This topic and why that picture is very misleading is well covered by this video by The Present Past:
Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
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Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do people attempt to use "stories" as a measurement of height? There is no universal agreement for what a "story" is. 97 meters is in fact 97 meters.
I think the universal agreement is actually to measure things in football fields
which is also not normalized. A referee once told me that - in theory - football fields can be square. I think it was 80m x 80m since 80m is the minimum length and the maximum width. Correct me if I am wrong.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#43That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun. There’s a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which suggests that there were quite a few towers…
>> I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun.
Isn't that really weird? I realise that most people experience the internet only through their phone browser and social media apps, where it's hard to do many of the common and simple things one can do on a computer, like pasting a link. How is it that those extremely fiddly interfaces have come to be the norm?
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the universal agreement is actually to measure things in football fields
which is also not normalized. A referee once told me that - in theory - football fields can be square. I think it was 80m x 80m since 80m is the minimum length and the maximum width. Correct me if I am wrong.
If you’re Australian, they can be circular.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#45That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun. There’s a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which suggests that there were quite a few towers…
>> I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun. Isn't that really weird? I realise that most people experience the internet only through their phone browser and social media apps, where it's hard to do many of the common and simple things one can do on a computer, like pasting a link. How is it that those extremely fiddly interfaces have come to be the norm?
Because they're with us everywhere and conveniently at hand most of the time. A traditional computer, even in laptop form, is comparatively bulky, unwieldy and inconvenient. Laptops don't fit into your pocket, they don't pull out for one handed use while you're waiting in line and they don't slip easily back in once the line starts moving again. To type in text, you need both hands free, and a relatively stable surface to place your laptop on.
Phones trade ease of use for ease of access. They allow people to be online and participating in an online discussion when and where a traditional computer would be prohibitive or inconvenient. And as a trade off those people aren't always able to do (or conveniently do) something they would do on those traditional computers. Most people most of the time seem to find that an acceptable tradeoff. And to be fair to those most people, I write far more than I copy and paste links so it's not unreasonable to find that tradeoff to be acceptable.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the universal agreement is actually to measure things in football fields
which is also not normalized. A referee once told me that - in theory - football fields can be square. I think it was 80m x 80m since 80m is the minimum length and the maximum width. Correct me if I am wrong.
Field size for American football is definitely standardized: 100 yards between goal lines and 160 feet wide. Lots of Americans will have an intuitive sense for how long something like "three football fields" is.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#47This topic and why that picture is very misleading is well covered by this video by The Present Past: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikg3-GQLg3g
Does nobody on HN read the articles? That exact video is what this article is commenting on.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Google Earth might be more wrong than the illustration. One of the two Towers of Bologna is 97m. On GE it looks less than that. 97m is more than 33 stories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna
Why do people attempt to use "stories" as a measurement of height? There is no universal agreement for what a "story" is. 97 meters is in fact 97 meters.
Going to play the pedantic card and mention that there's also no universal agreement on how to measure a building's height. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat on its own has three different methods and not everyone accepts those as being the correct and true way of measuring the building's height.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#49The Yemeni city of Shibam is filled with mud high rises that have been around since the 1500s [0].
I'd assume medieval Bologna was similar.
Re: Medieval Bologna was full of tall towers
#50That particular illustration is an artistic interpretation of another older illustration. I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun. There’s a YouTube video somewhere that explains all of this and shows a more accurate physical model (or as accurate as can be reasonably expected) that is located somewhere in Bologna, which suggests that there were quite a few towers…
>> I wish I could place a link for reference right now but I’m using my phone and that’s no fun. Isn't that really weird? I realise that most people experience the internet only through their phone browser and social media apps, where it's hard to do many of the common and simple things one can do on a computer, like pasting a link. How is it that those extremely fiddly interfaces have come to be the norm?
Most people never need to manually copypaste links on a mobile device because they can share links, via the browser’s share button, straight to all the apps relevant to them. Use cases like sharing URLs on a legacy non-mobile-oriented web platform such as HN are an extreme outlier. In any case, copying a URL via the browser’s "Share->Copy" or equivalent isn’t IMO too onerous a task even compared to C-l C-c.