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The All New Groundspeak Uk Pub Quiz!


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by all accounts brilliant at school, but he turned out bad anyway.

 

You lookin' at me? You lookin' at me? Huh?

 

My turn?

 

OK here's my question:

 

Latitude and Longitude are the fundamental basis of global navigation.

 

Lat/Long co-ordinates are meaningless without a sphere or spheroid upon which to describe them. We need a dimension to associate Lat/Long with.

 

Who first measured the size of the Earth?

 

Bonus points for describing how he he did it.

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by all accounts brilliant at school, but he turned out bad anyway.

 

You lookin' at me? You lookin' at me? Huh?

 

My turn?

 

OK here's my question:

 

Latitude and Longitude are the fundamental basis of global navigation.

 

Lat/Long co-ordinates are meaningless without a sphere or spheroid upon which to describe them. We need a dimension to associate Lat/Long with.

 

Who first measured the size of the Earth?

 

Bonus points for describing how he he did it.

 

Erastothanese (SP?) did it by measuring the angle of a shadow cast at mid day at Alexandria, he then measured the distance between Alexandria and somewhere where there was no shadow cast at mid day, he could then work out the size of the earth using geometry. I seem to remember Adam Hart-Davis explaining this on one of his 'pop-science' progs.

 

Dont know if anyone else did it before him.

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South-East actually (I've just fished me atlas out...)

 

Hang on.... I thought we weren't looking up answers?? :D

 

 

I said no Googling.... :D

 

Staying with the mythological theme - who was killed by an arrow made from mistletoe?

Edited by The Golem
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South-East actually (I've just fished me atlas out...)

 

Hang on.... I thought we weren't looking up answers?? :D

 

I said no Googling.... :D

 

Staying with the mythological theme - who was killed by an arrow made from mistletoe?

 

So you did, I'll bear that in mind in future :D

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Had a look on AskJeeves.com, seems it was the "Grand Trunk"

:wub::D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

 

Ha! Typical sneaky Rutson move :D Shurly "Googling" is now a generic term for looking summat up on 'tinternet same as Hoovering is to vacuum cleaning. I think that when Golem said "no Googling" he mean't no use of search engines etc. Come on Ian, get with the program, anyway I thought the Chinois had kiboshed Google, or are you back home in Clackhuddersfax?

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Nope still in China. But I don't see how googling/yahooing/dogpiling/{insert search engine here}ing is any different from looking the answer up in a book. I have the answers to the vast majority of the questions in this thread in books at home.

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As 'googling' or looking in a book is impossible to police, then I think banning it is a triumph of optimism over pragmatism.

 

Yes, but much the same applies to logging caches which you haven't found. If on 10th October you log a popular cache with a date of 5th August and the comment "darn, I just found the printout for this one, must have filed it badly at the end of a long day", very few owners will check, and the cacher who found it on 9th August won't remember who signed the previous page.

 

So I think we have to be on our honour. We all have that intact, I trust...

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OK Iain, here goes...

 

Geocaching is a good way to find new and intersting places, zen navigation is another. What is zen navigation, and which literary character was an exponant of it?

 

Zen navigation - to pick a car that looks like it knows where its going and follow that one.

The character is Dirk Gently

 

The long dark teatime of the soul, Douglas Adams

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I knew who, but not when. So I googled and found this:

 

>>Since then, the nickname "Redcoats" has been recognised worldwide as

>>referring to the British army.

 

I must tell my American military friends to say "Hi, Redcoat" to their squaddie counterparts. I'm sure they won't take it mean they work in Butlin's. Probably.

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