Chicago Public Schools Ends Columbus Day, Will Celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day Instead

ChezC3 said:

Well, that cocksmith and rape voyeur MLK, if you really need an example...

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Martin Luther King Jr raped a person?

CMPancake said:

You're defending slavery, genocide, and rape by saying they were going to die regardless of the diseases being maliciously brought to them. Just admit your heroes and your founders were terrible people who do not deserve to be celebrated.

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^^^^STARWMAN WARNING^^^^

NO! I am saying that the vast majority---VAST MAJORITY died from diseases not by genocide. And besides, you really think that rape, slavery AND GENOCIDE was not going on in the New World before Europeans arrived????? The Aztecs were slaughtering tens of thousands of slaves and prisoners from other tribes. The Anasazi were eating EACH OTHER. Plains Indians were for centuries raiding, kidnapping, and killing other tribes. We Europeans didn't teach them to do that.

So please! Stop with the selective outrage against Europeans. Unless you think the Aztecs were nice guys into life and liberty to all, I grow tired of all of this silly assertion that only Europeans are the "bad guys". If the Aztecs had developed gunpowder and built ships before the Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English--- they would have sailed to Europe and cut the living hearts out of Europeans in their blood lust ceremonies.

Bodhisattva said:

It is not wrong. The near exact diameter was known since the Greeks... it was the Romans who ****ed it up... taking it from around 24,000 to 17,500 in diameter. that was the information that Columbus used, like an idiot.

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No, it was not.

EMNofSeattle said:

No, it was not.

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The point was not whether it was a Roman or a Greek that later screwed it up... the point was that it was later screwed up and that is the incorrect information that Colubus used. I was very much correct. Deal with it.

Eratosthenes then used this to calculate the circumference of the Earth to be about 250,000 stadia. Modern scholars disagree about the length of the stadium used by Eratosthenes. Values between 500 and about 600 feet have been suggested, putting Eratosthenes’ calculated circumference between about 24,000 miles and about 29,000 miles. The Earth is now known to measure about 24,900 miles around the equator, slightly less around the poles.

Eratosthenes had made the assumption that the sun was so far away that its rays were essentially parallel, that Alexandria is due north of Syene, and that Syene is exactly on the tropic of cancer. While not exactly correct, these assumptions are good enough to make a quite accurate measurement using Eratosthenes’ method. His basic method is sound, and is even used by schoolchildren around the world today.

Other Greek scholars repeated the feat of measuring the Earth using a procedure similar to Eratosthenes’ method. Several decades after Eratosthenes measurement, Posidonius used the star Canopus as his light source and the cities of Rhodes and Alexandria as his baseline. But because he had an incorrect value for the distance between Rhodes and Alexandria, he came up with a value for Earth’s circumference of about 18,000 miles, nearly 7,000 miles too small.

Ptolemy included this smaller value in his treatise on geography in the second century A.D. Later explorers, including Christopher Columbus, believed Ptolemy’s value and became convinced that Earth was small enough to sail around. If Columbus had instead known Eratosthenes larger, and more accurate, value, perhaps he might never have set sail.

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