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. Here are the maps of Peru, if you want to take a closer look.

Asia is amazingly colourful with lots of endorheic basins in the middle areas: deserts, the Himalayas and the Caspian sea are to blame. Also note how the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra are divided.

I mentioned earlier that I also made white versions of all maps. Here’s Australia with its vast deserts. If you're wondering about the weird lines in the middle: that’s the Simpson desert with its famous parallel sand dunes.

North America with white background and colourful oceans looks pretty neat, I think.

Finally, I made the drainage basin maps of the individual oceans: The Atlantic, the Arctic, the Indian and the Pacific. The Arctic is my favourite one.

I really hope you like my new maps, and that they will become as popular as my river basin maps. Those have already helped dozens of environmental NGOs to illustrate their important messages all around the world. It would be nice if these maps too could find their purpose.

...Huh.

I have always thought of Arctic and Atlantic as "the cold oceans" and Pacific and Indian as "the warm oceans" (probably the Northern hemisphere bias, Everyone Knows South Is Warm). It's kinda weird to see this division map onto the "cold" two having much larger drainage basins. I mean, map projections can lie, so - is that right? Blue and green seem to penetrate a lot deeper into land than yellow and pink?

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

For context here is a picture

what

It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park. 

I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it. 

Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.  

But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night. 

Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys. 

And the dark. 

what the fuck

Vatican City isn't a country. Fuck you.

It doesn't have a population or community. It has employees. It's basically just the Catholic Church's corporate headquarters.

If Vatican City is a country, then Google's Googleplex office is a country.

And Europe isn’t a continent

Absolutely. Europe is a series of peninsulas on the western tip of Asia.

technically, asia isn't a continent either. africa, europe and asia (or afroeurasia) are all one giant continent

Not since 17 November 1869.

manmade canals aren't oceans by any stretch of the imagination

Tell that to the jellyfish.

I don't recognize their authority

Not yet you don't

I learned from educational books as a kid that there are "parts of the world" - America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. And then there's "continents" - South America, North America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. By coincidence, the number is the same, but they're different classifications.

I’ve made this post like six times but it still fucks me up the China’s mountains just look like that. Like I spent decades thinking it was stylistic but no, they just have different mountains over there.

For reference, here’s what my local mountains look like:

Here’s the general art style Chinese mountains are drawn in:

And here’s how some of them actually look:

What the FUCK

I’m specifically reblogging this here because I know there is a geological reason for this and I know at least one of you has to know it.

thank you 

To be clear, karst is a type of topography, not a mountain.

In Japan you’ll find limestone pinnacles, but karst is often heavy in sink holes and caves. It depends a lot on the weather and availability of water.

Here are some fun diagrams to explain the landforms!

begging some of you to watch any asian media

bro. how the fuck did you think i found out about the mountains.

tbh i don't really get why we divide the oceans into different oceans because they're all connected it's the same ocean

no metaphor here just pure confusion...is there a line where one ocean stops and another begins? or is it like a smooth gradient of percentages of one ocean shading into another ocean?

Yes, there is a line. There are confluences you can see and touch and they are NOT subtle in the slightest.

That's the Atlantic and the Caribbean on a particularly pronounced day.

This is the Indian and the Pacific. It's not always this obvious everywhere but the dividing lines are very much there.

Oceans have their own properties as far as temperature and salinity and unless something like a storm or a current forces them to mix they won't. Mostly this applies to vertical mixing and it gives you things like thermoclines and haloclines but water is wierd and won't mix horizontally either.

The ocean basins tend to have their own currents that go in a circle and define that ocean, and those patterns mix the water within that ocean. Like a washing machine.

The Caribbean has a little loop of its own that not on this map, but that current keeps that ocean pretty internally consistent. It's got clear warm water because of the shallow bowl of limestone sand it sits in. Where it meets the Atlantic with wildly different conditions the water is traveling in opposite directions, and it acts kind of like an oncoming lane of highway traffic. Species that have adapted to a narrow band of temperatures and salinities (most fish) can't cross, while species with a stronger homeostasis hang out there on purpose, (marine mammals, turtles, sharks). Plankton, that cannot control their horizontal movement in the water column, are held in their home territories by these barriers.

i went to the dentist today and my dentist honest to god said “can i ask you a question…….what the hell is in your mouth”

it was in awe lmao

then the hygienist and assistant all came over to look too and they were like “wooooow” and my ass was sitting there like

oh my god i posted this and then went to work, and

story time

okay so to preface this, my hometown where i’m originally from is a really fucking weird place. like from the outside it seems like a normal suburban town, but once you’re there for awhile you get the feeling that’s something’s not…quite all together. a lot of people are really fucking weird there — so much so that that was a running joke in school growing up, that people in the town were just like that. everyone knew not to go out to the farm lands surrounding the town especially at night, we called it “the cuts” and people used to disappear out there all the time or get shot at by the especially weird people that would live out there. the news was and still is truly a thing of horror. every time i come back i’m regaled with even more stories of crazy shit that has happened there.

