kevin starwheel

thank you dr janega for saving me the trouble

today is indigenous peoples' day, which means there will likely be some discussion of Christopher Columbus. it is pretty widely known at this point that Columbus was a brutal man who inflicted horrific violence during his time as a colonial governor, but did you know that he was also a fucking moron?

when I was a kid attending American elementary school, the version of "history" I learned sounded something like "everyone thought the world was flat, but Christopher Columbus believed the world was round and that he could reach china by sailing west. he bravely set out to prove it and then he found America." this is a very tidy little narrative that neatly fits him into the myth of the bold American visionary pioneer. the problem, of course, is that basically none of it is true, aside from the fact that Columbus did try to get to east Asia by sailing west and instead ran into an island in the Caribbean

the biggest myth here is "everyone thought the world was flat." educated people have known since at least the time of classical antiquity that the earth is spherical, and even a completely uneducated person can stand on a tall hill or on the deck of a ship at sea and observe the curvature of the earth at the horizon. Eratosthenes of Cyrene, a Greek mathematician, geographer, and astronomer recorded the first known calculation of the earth's circumference sometime around the year 240BC, more than a millennia and a half before Columbus's birth. further calculations were recorded throughout the centuries by Greek, Arabic, Indian, and Iranian scholars

one of those scholars was a man named Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Kathīr al-Farghānī. sometime between 833 and 857 in Baghdad, al-Farghānī wrote an astronomy textbook which included a calculation of earth's circumference. this textbook was translated into Latin in the 12th century and was quite popular and influential among scholars in Europe. the French astronomer Pierre d'Ailly included al-Farghānī's calculations in his own work on cosmology, and it was from d'Ailly that Christopher Columbus learned that al-Farghānī had calculated that one degree of latitude spans 56.67 miles

then Columbus made a very large mistake: he assumed that the miles in al-Farghānī's calculation were Roman miles. al-Farghānī' did not use Roman miles (approximately 1,480 m). he used Arabic miles (approx 1,830m). this meant that when Columbus tried to calculate the circumference of the Earth, his result was 25% smaller than the numbers scholars had been publishing for over a thousand years

Columbus then compounded this mistake with another: he vastly overestimated how large the Eurasian continent is. scholarly consensus in his day largely agreed with Ptolemy's estimate that Eurasia spans 180° longitude. the actual distance, from Spain to Japan is 150° longitude. Columbus estimated that Eurasia spans 225° longitude. based on this wild overestimate, he calculated that it was 2,400 nautical miles (4,400 km) west from the Canary Islands to Japan

it is, in actuality, 10,600 nautical miles (19,600 km) west from the Canary Islands to Japan

and so when Columbus went around to the courts of Europe looking for someone to sponsor a voyage west, the court geographers took a look at the math and said "absolutely not, you will run out of supplies long before you reach anywhere close to Asia"

THAT is why Columbus found no takers. not because people were too backwards to see his vision of a spherical world, but because his math was catastrophically wrong. eventually the Spanish Monarchs did sponsor him, because they figured it was worth risk for the fortunes they stood to make if he was right. and if he's wrong, well, was anyone really going to miss 3 ships, a few dozen men, and one dumbass from Genoa?

shostakovich had completed the work the year prior and had intended for its world premier to be performed by the leningrad philharmonic, but both he and the orchestra were evacuated from the city as it was besieged by the nazis. the work instead was first performed in the city of kuybyshev (now samara) in march 1942. a performance in moscow followed later that month

in april 1942, members of the leningrad arts department announced that preparations were underway for a performance in the besieged city, with the hopes that it would raise morale among the sick and starving citizens. the leningrad radio orchestra was the only ensemble remaining in the city after the evacuation of the philharmonic, and of its 40 members, only 15 remained. in order to reach the 100 members required to perform shostakovich's symphony, conductor karl eliasberg went door-to-door seeking musicians, recruitment posters went up around the city, and some members of military bands were recalled from the front

despite sickness, starvation, lack of heat, the poor condition of many instruments, and the deaths of three musicians during the months of rehearsals, the concert was given on august 9, 1942 in the grand philharmonia hall. soviet lieutenant-general leonid govorov ordered a bombardment of german artillery positions in advance of the concert, aiming to silence the nazi guns so that the performance could be heard. leningrad citizens packed the concert hall and stood outside the windows or around loudspeakers throughout the city to hear the performance

the siege continued until january 1944 but the nazis could never break the spirits of the people of leningrad

I will leave you with the words spoken by karl eliasberg before the concert began and with a recording of shostakovich's symphony no. 7 performed by the symphony orchestra of the ministry of culture of the ussr in 1985:

"Comrades – a great occurrence in the cultural history of our city is about to take place. In a few minutes, you will hear for the first time the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich, our outstanding fellow citizen. He wrote this great composition in the city during the days when the enemy was, insanely, trying to enter Leningrad. When the fascist swine were bombing and shelling all Europe, and Europe believed the days of Leningrad were over. But this performance is witness to our spirit, courage and readiness to fight. Listen, Comrades!"