User:Jadeddissonance

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[edit] About Me

Hopefully I won't make too many glaring mistakes on here.

December 27, 2007

As one with some slight scholarly knowledge on Eratosthenes, I wasted some time today attempting to upgrade the Wikipedia article on him:

1. Linked nautical miles, zenith distance, and gnomon.

2. Referenced prominent Johns Hopkins physicist Robert Newton's illustration of effect of sun semidiameter on E's experiment.

3. Updated one of the bibliography's articles.

4. Linked to least-squares demonstration (via Ptolemy's longitudes) of constancy of stadium, evidence first presented at Royal Inst of Navigation's 1984 Greenwich meridian centenary.

5. Requested source for "Egyptian stadium" adduced to justify getting E's circumference to be exactly correct, a practice scorned by a virtual unanimity of serious scholars.

6. Did not eliminate "mystery" of 1% match of the A.U. to a twisted translation of Eusebius but moved it to a footnote and indicated problems with a theory which less tolerant scholars would instantly toss out as crackpot.

7. Corrected a misspelling of geodesy.

8. Created an authorlink to an experienced mathematical analyst of E's geodesy who has published for decades on the subject in scholarly journals and now publishes one such journal.

However, I see by the Eratosthenes article's History that in just two minutes (18:57-59), you have understood all of this scholarship and deleted the foregoing as valueless.

Impressive.