Terrible video. The needle in a compass is a magnet. It has two poles, north and south. So does the earth. The north pole of the magnetic needle points to the earth’s magnetic south pole because magnets always align with each other north pole to south pole. It doesn’t matter what color the ends of the needle are or whether they are marked with an ‘N’ or an ‘S’. One end points toward the north magnetic pole and that is the south pole of the needle.
Thanks TriPolar. I was going to watch it again, but the explanation was bad IMHO.
Based on your username @TriPolar , you must have a very interesting compass.
I do get lost a lot.
Nope, the first crossing was by the US navy with several seaplanes, which landed at sea to refuel.
Alcock and Brown were the first non-stop crossing.
Lindberg was the first non stop crossing NYC to Paris- not newfoundland to Ireland. And he did it solo.
Yes, but you see “North South” on a magnet are simply conventions. North on a map existed long long before we could make magnets. Also not that the North Magnetic pole is not at the north pole. Back in the race to the poles ere it was somewhere kinda near Baffin island- but it moves and now it is pretty close to the actual North pole.
That’s where it would’ve pointed when that USGS topo was published. Magnetic declination changes over time. The poles like to wander.
Yes, currently it is close to true north.
The video doesn’t clearly explain those conventions. First I’ll point out that a compass needle points to both the North Pole and the South Pole because the needle has two ends pointing in opposite directions. So we end up using the term ‘North Pole’ for both the geographic North Pole and the end of the needle pointing north even though they can’t align that way. But as you say, it’s just convention. So the North Pole is the place where Superman has his Fortress of Solitude and the end of a compass needle pointing that way is the magnetic south pole of that needle, and the magnetic north pole of the needle is pointing to where penguins live. Or call them anything you want, they’ll still align that way.
Finally, they are pointing to the Geomagnetic North and South Poles. That’s the magnetic field the compass aligns with.
Yup. And for where the topo map is for. One in California is going to have different declination than the east coast.
Oddly, the magnetic south pole currently isn’t even within Antarctica.
I know someone who claimed that was what was causing global warming
Correct, and it should be mentioned that the south pole of Earth’s magnet is located near the North Pole (Arctic Ocean region), and the north pole of Earth’s magnet is located near the South Pole (Antarctica region). (At least right now. They will probably swap places sometime in the future.)
And a nitpick: strictly speaking, a compass needle doesn’t point to the Earth’s magnetic north pole, or the Earth’s magnetic south pole, or anything else. A compass needle simply aligns itself with the magnetic field that is passing through it. After it does this, we make the assumption that the needle is pointing to Magnetic North. Most of the time this is a good assumption. (There’s also the issue of magnetic dip, but that’s getting into the weeds.)
I’ve taught orienteering courses for search and rescue and that statement is very true. Be aware of your surroundings, what you holding, and what is nearby when you need to take accurate measurements. That needle could be influenced by local sources.
Yep. And even if you take those precautions, there are magnetic anomalies that - on rare/special occasions - need to be taken into account (Link 1, Link 2).
I’m reading Foote’s chronical of the Civil War, which has a lot of detail about the primary actors of the time. One of them, of course was Ulysses S. Grant, who later became POTUS. What I never knew before now is that Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. When Grant was looking to go to West Point, his sponsor, Rep. Thomas Hamer, was unfamiliar with him or his family, and put him forward as U.S. Grant. The red tape required to get that changed wasn’t worth the effort, so Grant just kept using it as it was.
It also spared him the indignity of having to put HUG on his monogrammed handkerchiefs.
Foote was a lost cause supporter. He loved Nathan Forrest.
Are you talking about Foote the general, or Foote the author?
The author. Shelby.
Oh, Vikings did not have “Viking Funerals” when they set a dude afloat in a longship and set it on fire with arrows, etc.
AFAIK, the Rus (which are kinda related) had one, once- as far as is known. .
There are some ship burials.
A burning ship in the water is probably going to go out by submersal before the corpse is fully ashed, so you’re going to get crispy jarl bits washing up on the beach of your fjord, and no-one wants that.
The Norse did practice cremation (in at least one text, this was mandated by Odin - they were enjoined to either bury the ashes or cast them to sea.) They also practiced burial. What they practiced, when and where, varied greatly, based on lots of factors like social status, prevalent cultural layers etc.
For instance, we don’t know how much of ibn Fadal’s described funeral was Norse-inspired and how much was Finnish- or Slav-inspired, since the Kievan Rus were a syncrete of all three. But as far as we know, all the elements in that ship cremation are also found in various Norse sites so none of it can be ruled out as fundamentally not Norse.
One other thing that people now “know” is that the Norse didn’t have horned helmets at all, and all such depictions are Victorian inventions made up out of whole cloth, probably for opera. That would, in fact, be wrong, we have several depictions of horned helmets from the Migration period right up to the Viking period (e.g. Oseberg ship grave). Which match quite nicely with actual finds of ceremonial helmets from the Nordic Bronze Age, suggesting a cultural continuity. What is true is that they probably never used horned helmets in actual combat, based off all the (few) combat helmets we have found.
Sometimes this is expanded into saying horned helmets were not worn in combat by anyone. That all horned helmets are ceremonial/tourney/parade helmets like Henry VIII’s, or Teutonic-style ones, or samurai ones.
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But there, we do have evidence from Egyptian depictions of the Sea Peoples, and Mycenean and Minoan references (this site has several pages of discussion illustrated with actual depictions, hypothetical reconstructions as well as an extensive bibliography. Many, many of the reconstructions are WTF.).
The argument is usually that any horns are impractical/ a hindrance for actual combat. To which my counterargument is “Have you ever seen a winged Hussar?”