Castle Aching

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

1 minute ago, Donw said:

 

I was not unsympathetic to you being confined to barracks but the idea of loo rolls being seruptitiously handed over was really amusing. One thinks of Private Walker.

 

Don

 

I keep getting this idea of newsagents keeping certain literature in plain brown paper bags under the counter. 

[RodneyS]

7 hours ago, Edwardian said:

Yesterday evening I braved Morrisons and was rewarded with loo roll, but forgot to see if RM was in (!). 

 

A friend told me that, according to the news this morning, Yorkshire Police are patrolling supermarkets stopping shoppers going down 'non essential' aisles.

Does this mean that buying RM is now illegal?

Rodney

[Edwardian]

Right.  Time again for The Bedford Level Experiments

 

A controversy that had reached its height around the time of Castle Aching.

 

 

Extract as follows:

 

The first experiment at this site was conducted by Rowbotham in the summer of 1838. He waded into the river and used a telescope held eight inches above the water to watch a boat, with a flag on its mast three feet (0.91 m) above the water, row slowly away from him. He reported that the vessel remained constantly in his view for the full six miles to Welney bridge, whereas, had the water surface been curved with the accepted circumference of a spherical earth, the top of the mast should have been some 11 feet below his line of sight.

 

... his claims received little attention until, in 1870, a supporter by the name of John Hampden offered a wager that he could show, by repeating Rowbotham's experiment, that the earth was flat. The noted naturalist and qualified surveyor Alfred Russel Wallace accepted the wager. Wallace, by virtue of his surveyor's training and knowledge of physics, avoided the errors of the preceding experiments and won the bet. The crucial steps were to Set a sight line 13 feet above the water, and thereby reduce the effects of atmospheric refraction, and Add a pole in the middle that could be used to see the "bump" caused by the curvature of the earth between the two end points.

 

 Russell in 1895

 

...

 

In 1901, Henry Yule Oldham, a reader in geography at King's College, Cambridge, reproduced Wallace's results using three poles fixed at equal height above water level. When viewed through a theodolite, the middle pole was found to be almost three feet higher than the poles at each end. This version of the experiment was taught in schools until photographs of the Earth from space became available.

 

Advocates of a flat Earth, however, were not deterred: on 11 May 1904 Lady Elizabeth Anne Blount, who would go on to be influential in the formation of the Flat Earth Society, hired a commercial photographer to use a telephoto lens camera to take a picture from Welney of a large white sheet she had placed, the bottom edge near the surface of the river, at Rowbotham's original position six miles away. The photographer, Edgar Clifton from Dallmeyer's studio, mounted his camera two feet above the water at Welney and was surprised to be able to obtain a picture of the target, which he believed should have been invisible to him given the low mounting point of the camera. Lady Blount published the pictures far and wide.

 

  Lady Blount

 

These controversies became a regular feature in the English Mechanic magazine in 1904–05, which published Blount's photo and reported two experiments in 1905 that showed the opposite results.

 

...

 

Atmospheric refraction can produce the results noted by Rowbotham and Blount. Because the density of air in the Earth's atmosphere decreases with height above the Earth's surface, all light rays travelling nearly horizontally bend downward, so that the line of sight is a curve. This phenomenon is routinely accounted for in levelling and celestial navigation.

 

Emphasis added.

 

For the opinionated, with more money and influence than scientific grasp, we used to have to rely upon members of the aristocracy.  i suppose today the place is filled by the likes of the President of the US, and, specifically in the case of Flat Earthery, by a rapper. 

 

As a foot note, I have not checked, but I wonder if the late "Mad" Mike Hughes received a Darwin Award* for his work on proving flat earth theory in 2018.

 

* necessarily a posthumous award.

[Malcolm 0-6-0]

12 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Right.  Time again for The Bedford Level Experiments

 

 

Which then brings us to the Fata Morgana 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fata_Morgana_(mirage)

 

And then a reference to Arthurian legend (Morgan le Fay) which allows not only a pre-Raphaelite pic but one that contains a beard.

 

 

[Northroader]

I’ve read somewhere that when the Suez Canal was built, some folks saw that with a curved earth, the water would drain out of the middle, but this didn’t happen, and subsequent engineering contracts had a clause to assume the earth is flat. The whole tale seems to be on shaky foundations, though.

