No one disagreed that our beautiful planet was round.  The fact was well established by the Greeks – Pythagoras and Plato had had a glimmer of this fact but their inquisitive successors found more and more evidence.  By the time of Alexander, no educated Greek or Roman would deny a spherical Earth.
In holy Alexandria, scholars in tunics desperately went through the heaps of scrolls and they paced as they desperately pondered along the beaches of Egypt as the lapping Mediterranean taunted them.  Furrowing their brows, they were trying to figure out just how big this gosh darn sphere actually is.  Many of them put up excellent attempts.  Eratosthanes created an experiment using two men on different latitudes – one in Alexandria and the other in a town to the south on the Tropic of Cancer.  They would measure the angle of the sun on the summer solstice and compare the results.  Doing this, Eratosthenes concluded the world was 252,000 stadia which, depending on whether he was using Greek Stadia or Egyptian Stadia, made the world either about 46,620km or 39,690km.
When Islam conquered all of those Hellenistic lands, the muslems, most of whom had previously believed in a flat Earth, ravenously absorbed the Greek learning.   They produced some remarkable mathematicians and pushed our knowledge of the earth and the stars. Of these muslem scholars, the one who did the most remarkable work on the size of our Earth is the Persian, Abu Rayhan Biruni. He built on the Greek work about the size of the Earth and added the use of trigonometry to triangulate the distance between objects of known height and distance in relation to the sun to come to a stunningly close measure of the Earth – just a couple hundred kilometers short of the actual figure of 40,068km.

Enter to this world a brave bonehead named Cristoffa Corombo. This sailor had read all of the books by the Greeks and the Arabs and the keen intellect, through a scientific process of chicken-picking parts of theories that worked out best for his hypothesis and through confusing Italian statute miles with Arab ones, advanced the theory that the Earth’s circumference was around 25,000km.
Oy Vey!

He went all over Europe being laughed at by right-thinking people who thought he’d be committing suicide by undertaking a voyage of over 20,000km.  The determined Columbus and his brother went to every king in Europe and tried to play on their jealousy of each other.  He finally found a sympathetic ear from the Spanish monarchs who were desperate to find new revenue and edge out Portugal for trade routes to the East.  They took a risk and funded his trip.
The lucky schmuck happened to find an undiscovered continent where he thought Asia was.  And for this we in the United States have a holiday that I don’t get a day off for.
THEREFORE, I support those who want to abandon the Columbus Day holiday.  Although he can’t be blamed for what the people who followed him achieved in brutality and slavery, he himself adored brutality and slavery, often to the shock of his crew.  Columbus also sort of seems like a sad figure to me.  He spent most of his life begging for the chance to go on this voyage, only to be laughed at.  When he finally got the chance to do it, he discovered these amazing new lands only to be stripped of all his power and arrested on his return to Spain.  He died wealthy but bitter, still thinking he had discovered a route to Asia.  I don’t know why, but I imagine him really frustrated and sad.
I propose a holiday to honor Abu Rayhan Biruni and Eratosthenes and mathematicians everywhere and through all time.  Ahh, it will be the best holiday ever.  Brilliant parties can be held with guests wearing festive pocket protectors will toast their favorites “TO THE BANU MUSA!!!!” “TO SIR ISAAC NEWTON!!!” “TO EUCLID!!!!”  ”TO PIERRE de FERMAT!!!” each and everyone one responded to with a resounding “HURRAH!!!!!” “HURRAH” and a third time “HURRAH!!” from the jubilant party goers – of course Chocoleibniz, Fig Newtons and Apple Pi would be served.
But until then we fête Mr. Columbus  - we celebrate the creation of New Spains, New Englands, New Portugals, New Netherlands and New Frances in the Americas, we celebrate the destruction of civilizations, we celebrate the unfortunate spread of disease, and worst of all – we celebrate BAD MATHEMATICS.  Oh what a world, what a big round world it is after all…

Icarus had these awesome wings held together by wax that let him fly. But he was so into it that he flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and he fell to his death.

John Connor was raised from birth to the be the head of a human army to fight an army of super-androids with human skin whose sole desire is to destroy all humans.

For all of history there have been stories warning about technology – either the joy of the freedom that technology brings will bring death or the robots will turn on us and destroy us. I sometimes wonder from where this fear comes. Is it a conservative fear – technology will destroy the old and the traditional? Is it an ancient fear – did something happen frightening deep in human history, too far ago to ever discover that is only remembered in these dark fears?

There was an article in the New Yorker recently about Google and in it many people are described as worried that that Google is out to rule the world. Their technology is changing business models in several industries that had never before been directly challenged by the tech companies. This fear that this tech company is out to take over the world also, in some way, embodies this same fear of technology. They want to digitize every book? It scares people on some level. There’s something of the Tower of Babel in it.

Where is this all heading? I think most of this is just pure fear and totally irrational – like the fear of flying or having your photo taken. But could there be something to it? Is the singularity near and is it to be feared? Is transcending biology a good? I cannot say but in the mean time I am going to learn as much about computers as possible and at the same time learn survival techniques – hedging my bets.

Christmas is a really cool holiday – in the United States, it’s the only Federal holiday that has any religious significance, although other holidays have quasi-religious sentiments such as Thanksgiving.

The great thing about Christmas is that it’s also the closest thing we have here to a pagan holiday. All of the traditions of Christmas go back to pre-Christian roots, the giving of gifts, the trees, the holly, the ivy, even many traditional carols are older than their 19th century lyrics and have non-Christian roots (sometimes pagan, sometimes just non-religious).

It makes sense that in the bleakest, darkest days – when the Sun seems to be fading from the sky – to have a holiday where light and heavy food have such an important role, to celebrate the Sun’s re-emergence. The Romans celebrated a holiday called Natalis Solis Invicti which was celebrated with singing and dancing and gift giving, celebrating the birth of the undefeatable Sun. So too does Christmas, in practice, often seem like a celebration not of Christ, but of something older and subconsciously within us.

So all those people who complain about the “War on Christmas” or urge us to remember Christ as “the reason for the season” should remember the true reason for the season which is of course veneration of various Sun gods and the victory of Nature of the bleakness of the winter – Yule Rules!!!!

I really love James Brown.  Can he get into like a sex machine?  Yes. Yes. His music is wonderful – his performances were entrancing.  I own several albums of his, some of them are performance recordings.  He’s often introduced to the crowd as “Soul Brother #1″ a distinction which is irrefutable.  It just got me to thinking – if he’s soul brother number 1, who’s soul brother number 2 and 3 and 4?  Then I wondered where I fall in all of this – if I were introduced at the Apollo Theater in 1970 by the J.B.s “Here he is! SOUL BROTHER NUMBER….. “  3,000,000?  How many people in this world would come ahead of me?  It really makes you think – right? Am I doing enough to get higher in that list?  What could we all be doing to achieve that Buddha-like state of soul-brother-number-one-ness with our universe?