An interesting thing I didn't know until today

[Sporting]

Moat Loaf recorded for Motown in 1971 as part of the duo Stoney & Meatloaf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoney_%26_Meatloaf

Love the typo!

[Patrick Thistle]

Screenshot_20230416_202945_Facebook.jpg

[ad hoc]

There is a point in North West Brazil which is closer to every other country in the Americas than it is to the furthest point within Brazil.

(I am struggling to express that but I hope it's clear)

[Gangster Octopus]

Ah, you've been on the map thread...

[ad hoc]

Shit is that where I read it? I thought it was on twitter but hadn't realised I'd read it from here.

This is all rather embarrassing

[Gangster Octopus]

No worries. We're getting to that age...

[S. aureus]

Screenshot_20230416_202945_Facebook.jpg

I see the lofty mountains of Florida are part of the Appalachians.

[Patrick Thistle]

I see the lofty mountains of Florida are part of the Appalachians.

Also Britain is pretty much a land bridge to Greenland

[Sits]

Thanks to Grand Designs NZ, I now know about Swamp Kauri: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_kauri

45-50,000 year old timber which is neither petrified nor fossilised. Excellent.

[Satchmo Distel]

Florida seems to be "semi" excited by the news in the map above. This is the filth we need to ban from our schools.

[Nocturnal Submission]

The BBC recently had a feature about pianists and I discovered Winifred Atwell, the first black woman to have a UK No. 1 and the only female instrumentalist to ever do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Atwell

[Hot Pepsi]

Pierce Brosnan is married to the woman in Huey Lewis & The News’ “Stuck with You” video, which I saw about 10,000 times in the mid 80s.

[San Bernardhinault]

So, I might be the last person to know this, but today I learned why K2 is called K2. For reasons, I was making 3D renders of the Baltoro glacier which had a huge great K2 peak in the back of the image. But there was also a huge prominent peak closer into the foreground.

Intrigued, I looked it up. It is the 22nd tallest mountain on the planet, and is called Masherbrum, but was originally called K1. It was called K1 as the first peak to be surveyed in the Karakorum. The surveyor (on top of a separate, far distant hill) decided to survey a second prominent peak behind Masherbrum, so that was designated K2 on the survey. The policy of The Great Trigonometrical Survey* was to, following the survey, call the peak by its local name. Which is Masherbrum. But K2 is too distant from any known settlement, and the peak would only be seen if you walked up the glacier which nobody would do, so there isn't actually a local name. Hence it was never redesignated.

Anyway, the 2 in K2 was because it was "the second surveyed peak in the Karakorum" rather than, as I had always assumed, the second tallest hill on the planet.

* what a brilliant name. I wish I worked for The Great Trigonometrical Survey

[Hot Pepsi]

I thought it was the second largest mountain.

[San Bernardhinault]

It is. But I wrongly assumed that the “2” was because it was second largest.

[Hot Pepsi]

Oh, I see what you mean.

[Nocturnal Submission]

So, as some of us may be aware, India is shortly (days, weeks, maybe a few months, depending on your source) due to overtake China as the most populous nation on earth.

(I wondered when China was last anything other than No. 1. It looks as though it was nip and tuck with India for most of the last two millennia until about 200 years ago when China's population began to massively outstrip its rival.)

Anyway, the aforementioned prompted me to take a look at historical demography statistics and the results rather surprised me. There are figures for various points over the last 2,000 years but it's the distant ones that most interest me, as it was a time when I thought that our planet was quite sparsely populated with most lives cut short by disease and harsh living conditions.

So, the estimates:

Population of the world at the birth of Christ - 226m-300m. (500 BC - 100m, 1,000 BC - 50m)

In Europe, the top two are Italy with 7m inhabitants and France 5m. The UK is at 1.5m. (I presume we're applying modern state borders.)

The native American population of the USA - 5m. Mexico - 10m.

The two biggest countries are the current two - India 60m & China 50m.

A thousand years later and the global population had actually gone down. It didn't hit 1bn until around 1800.

[jdsx]

I'm only going by Worldometer figures, but they have the population at the birth of Christ* as approximately 170 million and a fairly steady rise to 275 million by 1000 CE

*Actually on the page I'm looking at (https://www.worldometers.info/world-...ation-by-year/) they give estimates for 200 BCE and 200 CE, so I've inferred the figure for 1 CE

[Nocturnal Submission]

I'm only going by Worldometer figures, but they have the population at the birth of Christ* as approximately 170 million and a fairly steady rise to 275 million by 1000 CE

*Actually on the page I'm looking at (https://www.worldometers.info/world-...ation-by-year/) they give estimates for 200 BCE and 200 CE, so I've inferred the figure for 1 CE

Yeah, I took the figures from the relevant Wiki page. I'm sure there are lots of different estimates out there and that they vary widely. But even if 170m is nearer the true mark it's still, to me, a surprisingly large one.

Thought this was a good graphic too, (bit tricky to read, admittedly):

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

It's noteworthy that the Wiki pages don't bother trying to explain the explosion in world population over the 20th century and into this one. It really ought to be much more widely known than it is how much the growth of world population has depended on one very specific bit of chemical industry innovation, namely the Haber-Bosch process. If that hadn't been discovered, the world population could probably never have grown beyond 3 billion, because that is the limit of how many people could be fed with agriculture without chemical fertilisers. And all fertilisers with globally material impact on yields depend on the production of nitrogen-rich chemicals using nitrogen extracted from the air by Haber Bosch. Literally billions of people owe their lives to that invention. (Problematic characters though, Haber also worked on poison gas production for the Kaiser's army in WW1.)

It was the most significant factor in world population since the agricultural revolution itself kicked off around 10,000 years ago.

[Satchmo Distel]

How many students know that nutrition is vastly more important in the history of population than the eradication of diseases? It wouldn't play well with how health research is marketed as a history of life-saving medicine.

[Sits]

So Jesus had siblings, someone told me today. I've managed to live a good many years without knowing that.

None of them were immaculate; perhaps they were actually a bit scruffy.

[Stumpy Pepys]

So Jesus had siblings, someone told me today. I've managed to live a good many years without knowing that.

I found out that too this year. Do you follow Bart Ehrman by any chance?

[Patrick Thistle]

Although in Catholic Bibles, they are referred to as his cousins because of course Mary never, ever had sex because sex is dirty and shameful. Some Catholic commentators have decided they might be step-siblings from Joseph's first marriage because of course Mary never, ever had sex because sex is dirty and shameful.

The book of James in the Bible is traditionally ascribed to St James the Just, leader of the Christian community in Jerusalem and described as 'the brother of the Lord'. In other words, Jesus's brother. That branch of Christianity faded out.

[Sits]

I found out that too this year. Do you follow Bart Ehrman by any chance?

No. A work colleague is in the Hillsong Church (yikes) or similar. She learned this last week in bible class, apparently.