[Compound2632]

28 minutes ago, Edwardian said:

Right.  Time again for The Bedford Level Experiments

 

A controversy that had reached its height around the time of Castle Aching.

 

 

One has to ask, why? It's curious that this should have been contemporary with the Shakespeare authorship controversy, which seems to have been rooted in sheer snobbery - incredulity that the author of the world's greatest drama could have been someone who, as Paul Merton had it, spoke with a Brummagen accent. Also Madame Blavatsky's theosophy, which attracted a number of people who should have known better. 

[Adam88]

50 minutes ago, Malcolm 0-6-0 said:

 

I keep getting this idea of newsagents keeping certain literature in plain brown paper bags under the counter. 

My local model railway shop always hands over my copy of MRJ in a plain paper bag.

[Compound2632]

11 minutes ago, Northroader said:

I’ve read somewhere that when the Suez Canal was built, some folks saw that with a curved earth, the water would drain out of the middle, but this didn’t happen, and subsequent engineering contracts had a clause to assume the earth is flat. The whole tale seems to be on shaky foundations, though.

 

Further failure to understand well-established Newtonian gravity.

 

I understood that there was more of a genuine concern about the difference in sea level between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In fact, the flow is seasonal in the northern part of the canal and tidal in the southern.

[jcredfer]

31 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

Further failure to understand well-established Newtonian gravity.

 

I understood that there was more of a genuine concern about the difference in sea level between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. In fact, the flow is seasonal in the northern part of the canal and tidal in the southern.

 

I believe that there is also the influence of very small tides in the Mediterranean, being an almost enclosed small sea and the larger tidal range in the Indian Ocean / Red Sea, plus the funnel effect {Like the Bristol Channel}.  The southern surges in / out would outsize the much smaller ones from the Med, combined with it's seasonal rise /fall.

 

Julian

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by jcredfer

[wagonman]

5 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Yes, I don’t want to mention it in front of Edwardian, but we buy ‘green’ loo paper that my good lady sources from a small firm that I suspect is run by hipsters, and it arrives in a big box of 48 rolls, just before the last lot runs out (the hipsters must have a loo roll consumption algorithm, based on the number of people in the household).

 

 

 

We had a large order with those nice people – the ones who really do give a cr@p – before the panic had started, so we are sitting pretty. We did share it out among our colleagues, of course, in true hippy style...

[wagonman]

All this arguing about the shape of the world seems rather irrelevant when the cognoscenti all know it is in fact a disc supported by four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle.

[Nearholmer]

8 minutes ago, wagonman said:

 

We had a large order with those nice people

That’s the ones. I’m not too keen on their strap-line, but that isn’t the point really.

[webbcompound]

Just popped out for a walk and missed the whole flat earth debate.   The Bedford Levels experiment is a bizarre event. Any sailor could tell you how tall things disappear over the horizon. Regarding popular knowledge the orb, (globe surmounted by a cross) has been the depiction of Christ's dominion over the world since the Roman Empire. Before that some coins (for example of Hadrian) showed Victory standing on a globe. It is depicted on coins, and held by kings from then on. If it was generally considered that the earth was flat it would be a disk not an orb. So anyone who saw coins, or knew anyone who had, or had been to church would know this. For the 19th Century invention of the myth that people in the middle ages believed the earth to be flat read  Jeffrey Burton Russel's book published in 1991: Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians.

[Regularity]

6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

I’m not totally confident that if I kept pedalling I wouldn’t, at some point, come to The Edge, though.

Say hello to Paul, Larry and Adam as well as Dave if you, please...

[Edwardian]

Worth reading up on Lady Blount and her circle - Creationalists, ultradispensationalists, Anglo-Isrealites, anti-vaccinators - and her anti-Newtonian poems and  flat-earth operetta!  It's all there, like a bonkers trip through Donald Trump's mind, set to "a sprightly travesty of Gilbert and Sullivan".  

 

Here is Bob Schadewald, The Plane Truth with Chapter 7 on Lady B, giving a little more detail on her 1904 experiment.

[Hroth]

3 hours ago, Compound2632 said:

incredulity that the author of the world's greatest drama could have been someone who, as Paul Merton had it, spoke with a Brummagen accent

 

If you read Shakespeare with that in mind, it suddenly makes a lot more sense.... 

