I guess eveyone knows some sort of interesting stuff, for example,
From my ex boss at the building firm where I worked as the driver came this.
One of the main symbols of hope and renewal after the fire was Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral, and it was politically expedient for it to progress quickly. It only took ten years to produce a design that allowed such speed of construction it was all over in another forty. That may seem slow to us, but the great medieval cathedrals had taken hundreds of years to build.
One of the things Wren did was base the building on four supports for the main dome. This meant that four different builders could be employed, one on each. Plans in those days were not so precise in their specification, with the result that each builder achieved his objective differently, and the building is not quite symmetrical.
This information came from I know not where, but although the source is not memorable, the information certainly is. Another building put up after the fire was The Monument. A collaboration between Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke it was erected close to the start of the fire, it is a column with a viewing platform and bronze flame at the top. This, however, was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, and the time of the founding of the Royal Society, of which both Wren and Hooke were members. The building reflects this. It is not simply a monument to the fire, it is also a scientific instrument. The steps in the spiral staircase to the top are all exactly six inches tall, to make barometric pressure experiments easy, and the centre of the staircase was left free to allow pendulum experiments; it is also a fixed telescope.
Scientific experimentation was beginning, and Hooke had produced some of the best lenses made to date. The distances of the planets had been worked out by triangulation; taking sightings from different points on the Earth and measuring their angle, but the stars are so far away that the difference in angle, even from observation points hundreds of miles apart, was too slight to measure. The solution? There is one star almost directly overhead, and by building a fixed telescope pointing at it it was possible to take readings at opposite ends of the Earth’s orbit, giving the triangle a base of just under three hundred million kilometres; and for the first time it was possible to work out the distance to a star. Impressive.
Interesting stuff is often just something you know, we don't require references.
So, anyone know any stuff, and it had better be interesting![]()
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