If the Foo...

I'm currently on an archive trawl of "A Girl and Her Fed". In the light of some of Orangemandias' recent comments, Hope's last line in this strip struck me as apropos.

Wisdom of the Ancients

When I gave my talk on the history of non-Euclidean geometry a while back, one of the questions that came up was the ancients' knowledge of the roundness of the Earth. The audience were academics, most of them, but there were a few who were unaware how far back that bit of knowledge goes. I mentioned Aristotle's arguments on the subject, and Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth.

So, I'm currently reading Pliny's _Natural History_. That's Pliny the Elder, who died during the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii. Thus far, he's mostly been talking about astronomy and meteorology, and most of it's rubbish, although I was interested to find that he knew that light moves faster than sound. (His was the usual argument, involving lightning-flash and thunderclap.) But I just hit a passage in which he presents several arguments for the roundness of the Earth; the most interesting, I think, rests on the visibility of different stars and constellations at different latitudes; I don't think I've run into that one before, although once pointed out it's pretty obvious.

Pliny's going to be a long slog. I'm in what's marked as Chapter 72, apparently 11% of the way into Volume 1 (of 6). The chapters are short, happily.

Seals

One drawback I've found to Bell's palsy is that, though I can close my right eye if I also close my left, I don't get a tight seal on the right. I discovered this when I washed my hair and got shampoo in my right eye. I have since learned how to minimize the chance of that, but it requires a good deal of care.

A few days ago, I discovered another consequence of the poor seal, when Gracie (cuddlebug that she is) started licking my face. Of course, I closed my eyes, but... well, you can guess the rest.