What would pocket videos capture 200 years ago? I often wonder this. When there was no video to record anything. When it was simply one word versus another. What sorts of foolish things might you have seen “back in the day”?
You can pull up YouTube today, and see the world’s most elite bunch of idiots doing all sorts of crazy things. Someone had a phone in their pocket. An act was recorded, shared, and now that clip has been viewed millions of times. It’s the outliers that we share. The normal dose of life is too uninteresting to be of note. They go unnoticed. It’s the extreme ones that get shared and viewed again and again. The unbelievable. How could someone be that stupid? How could someone be that cruel? Oppressive? Rebellious? Ruthless? Unkind? The worst of the worst, and at their very worst. A bad day. A thoughtless act. An outlier caught on live feed. Shared with the web, and there for the rest of the world to say, “What the heck?” Another embarrassment for the human race. The best of the best at their best aren’t captured enough. The common folks when they are doing okay, and not being an idiot. The everyday heroes. The moderates. The salt of the earth. These folks never get the airplay of the sure enough idiots. But hey, these people are the reason to still have a little faith in humanity. Mathematicians are a curious lot. History hasn't changed that much, but the concept of the number 0 was not easily understood! In fact, many more complex mathematical ideas were understood long before it was understood that 0 was an actual real number, and much more than a place holder! Here are a few examples of those.
1.) They knew that the square root of 2 could not be written as the ratio of integers. It was the un ratio so to speak, or what we would call today an irrational number. 2.) They knew what a prime number was, and that for any number chosen you could find a number of primes larger than that number. Or what we would say today, they knew that there were an infinite number of primes! 3.) They knew out of all of the possible shapes of solids, that there were only 5 regular solids possible. They knew what they were and inscribed them in a circle! Namely the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the icosahedron, and the dodecahedron! All of these things today seem more complex than the number 0. However, we've been working with 0 and our complex number system since the day we were born, so hopefully we've got it by now! So, if you truly understand the concept of nothing as a number, then give yourself a pat on the back! Likely, you understand it better than most of the ancient mathematicians of our time!
Six uniquely enchanted stones were crafted by the ancient wizard Archimedes. Five of them he modeled after the platonic solids, and the sixth one he shaped as a sphere. Archimedes used the stones for the greater good of Candora under the gentle guidance of the creator, and because of this, there was a surge of prosperous peace like never before. But when death had found the wise old wizard, there was none that was fit to take his place. The archdemon, Astaroth, seized the opportunity and cursed the stones and with it- everyone in Candora. Centuries pass and a half-elf/half-human is born at precisely the right time in the small village of Venunder. At this time, most of the elders of all the races had forgotten the curse of the stones, but the curse remembered. Yet when a tragic incident plummets the young half-elf/half-human into a near death experience, he meets a lifelong friend and mentor who reveals his destiny with the stones by the mesmerizing warmth of Euclid's Fire. There was a 100 or more that left to pursue your grandparents and a young female elf, but only 18 were said to have returned to Alesia. Yet the emerald stone of air, nor your Grandfather’s bow were ever found. It was never talked about in public, but everyone assumed that all 3 were slain in the search party. I am happy to discover that it seems the child was spared.
Before maps, how did we know the answers to questions like, "How big is this world?" Amazingly, at least a couple of folks knew this answer in terms of camel distance long before many even knew that the world was round.
Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth by using the camel distance between Alexandria and Aswan from a special property of Alexandria at a certain time of the year! You can read more about it in chapter 5 of Fifty-Two Factorial (52!). :) And then e heard a melodic sound that he could not place from anywhere he had been before. His pointed ears perked up, and he strained to drown out the external noise so that the harmonic sounds were all that he heard except for silence. Yet this was difficult as there were distractions that where near impossible to ignore. There was shuffling and noises from all over the inn that were interfering with the sound. Conversations that polluted the beautiful melody, and left him to wonder, “Why didn’t they just shut up?” He was considering moving closer in. He wanted to hear the music more clearly, and drown out the distractions that filled his ears. "Why didn't they recognize the beauty?" he thought.
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February 2017
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