The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn for August 12, 2011

Dim like a fox…

They were all misunderstood from the start…

People in Columbus’ time knew the earth was round.

Well, I guess he will never get a day named after him either.

Snuck out of Italy before they burned himSeduced Queen IsabellaFerdinand got him to go on a snipe huntNever did what he said he’d do (spent their money though)Never realized his “discovery”Sent back to Spain in chainsHe did however introduce syphilis to EuropeAnd He’s now running for Senate in your state.

The Bible indicates that the earth is round. One verse we can look at is Isaiah 40:22, where it mentions the “circle of the earth.” From space, the earth always appears as a circle since it is round. This matches perfectly with the Bible. from: http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab2/bible-say-anything-astronomy Some people say the idea of a flat earth came from the Bible. That is not true.

Exactly what I was thinking… all of those planets and the sun should be revolving around the earth when they thought it was flat. ;-)

@zipdryve My great grandfather was a very devout minister who went to his grave in the late 1980’s firmly convinced the earth was flat because of the Bible — specifically the multiple references to the “four corners of the earth.” He flew from the east coast to California twice to visit our family, and couldn’t understand why the sun came up so late in the morning. He would get offended if you tried to explain time zones, and just accused people of messing with his watch. The point is, the Bible can basically be interpreted to mean anything you want it to mean. Just look at all the diverse religions that use the same book.

Of course, most educated people in Columbus’ time knew the earth was round. This had been known since ancient times, when Eratosthenes actually calculated the circumference.By the 15th century, the only ones who insisted in a flat earth at the center of the solar system were the illiterate, and of course, conservatives determined to maintain ideology over fact.

But is this “four cornered” earth a flat quadrilateral or a tetrahedron? Those are the only ones with four corners.

it’s really time to remember no one though the earth flat in the 15 century. the earth had been proven round and the curcumference measured by the Greeks, a thousand years earlier

150 years before Galileo’s telescope — too many planets.

Thank goodness for “Comics Physics”, I don’t care if it’s accurate, it just has to be funny! And thank you, it is!

The problem Columbus had trying to convince others of his views was not that he believed the Earth was a sphere and not flat, but its size. He was wrong about three things: he assumed that the European continent was nearly twice as wide as it actually is and that Japan was much farther east from China than it is (making it closer to Europe) and that he based his estimates on the Arabic mile, which was shorter than the Roman mile that Europeans of his day used. He estimated that the distance from the Canary islands to Japan was only 2,800 miles, when it is, in fact, 12,000. Had he not bumped into the Americas, his expedition would have run out of supplies, starved and never returned.The story that Columbus believed in a flat earth originated with Washington Irving in his 1828 book, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Now we need one about Pisa and Galileo, showing the earth at the center for most students.

Yes, it is funny so that’s what matters! Even tho’ many of us know more about history.