251–260 of 261 posts
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Shitty life-hacks: you can ballpark converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit by multiplying by 2!
This life-hack is significantly improved if you change it to: C->F: multiply by 2, then add 30 F->C: subtract 30, then divide by 2.
Hello! Being the author of the blog post commented here, I'm glad it became food for thoughts. Here a few of the salient points: > They are not cathedrals! True! As I learned after writing the blog post, a Cathedral is not simply a large church. As written in several comments there has to be a bishop. > Fallacy of using other projection than the Mercator one. It was known that they are "visually" aligned on the Merca…
you missed a chance to say "only under a bishopric"
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I studied art history, and this always bothered me when learning about Christian symbolism. When reading about numbers related to cathedrals, such as the number of statues on a ledge or the number of archivolts (the bands around doors), so much emphasis was put on the meaning of these particular numbers by whoever authored the piece. Three related to the Holy Trinity, four represented the four Gospels, five alluded t…
Wasn't the whole point of building the thing to make physical all that symbolic stuff in the first place?
The beings who built the cathedrals had methods and technologies of amazing power that we know virtually nothing about. They are artifacts of something that is now, presumably, gone.
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I was taught the same thing by Catholics in Buenos Aires.
Well, now you know where they got it from.
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This is an interesting point. Wikipedia's page on St. Michael's Sword describes it as "monasteries and other sacred sites" and also notes that they are also "almost all located on prominent hilltops". Only four of the seven locations show up on Wikipedia's list of "churches dedicated to Saint Michael" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(archangel)#Churches_d... ). Also worth noting: "[Michael's] churches were of…
You can’t just rip off Tim Powers and Alan Moore like that.
What’s with the use of “we” everywhere?
"Authorial we" is/was common in academic writing although its usage has declined nowadays. Shouldn't be mixed with "royal we". Rather it's meant to specify "the author and the reader", that is "I and you" (even if what you do is basically follow along an already done work).
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Ill say. If I follow GPs life-hack for 30C I get 60F, which is significantly different from 86F. Some life-hack.
30*2 + 30 = 90, which is pretty close to 86. Going the other way 86-30 / 2 = 28 which is close to 30.
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I would say the next logical step is figuring out the probability that with this many points, what is the likelihood of 7 of them being this close to being on a line? We can assume a uniform random distribution on the unit circle or square for simplicity.
Erm human population is pretty far from uniform, and is a certain population threshold is a pre-requisite for building one of these sites.
Pondered the estimation a bit more. The first two points of a group of 7 define a line. The probability of the remaining five being close enough to the line is just the probability of each being close enough, to the power of five. We can roughly estimate that probability as the "close enough" distance divided by the total area. Let's just normalize. Let's assume distribution within a unit square Some of the lines would not cut in a way that most of the "close enough" area is inside the box, but that's a constant factor and not to big.
Given n points and the probability p7 that seven points lie close enough to a line, we take the number of different sets of seven points, N7 = (n choose 7). The likelihood of a match is (1-(1-p7)^N7).
This is a very rough estimation, of course, but it gives some idea of the likelihood.