Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

Post by mikhailfranco » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 4:58 PM UTC

mikhailfranco wrote: post #152

Archelaos wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Wikipedia list has a lot more St. Michael's churches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Michael%27s_Church Around 150 in Europe alone. For the next hackaton: Write a programme to find all possible approximately straight lines between any 7 of these churches.

There really are many more. I know of 3 in a small area of Somerset not on the list, but 2 of them are ruined, and hence not currently dedicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_St_Michael_and_All_A... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrow_Mump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Tor Churches were often dedicated to St. Michael when they were built over pagan sanctuaries, because St. Michael could fight…

Post by mensetmanusman » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #142

jvanderbot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's neat! However, if each burger king was so enshrined by king burger, then there would again be nothing interesting. So, were these the only sites that were selected in that way? Second, is this a post-hoc story we told about the shrines (perhaps to avoid destruction / re-purposing by a greedy local lord?)

Put another way, if there are 10,000 shrines to this one saint around Europe, the probability that 7 will randomly be in a straight line on the Mercator projection is a lot higher than if there are <10.

Post by sonoffett » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 5:30 PM UTC

pyrale wrote: post #155

svieira wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The extra interesting wrinkle here is that each of the Burger Kings in the straight line are associated with an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location, while the others are mostly random franchises stuck up by someone who decided they would like a fast food restaurant here and it might as well be a Burger King. (i. e. Mont Saint Michele the bishop who saw St. Michael orig…

> are associated with an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location ...According to the guy trying to sell you a big mac or whatever they are called there.

Post by seanhunter » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 5:58 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #159

pdabbadabba wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we have yet to discover the real St. Michael's sword, which would, of course, be aligned along a geodesic line.

Yeah, spherical geometry exists. But using various projections makes for better click bait.

Post by 082349872349872 » Thu, Jun 06, 2024, 6:09 PM UTC

randomtoast wrote: post #64

robertlagrant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but I suppose even if you have 7 that line up, they may not fall in your band. To remove that constraint, so it's just any band, I think it should be more like: given a cathedral is in a particular place, how likely is it that six other cathedrals fall in a 50km wide band aross Europe.

Okay, GPT4 said there a just 189 non-overlapping 50km bands (horizontal, vertical, and diagnoal) in Europe and then continued to calculate the chance to land those 7 points in any of the 189 bands and gave a result in the order of 10^-12.