to put it in perspective we generally never had “normal crime” like robbery or anything like that when i lived there, though that did happen sometimes. the news stories were always like, “a kid was kidnapped by local residents and tortured in a house around the corner,” “a random person was chased down and shot for sport in a really nice neighborhood,” “someone was gored to death by a bull while out car shopping,” etc. (these are all real, btw). everyone does drugs and the whole town is located really close to a government site where they test nuclear weapons and chemicals and shit. this is how i grew up, in this bizarre environment.

i need to preface it this way so that you get that it’s weird. it’s a fucking weird place. i used to listen to the welcome to night vale podcast and make comparisons from it to my hometown, that’s how weird it is.

i only say this so you know that this town is where i got my orthodontics from.

all the kids in my town went to this one particular orthodontist. i also used to go to a dentist in town that a lot of people went to as well. i had a permanent retainer put on my bottom teeth after braces and no one had ever said anything to me about the model of retainer itself or it being weird type of retainer at all. i saw a ton of other people (mostly other kids that were my age at the time) that had the same type of retainer as me too so i never thought about it.

so i kept my retainer in — it’s never caused me problems and it keeps my teeth straight, why not?

however i went to a dentist for the first time in a metropolitan area now, and when he saw it in my mouth his literal first reaction was to say “uh can i ask you a question….what the hell is that”

LITERALLY the words that he said

which in hindsight makes almost too much sense. of course my town of all towns would put these weird unnecessary contraptions in kids’ mouths, and of course it happened so much that everyone just thought it was normal. that sounds exactly, to a T, like my hometown.

my permanent bottom retainer is apparently this prototype that is so rare that he’s literally never seen it before in his life, not in dental school, nowhere. it’s not that it’s an outdated type, it’s just rare as fuck. they were still staring at pictures of it on my chart in wonder when i left the office.

so just know somewhere out there, in a weird ass suburban town where they test nuclear weapons and a good portion of the residents go fucking nuts, there’s probably hundreds of people still walking around with this same contraption in their mouth that exists nowhere else in the world thinking, “yeah, that’s cool. that makes sense. let me go drink the definitely not-contaminated water now and never move away from here.”

This sounds like an X-files episode

Okay, so I looked into it and I think that the town is Tracy, California.

I looked up the bull-murder thing OP mentioned and Tracy seemed to be only town that came up with a matching case. Though the man didn’t actually die from his injuries everything else matches up one for one. So just to make sure that it was the right town I looked to see if there was any murder-torture of young people in Tracy, and unfortunately there was. It was a 17 year old boy who escaped and survived the torture. And just to solidify that it was in fact Tracy I looked up shootings in residential areas and there was one of a 20 year old man who was shot and killed in a nice neighborhood.

Okay, but I decided to look into Tracy more to find out more information about it and the town is super suspicious. There’s been a lot of murders and shooting in the town. Back in 2009 an 8 year old girl, Sandra Cantu, was kidnapped and murdered by a Sunday school teacher who said she had no idea why she killed Sandra. Another case happened in 2018 when four underage boys were shot and one was killed by four teenage boys. There’s a lot of news stories on shootings, homicides, and drug busts in that town. It’s a really cute town from the outside, if you just look up Tracy, California there’s a lot of really cute businesses and nice articles on sweet things that happen in the town, but if you actually look into it the town is really sketchy.

So yeah, this sketchy town with a military base, multiple homicides and shootings is maybe Tracy, California.

………………..yeah, you guys caught me

i grew up in tracy

also i have to add another person’s tags to this since it’s honesty hour because they’re hilarious and true

Honestly I wasn’t even surprised when I found out it was in California. Even less surprised when googled it and found out it was near the Bay Area. That sounds about right.

Apparently the motto is “Think Inside the Triangle” and I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Im rebolgging just to add that it’s illegal to see the news from the city in UE. Like, LITERALLY:

it’s….what now

Please get out of this place

How did this post get weirder

World Heritage Post

HOLY SHIT NO FUCKING WAY

Im european, but I really don’t mind americans not knowing our countries just because I don’t know theirs very well.

Me, a non-European non-American who can list most American states and European countries:

Okay but. USA states aren’t countries. North American countries are USA and Canada (and depending on how you’re defining “North” also Mexico). Now granted I don’t know (most) South American countries and also I have long ceased to remember like half of European countries (im sorry Balkans and microstates there are just so many of you ;~;) so I don’t mind this either it’s just

i mean

USA states aren’t countries

so there’s an argument you could make that by population, US states are close to European countries, so a US state is “as significant” as a European country. You can disagree that that really captures what we care about*, but more straightforwardly an implication is that then we should even more so care about listing Chinese provinces and Indian states.

