Farouk Bulsara wrote a song when he was a teenager which later became Queen’s signature piece. Granted, he probably refined and enhanced it for recording, but he originally wrote Bohemian Rhapsody as a young’un.
My point is that, yes, we should be impressed with Mike Altman’s work, but not particularly on the basis that he was 14. He had talent.
TIL that Cyprus is in Asia. It’s obvious really looking at a map, but as it’s been treated as part of Europe for most things politically I’d always thought of it as being in Europe.
I think it’d be more accurate to say that it’s in the Mediterranean. And of course, the boundary between Europe and Asia is vague and arbitrary to begin with.
Apparently some Europeans count there as being six continents, not seven, because although they consider Europe and Asia distinct, the Americas are all one continent. Nobody ever claimed that humans are consistent.
The ancient Greeks labeled everything on the east side of the Aegean Sea Asia, and everything on the west side Europa. Things get iffy once you get north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea of course.
But did they have the sense of a continent as such, or was it just a large region to them?
There’s not really any good justification for making Europe a continent, anyway, other than the fact that it’s Europeans creating the system.
The legend of Jason and the Argonauts recalls a time when rowing and sailing from Thessaly to the southern coast of the Black Sea was such an arduous voyage that it took a band of heroes to get there and back.
I heard a recent definition that placed the boundary along the Dardanelles/Marmara/Bosporus, but that is still a little iffy. The motivation for that was to be able to claim that Istanbul is the only city that straddles two continents.
The division of the world into continents comes from the attempts to draw the known world in the Middle Ages using a Mappa Mundi. This is a map of what was known about the world at that point. In such a map, east is at the top of the world. Jerusalem was in the center of the world. The world was a circle with the Asia being the top half of the world. Europe was on the bottom left of the world. Africa was at the bottom right of the world. They knew that the world was round, of course. They just didn’t know how much of the world was taken up by what we now call the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. They knew that they were just drawing a rough picture of the world, not drawing an exact map. They knew that they were splitting the world into round racial groups:
I’m nerdy in several ways, but one of them is collecting cover songs. I have about 8 versions of “Suicide is Painless”.
I think I have more of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” but “Suicide” is pretty popular.
Ironically, I can only remember watching 2 episodes of MASH*, the series did not really appeal to me.
Have you seen maps of the proposed voyage? They differ from author to author and interpreter to interpreter, but, aside from Herodotus’ simple map, most of them involve voyages of truly heroic proportions:
Myself, I doubt the more complicated ones – I suspect ignorance of the real state of things lead some writers to assume the voyage went way beyond reasonable bounds.
I’ve read that energy is conserved, and there are no exceptions to this “law.” But today I watch a video that says this is not true: apparently energy is not conserved over very long time frames, and when the expansion of the universe is taken into account.
Over very short time frames it isn’t conserved, either. It’s another manifestation of the Uncertainty Principle.
I haven’t heard anything about lack of conservation over long time periods, though.
A search says that there are 600 to 800 versions of this song.
And while some Europeans did speculate about the “antipodes” or the existence of what we’d call a “counter-weight continent” somewhere in the southern hemisphere, the discovery of the Americas was so astonishing to medieval conceptions that it was literally dubbed “The New World”.
I was just watching (ETA: that same) video about this yesterday explaining the contributions of little-recognized math/physics genius Emmy Noether. Noether revolutionized the understanding of physical conservation laws by showing that they were inevitable consequences of symmetry. In the case of conservation of energy it is due to symmetries in time and space: if the future will be the same as the past and moving to a different location in space doesn’t alter one’s global circumstances, then conservation of energy necessarily follows. Except that the expansion of space undercuts those symmetries, so then conservation of energy is no longer a given.
Which is why Australia was named before it was discovered. This hypothetical counterbalance continent was drawn on maps labeled Terra Incognita Australis (Unknown Southern Land).
The mappamundi gets a chapter in Jerry Brotten’s magnificent A History of the World in 12 Maps. (Lots more than 12 maps, obviously: publishers went obnoxiously crazy with rip-offs of Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses. A deserved bestseller, but c’mon.) It’s a fat, heavy-going book (for light reading about maps, seek out Mark Monmonier) but this is real history that opens up the world in several senses.
I once did some work for Cohen’s estate.
Before he died, Cohen’s email address began with “baldymonk”. And on some form (maybe his taxes?) he listed his occupation as poet.
He is (or… was). More so, in my opinion than Bob Dylan, who received the Nobel for literature
I love Bob, but I think Leonard has superior lyrics.