“THE SERVICE”: If you let a single ray of light through the shutter, it will go on diffusing itself without limit till it enlighten the world; but the shadow that was never so wide at first, as rapidly contracts till it comes to naught. The shadow of the moon, when it passes nearest the sun, is lost in space ere it can reach our earth to eclipse it. Always the System shines with uninterrupted light; for as the sun is so much larger than any planet, no shadow can travel far into space. We may bask always in the light of the System, always may step back out of the shade. No man’s shadow is as large as his body, if the rays make a right angle with the reflecting surface. Let our lives be passed under the equator, with the sun in the meridian. There is no ill which may not be dissipated like the dark, if you let in a stronger light upon it. Overcome evil with good. Practice no such narrow economy as they, whose bravery amounts to no more light than a farthing candle, before which most objects cast a shadow wider than themselves. HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
276 BCE
circa 276 BCE: Eratosthenes was born at a Greek colony in Cyrene, Libya. He would be educated at the academies of Athens and in 240 BCE would be placed in charge of the Great Library at Alexandria. While there he would be authoring a comprehensive treatise about the world, which he would term GEOGRAPHY, “a writing about the earth.”
2 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
240 BCE
240 BCE: Eratosthenes became the head librarian of the Great Library at Alexandria. While there he would be authoring a comprehensive treatise about the world, which he would term GEOGRAPHY, “a writing about the earth.” Having heard that at the bottom of a deep well at Syene (near the Tropic of Cancer and the modern Aswan Dam creating Lake Nasser) sunlight could penetrate only on the summer solstice (June 21st, nowadays), knowing as he did the approximate distance between Syene and Alexandria as measured by the regular camel caravans (approximately 5,000 of the standard sports stadia in use by the Greeks, which is to say, about 800 kilometers), the scholar noticed that he ought to be able to calculate the circumference of the earth. He would measure the angle of the shadow in Alexandria on the solstice (7 ° 12’) and divide this into the 360 degrees of a circle and then multiply the result of 50 by the known surface distance between Alexandria and Syene.
He would make mathematical errors in his calculation, but fortuitously these would cancel each other out! His calculation would produce a circumference of 25,000 miles, only slightly greater than what we know to be the actual circumference of the earth at the equator, which is 24,901 miles. A few centuries later, Posidonius of Apamea would suppose Eratosthenes’s circumference to be much too large. He would calculate the circumference on his own (using the greatest height of the bright star Canopus above the horizon, as seen from Egypt and from the island of Rhodes near the southwestern tip of Turkey) and would obtain a figure of 18,000 miles, which we now know to be 7,000 miles too short. Not long after Eratosthenes and Posidonius, Strabo – for reasons that now are unclear– would reduce the 250,000 stadia of Eratosthenes to 180,000 and would then carelessly write down that half this distance would amount to 70,000 stadia:
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
if of the more recent measurements of the Earth, the one which makes the Earth smallest in circumference be introduced — I mean that of Posidonius who estimates its circumference at about 180,000 stadia, then... Posidonius suspects that the length of the inhabited world, about 70,000 stadia, is half the entire circle on which it had been taken, so that if you sail from the west in a straight course, you will reach India within 70,000 stadia.
4 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
In the early 9th Century, Khalif El Ma’mun of Baghdad sent out two teams of surveyors to measure a north- south baseline and from this was able to calculate the approximate radius of the Earth in Arab miles. Ptolemy based a speculation on a later definition of the length of the Greek stadium, and confused the Arab mile used by Khalif El Ma’mun with the Roman mile, getting the measurement far too short.
Here is Ptolemy’s image of the world, in a couple of medieval illustrations:
During the middle ages, most scholars would accept Eratosthenes’s circumference in preference to Posidonius’s or Ptolemy’s. Christopher Columbus would prefer the shortest reported circumferences because this enabled him to raise venture capital by talking a good story. He promised the investors that, through sailing west from Europe, he would shortcut the distance to the spice ports of Asia and make them a fortune. Nobody knows whether Columbus really credited Posidonius’s calculation over Eratosthenes’s calculation. He was chock full of weird ideas, such as the location of the Garden of Eden, but in this case he may merely have been being Mr. Devious. After all, government cost-plus contractors typically underestimate on the first bid they submit to the government in order to get the contract and then later, as reality hits, try to renegotiate.
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ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
Columbus’s behavior matches with that conventional behavior, observable even today, precisely.
196 BCE
196 or 192 BCE: In his 80s, having become blind, Eratosthenes starved himself to death.
6 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
135 BCE
135 BCE: It was in about this year that Posidonius was born in Apamea, a city in northern Syria (at the very center of his map below):
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
86 BCE
86 BCE: Posidonius of Apamea, while living on the island of Rhodes, had been accepted as a citizen and had once been trusted with the high office of prytanis, and in this year he was part of an embassy sent to Rome.
50 BCE
50 BCE: Supposing Eratosthenes’s estimate of the circumference of the earth to be much too large, Posidonius of Apamea had relied upon the greatest height of the bright star Canopus above the horizon, as seen from Egypt and from the island of Rhodes, and had produced his own estimate of 18,000 miles — which we now know to have been 7,000 miles too short. ASTRONOMY
50 BCE: By this point the rise of Alexandria and the growth of Roman power had overshadowed the political and economic importance of the Greek city states. Athens was no longer the philosophical center of the Mediterranean world. The Stoics were still being attracted to their Stoa there, but were coming there from elsewhere. Zeno had come to the Stoa in Athens from Citium on Cyprus, and had been succeeded by Cleanthes from Assos in Asia Minor and Chrysippus from Soli in Asia Minor. The Late Stoa would be entirely Roman, featuring such names as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. The rich scholar Panaetius of Rhodes, who had studied under Crates the Stoic at the library of Pergamum, became a student of Diogenes of Sinope in Athens but then passed on to the capital city of the Mediterranean world, Rome, where he and Scipio the Younger were at the center of a circle of philosophical admirers. After the death of Scipio, he had assumed leadership of the Stoic school and had returned to the Stoa in Athens for the final two decades of his life. His most illustrious student had been Posidonius of Apamea, a city in northern Syria, who died during this year on the island of Rhodes near the southwestern tip of Turkey.
8 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 20 Miles Avenue, Providence RI 02906. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: August 12, 2013
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 9 HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
10 Copyright Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
ERATOSTHENES ERATOSTHENES
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 11