*which raises the question, what do we care about here? i mean, beyond self-righteous smugness. why do we think people ‘should’ be able to list countries, or polities, with certain properties?

This goes into philosophical territory, but on a basic level “does this segment of the earth’s population have its own foreign policy” is a good metric. Also shoutout to “do local leaders ever get mentioned in history textbooks outside of the region itself” and “what are the chances of seeing local leaders ever mentioned on TV”.

Resisting my urge to agree with “wait, why DO we care about that?” for a moment longer, size/population is definitely a terrible metric for your argument. The population of Kharkiv Region in Ukraine is 2.658 million according to google, which is bigger than the populations of Moldova, Latvia and Estonia separately, and also than the total population of Luxembourg, Montenegro, Malta, Iceland, Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino and Vatican put together.

Please go ahead and tell me how knowing regions of Ukraine is comparable to knowing European countries.

Im european, but I really don’t mind americans not knowing our countries just because I don’t know theirs very well.

Me, a non-European non-American who can list most American states and European countries:

Okay but. USA states aren’t countries. North American countries are USA and Canada (and depending on how you’re defining “North” also Mexico). Now granted I don’t know (most) South American countries and also I have long ceased to remember like half of European countries (im sorry Balkans and microstates there are just so many of you ;~;) so I don’t mind this either it’s just

i mean

USA states aren’t countries

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

man the Appalachian mountains really aren’t shit huh

The Rockies are new, young and virile and fresh from the Laramide orogeny, tall and lanky teenagers on the geological scale. the Appalachian mountains are old, formed hundreds of millions of years ago before dinosaurs walked the Earth. They are ancients, elders, witnesses to half a billion years of life coming and going. To be tall is not a virtue. To be small is not a sin. The Appalachians are eroding under the weight of time, slowly shrinking and returning to the Earth from which they sprang. Appreciate them while they are still here.

I do want to say real quick again about the age of the Appalachians…

They said “before dinosaurs,” but we have a cave here that began forming between 450 million to 550 million years ago.

There are no bones in that cave. No fossils. No nothing.

That’s because this cave began forming before bones existed on land, and had only just started to exist in the ocean. Shellfish hadn’t evolved yet. Limestone, which forms many caves, was just starting to become a more prevalent rock.

The mountains aren’t older than dinosaurs. They are older than bones.

see that little lump up at the top of minnesota? the sawtooth mountains? so small most places would just call them hills?

those are over a billion years old.

that’s why they’re so small. they’re the last ancient remnants of a lava flow 5 miles thick. the lava didn’t kill any dinosaurs. or any fish. or any animals at all. because there were no animals. you know what there was?

algae.

those mountains were 5 miles tall when the most advanced life on earth was algae.

so i’m just gonna go ahead and keep calling them mountains, even though all you need to climb them is hiking shoes and a nice afternoon. because a place where you can crouch down and touch basalt that was lava before leaves were invented deserves some respect.

The earth is unfathomably ancient, and you garner no love from her when you insult her eldest children.

not only that, the Appalachians predate the Atlantic Ocean and were fragmented. they stretch across three continents, as Atlas in Africa and Caledonians in Europe as you can see here:

the Appalachians are way way old. the fossils that ARE found in these ranges are ancient marine beings, whose fossil remains predate the anatomical structures of beings migrating to land for the first time. THAT’S how old the Appalachians are.

show the elders some respect, they have witnessed eons and are returning to the land from which they grew, it’s the kind of the passage of time on a scale that our human lives could not even begin to comprehend.

Just so you know

EDUCATE.

Africa is the continent.

wish more maps like these came across my dash

i gotta find more people to follow who rebagel this sort of stuff

Subcontinants? what are they?

I know India is considered a subcontinent but idk if there are others? I’m more concerned about what other countries are taught though???

Continent is a huge landmass surrounded by ocean. There's South America, North America, Eurasia, Africa, Australia and Antarctica. That's it.

(Then there's the division of 'parts of the world' that goes a bit differently: America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, but still adds up to the same sum total)

I have never heard about subcontinents before wow 0.0

and here am I, an Eastern European, where there's basically no fauna not scared of people much more than people are scared of it, except like, stray dogs (which are officially considered the biggest threat and a big problem) I guess there are snakes but they are mostly non-poisonous (because of, you know, people exterminating the poisonous ones as best they could) and avoid us frantically I saw a wild animal that was not a bird, a cat or a dog and larger than a turtle like twice in my entire life, and I go hiking nearly every year...