Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for November 13, 2015

And HOW did Eratosthenes calculate the Earth’s circumference without setting foot out of Egypt? As for the 820 indigenous P.N.G. languages, which thereof is the most widely spoken with how many speakers?

Please tell me you’re joking…

That was pretty remarkable of Eratosthenes – he had to be very forward thinking to assume that the Earth was spherical in shape instead of being flat. Once he made this assumption, the rest followed through.

He did it by looking very carefully – all he had to do was to pyramid the dunes…

When arguing for a young earth, the person most referred to by religious fundamentalists is Bishop Ussher. Bishop Ussher was a learned scholar in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He could read Hebrew and Greek in an age when biblical scholars could read neither.He calculated the age of the earth, by using. (Wikipedia says it best), “the most up to date contemprary scientific, chronological, historical and biblical scholarship to date the age of the world.”He had to a choose between two Torahs, which didn’t agree on their chronology. (If Jewish, Xian, and Islamic religious books are the literal word of god, why are there so many versions that don’t agree?)Isaac Newton calculated that the sun was 6,000 years old. Other natural philosophers were pretty much in agreement. One interesting note is that Bishop Ussher did not calculate the age of the earth by using the geneology tables in the KJV bible. I have a brother who is a Xian fundamentalist. It boggles the mind at the convoluted arguments he can come up with to justify his “faithtard”. (I just invented a word, feel free to use it.The sainted King James, of bible fame was the homosexual sex slave of the Duke of Buckingham, who gave KJ Buckingham palace for being such a good……..I will leave it at that, after all this is a family comic.

Old Texan 75, Thanks I never knew they measured distance in miles back then!

And Eratosthenes did it without using the calculative placeholders of the Arabic numeral system invented much later by the Muslims before they were taken over by the extremist conservative Wahhabi sects of Sunni Islam.