131–140 of 244 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
Barnacle goose do migrate from Greenland to the British isles, but I do not know if Greenland is considered north America.
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Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere . Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations).…
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which it involuntarily carried with it.)
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My experience living in Taiwan is that those terms may literally mean foreigner but their practical usage means white/western people. A native or black american would not be called that. Also, lao wai is the one they go for when they are angry or postering xenophobia amongst each other. I find it to be a needlessly othering term but I try to accept it as not said with explicitly bad intent.
The best summary of the word that I've seen is that its a lot like "gringo". Its status as pejorative or descriptive or even endearing depends on how it's said and the context in which it is said and on the person saying it. World of difference between "ey gringo, since when you drink tecate" and "what you doing in our neighborhood gringo".
Why "Christopher Columbus" and not "Cristoforo Colombo"? In Italy the press and media did not convert names into an Italian from the '60. We say New York and Joe Biden. Not Nuova Iorc and Giovanni Baiden.
Giovanni = John, Giuseppe = Joseph
> But it could help explain why Columbus, a Genoese, was prepared to set off across what most contemporaries considered a landless void. I had always thought that Columbus made the trip because he miscalculated the distance around the globe, while everyone else was saying they'd starve before reaching Asia. He was just lucky enough there happened to be land halfway there, and then mistakenly assumed he made it, since…
Educated people already knew the circumference of the globe. Columbus’ miscalculation was… hopeful. There’s a sort of conspiracy theory that it was deliberate - how else was he going to get funding?
The Vikings/Norsemen had already spread awareness of Vinland to monks in Iceland, as the sagas regarding Vinland were written down about 100 years before Columbus visited Bristol. Did Columbus or other merchants in the North hear of these sagas? Did they come into contact with the written versions of these sagas?
Italian merchants had a serious incentive to find alternative trading routes.
There is a deeper question of why a man would go on a theoretically suicidal voyage, and on top of that, be funded by royalty to do so. Believing in your miscalculations is courageous I suppose, but its your life at stake; would a pious man be willing to kill himself chasing possible alternative geographic calculations?
Intriguely, Columbus claimed that in 1477, after visiting Bristol, England (which is confirmed), he visited Iceland, where the stories of Markland would have predominated.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Columbus thought India was closer than it was because birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere . Portugal, Spain and anyone else he asked thought he was wrong because that would've required the Earth to be around 20k miles in circumference, when the Ancient Greeks had calculated it to be 24k miles in circumference (and they were very close in their calculations).…
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> birds could be seen returning to the West Coast of England with twigs and leaves from somewhere. Are you saying birds were carrying twigs over the Atlantic from Americas -> Europe?? Genuinely curious as to if birds actually do that, seems pointless.
> seems pointless I'm more wondering about the effects of seed/life transfer. Doesn't seem feasible to me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a twig, but there is a recorded case of a bird making it to Europe after being shot with an African arrow. (Which it involuntarily carried with it.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfeilstorch But that's different, I doubt birds intentionally carry anything from Africa either.
Ok, it seems that Aristoteles believed, that birds actually transformed, but zoologist of that time at most believed, that they hibernated underwater", which seems a more solid theory, than transforming.