The fact that they were using a sextant - something invented in the early 18th century - is similarly mind boggling.
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Iāve flown with some old timer USAF Kernels (thatās what we call them at SWA because theyāre fucking rigid mofos), and they were flying heavies (C-141s, KC-135s) even back in the late ā90s-early ā00s with sextant windows and navigators taking plots. Consider also how ancient people traversed oceans with only the stars and knowledge of wind patterns, tidal flows, etc.
Blows my mind.
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While the Phoenicians are believed to have had the first organized form of insurance, Lloydās of London was the modern reinvention of it. It came about because ship owners would finance a naval adventure and send a ship on its way not expecting to see it again for years but, worryingly, maybe not ever. Ship owners started pooling this risk and, once a ship was declared lost - because who the fuck knew what happened to it - the many ship owners would chip in to make whole the loss of the one.
Now you have to deal with home, auto, life and health insurance. Youāre welcome!
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Fascinating.
Thatās pretty cool to learn.
Iām glad we keep you around!
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Hereās an another fun fact about insurance: life insurance requires the policyholder to have an āinsurable interestā in the life being insured but, when life insurance first hit the scene, this was not the case.
Can anyone see the potential problem with that? Class? Anyone?
Yep. At its most innocent, taking out a life policy on someone you donāt know is a form of gambling. At its most sinister, the cause of death being murder is not an exclusion.
āInsurable interestā is now a thing for any policy. I canāt take out a fire policy on your property nor you on mine, for reasons which should be as obvious as a building engulfed in flames.
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Itās just dawned on me that we are having this discussion on Columbus Day, celebrating a seafaring adventurer leaving Europe on a Hail Mary mission to find the western route to Asia and crashing into America on the way because no one knew it was there.
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Irony is ironically ironical at timesā¦
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Itās like raaaaiii-eeeeeee-aaaaiiiin ā¦
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Maybe no one in Europe knew it was there.
Seagoing navigators had a pretty easy time calculating latitude, but longitude was a different story. They basically had no idea where they were. I would tend to find that discomforting.
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Iāve got a book about the Englishman who solved the longitude problem.
Itās fascinating.
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Itās a great story, both about the genius/dogged determination of the man (and his son) and the reactionary shitheads who tried to deprive him of his prize.
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Didnāt the longitude problem spur a lot of work in accurate timepieces?
Well, some people knew it was there, specifically the people who lived there. And the scientific minded at the time. Of course, science in the 15th Century was held in the same regard as it is in the MAGAverse today.
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Good point.
I wonder if MAGA has considered the fact that they are celebrating a man who brought boat-loads of Hispanics to America.
Europeans had traveled to North America as early as the 10th century. They had no clue how huge that fucker was, however.
Depending on who you ask, Spanish are not āHispanicā, so Columbus sort of created Hispanics. In America.
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I do, too.
Yessir. At first they had some poor bastard sitting there with an hourglass. That turned out not to be as accurate as they had hoped. Or needed.
āLongitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Timeā by Dava Sobel?
They made a TV miniseries about that a few years ago. It was pretty good, for that sort of thing.
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They did TV movie based on the Longitude book. Michael Gambon & Jeremy Irons. Itās been forever but I remember it being good.
ETA: son of a gun, just beat me.