Agreed. This comment to that article pretty well sums it up for me:
I guess it is good someone put the idea to paper, but I feel like this is a common sense conclusion (because of how concentric rings work) which is generally ignored because it’s not what most people want to know when they ask the question about the closest planet. When asking the vaguely worded question of “which planet is Earth’s closest neighbor” they are wanting to know which orbit is closest to Earth’s orbit, i.e which orbit is going to be most like Earth.
Wanting the literal average distance to a planet is like asking someone how fast they drive and expecting them to include time sitting at traffic lights in their average.
Louis Vuitton left home when he was 13 and spent two years walking to Paris where he began an apprenticeship in the trunk-making business. He became successful on his own fairly quickly, but his fame was sealed when he was hired as the personal trunk maker for the wife of Napolean III.
Wow. 7 years go by in a big hurry. I’m in the biz and if you’d have said it was 4 years ago I’d have said “Sure.” And I only know it’d be 4 (or more) years because it couldn’t have happened during Trump’s term without lots of extra silly controversial baggage being attached.
In 1844, Irish surgeon Francis Rynd invented what was arguably the world’s first hollow needle.
But it was a device which used gravity to make the liquid flow and involved breaching the skin with a tool known as a trocar.
Within 10 years, however, the modern version of the hypodermic needle was born
In 1853, Fife-born physician Alexander Wood added a plunger and developed the first all-glass syringe that allowed doctors to estimate dosage based on the amount of liquid observed through the glass.
Watching a behind the scenes thing about Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic, I learned that Phil Tippet had too many beers with his buddies for lunch and slurred the word “shoelaces.” That became Salacious as in Salacious B. Crumb, Jabba the Hutt’s right hand man.
The letter ‘a’ isn’t used at all in any of the numbers between one and one hundred.
I know it’s not a deep and meaningful fact, but it keeps me entertained. Especially useful to wager with people that you can say a hundred words quickly without using ‘a’.
Technically, Mercury isn’t the closest planet to Earth. Neither is Venus nor Mars. Nor Luna, even though I still say that Luna should be counted as a planet.
The actual planet that’s closest to Earth is Earth, of course
My recollection is that rigorous grammar rules prohibit the use of “and” within the speaking of an integer; it’s reserved for designating the break point between the integer portion and fractional portion of a non-integer number. To also use “and” anywhere else would make its meaning ambiguous.
So you would say “one hundred one and one-half”. You would not say “one hundred and one and one-half.”
Likewise, you would say “one hundred one,” not “one hundred and one.”
Here’s another set of only vaguely interesting facts. There are now 1.83 billion websites on the Internet with about 200m of these presently active. There are currently about 55 billion pages indexed by Google, down from c.65 billion in 2020.
I know, this is exciting stuff. Try to calm down everyone.