 

 

[Donw]

Of course the world is flat. From the viewpoint of a man even if he had access to a horse is will always seem flat and the accuracy of a spirit level  making repeated measurements  to get a long length would never be able to show the world was curved. However get in a boat  and you can see as you approach a distant ship the sea is curved. Get in a high flying aircraft and you can see the curve go up in a spacecraft and you can see the whole thing is round.  

The other thing is to  watch a solar eclipse  the each's shadow across the sun will show a definite curved edge.

 

It is just a matter of context the earth is certainly a globe but is big enough that when erecting a building  or laying out a garden you just treat it as flat the amount of curvature is negligeable of those sort of distances. Building a railway you just treat each section of track as flat (except when gradients start or finish) and you will have no problems.  The line acroos say the Australian plain will be slightly curved but you will not notice.

 

Don

[Donw]

6 minutes ago, Hroth said:

 

If you read Shakespeare with that in mind, it suddenly makes a lot more sense.... 

 

 

 

Having lived and worked in Birmingham and the Black country I have experienced the surreal of Shakespeare being quoted  in the local accents.

 

Don

Edited April 10, 2020 by Donw
finger trouble

[teaky]

Once mower unto the breach, dear friends, once mower; or close the wall up with ar English jed.  In peace there's nothen so becums a geezer as modest stillness an' humility: but when the blus of war blows in ar eass, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage; then lend the eye a terrible aspect; let pry through the portage of the yed like the brass cannon; let the broo o'erwhelm it as fearfully as doth a galled rock o'erhang an' jutty his confounded base.  Swill'd with the wild an' wasteful ocane.  Noo set the teeth an' stretch the nostril wide, hold sound the breath an' bend up every spirit to his full heoight.  On, on, yaouw noblest English.  Whose blood is fet frum fathers of war-proof!  Fathers that, loike so many Alexanders, have in these parts frum morn till even fought an' sheathed their swords fer lack of argument: dishonour not yaw mothers; noo attest that those whom yaouw call'd fathers did beget yaouw.  Be copy noo ter men of grosser blood, an' teach them 'oo ter war.  An' yaouw, bostin yeoman, whose limbs were med in Englan', shoo us eya the mettle of yaw pasture; let us swear that yoo miskin worth yaw breeding; weege I doubt not; for the'er is nariun of yaouw so mane an' base, that hath not noble lustre in yaw eyes.  I see yaouw stond loike greyhounds in the slips, strainen upon the start.  The game's afoot: folloo yaw spirit, an' upon this charge cry 'god fer Harry, Englan', an' Saint George.

 

[Hroth]

Most stirring!!! 

 

 

[Nearholmer]

24 minutes ago, teaky said:

Once mower unto the breach

 

I'm imagining The London Trayned Bands, or whatever else cockney soldiers were called in those days, coming away from that speech wondering what in the Lord's name he'd been on about, and what was expected of them.

[Compound2632]

But he was Welsh! As a side remark, Shakespeare had a Welsh boy actor who could sing...

 

Just try Hamlet's soliloquy in a Brum accent...

[Schooner]

16 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

Just try Hamlet's soliloquy in a Brum accent...

 

One step at a time...

 

 

[Regularity]

5 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

If you read Shakespeare with that in mind, it suddenly makes a lot more sense.... 

 

 

It’s also a lot more down to earth - it might appeal more to school kids if they were shown how Shakespeare had the “common touch” and knew how to slip in a bit of rudery here and there.

5 hours ago, Donw said:

 

Having lived and worked in Birmingham and the Black country I have experienced the surreal of Shakespeare being quoted  in the local accents.

Although it should be remembered that WS was from Warwickshire, and not Bromwicham (small village then) and certainly not the Black Country (very pleasant countryside then) so his accent would have been quite different, at least to the locals.

Having worked in Solihull (which despite its reputation for being posh has quite a harsh accent) a few years ago, I was made aware on a number of occasions about local differences, and that there was no such thing as a generic Brummy accent.

 

[Regularity]

1 hour ago, Compound2632 said:

But he was Welsh! As a side remark, Shakespeare had a Welsh boy actor who could sing...

 

Just try Hamlet's soliloquy in a Brum accent...

My party trick is reciting Hal’s soliloquy from 1 Henry IV, 1(ii) in a faux Brum accent.

”Ey know yo’wl...”