Even packed in that close together, if you were standing on a planet orbiting one of those stars, your nearest stellar neighbours would still appear as points of light, not discs.

Stars are huge, but light years are absurdly enormous.

Given the hyperdimensional fabric of the Universe, ALL things are at the centre of the Universe, and so, Hermes Conrad, you are technically correct, the best kind of correct!

Yes, but we should be careful here.

Aristarchus had an incredible idea that was well ahead of its time, but he didn't reach the conclusion of heliocentrism based on careful calculations or observations. Quite the opposite; He fully supported the Ancient Greek model of epicycle orbits of the known planets, and like Copernicus many hundreds of years later, was attempting to map the epicycular orbits of the planets onto the perfect Platonic solids.

His reasoning that the Sun was at the centre of the Universe was the result of the same thought process that all Ancient Greek natural philosophers engaged in; What was the cosmic hierarchical order of the five basic elements (Earth, water, air, fire, and quintessence)?

All of them had concluded that quintessence was at the top of the hierarchy, and so it surrounded and permeated all things. It was the crystalline medium of the Cosmos in which the fixed stars were embedded.

The disagreements came from deciding the order from there. The Aristotelean School put Earth next, so the Earth was given the dominant position in the Cosmos. Thales of Miletus also placed the Earth at the centre, but that was because he believed the Earth was composed almost entirely of water, and water was the second in the hierarchy after quintessence. Aristarchus placed fire as the next below quintessence, and so he concluded the Sun was at the centre of the Cosmos.

We must understand that Ancient Greek natural philosophers largely did not conclude results through careful measurement or practical demonstration, but instead took existing models and modified them to fit their own personal biases and conclusions. The epicycle model of the Solar System was particularly useful in these regards because if the movement of the planets didn't match one's predetermined conclusions, one could merely posit that there were greater or fewer epicycular movements of the planets when they dipped below the horizon, the Ancient Greeks being unable to view their orbital paths from the Southern Hemisphere.

The reason you've learned about and remembered the times when the Ancient Greek natural philosophers did use careful measurements and practical demonstrations, like Archimedes weighing King Hieron's crown, or Eratosthenes measuring the circumference of the Earth, is because those discoveries were the exception to the rule.

This article is the most clickbait nonsense I've ever seen.

TL;DR - Colorado is indeed a four sided state when represented on a globe, but when it's borders are applied to a flat map, the corrections to the projection distort the otherwise straight borders.

Well thanks Gerardus Mercator, but I heard you died in the C16th?

Racehorses and the monarch of Britain have two birthdays per year.

I'll let you fill in the gaps.

Did every Christian just skip the verse in Leviticus that specifically says NO TATTOOS, or..?

Seems like the STEM degrees were the Mickey Mouses all along, huh?

They were also marketed as an anti-masturbatory medicine, the thoroughly insane and perverted Dr. Kellogg believing that eating protein and sugars led to 'chronic self-pollution', and that the only way to avoid the horrors of whacking it was to subsist on the most bland grain based diet possible. He was renowned for his catchphrase 'Fish and fowl are enemies of the bowel!' which he'd shout at his patients whilst administering them yoghurt enemas, or electric baths, or pummelling them with heavy leather switches.

Guy was utterly cuckoo.

Well it's more impressive when you realise this building was a working telephone exchange, and this was before automatic relays, so every single telephone wire running in and out of the building had to be turned 90° and lengthened a few hundred feet without loss of service.

The photographs of the works are crazy. Because they had to rotate the building they had to dig out a circular trench around the whole ground floor so none of the corners caught as it turned. As a consequence, the building's workers had to enter through a covered bridge that spanned between the pavement and whatever direction the building was facing at the time. For a while those workers had their own moat and drawbridge 😮

Yeah, but it does travel across the top of a goddam mountain range several times, so there's that.

Honestly, I don't think people appreciate just how much more interconnected the world was before the mid-20th Century population explosion.

Whenever I hear interesting tales from history, the same people, places, and events pop up together again, and again.

Just like how John Wilkes-Booth's brother saved Lincoln's son from being run over by a train days before JWB shot Lincoln.

Sometimes it seems as though the world only held a few dozen people 😅