It’s a good quote, and it’s actually a little ironic because the line sort of proves itself, as it’s actually a myth that people ever believed the world was flat pre-Columbus. Scholars have known the Earth was round for literally thousands of years; Pythagoras wrote about the curvature of the earth as early as ~500 BC. The roundness of the Earth was never really contested until the last 50 years or so.

The myth stems from Washington Irving’s book “A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus”, in which he completely fabricates the idea that Columbus argued with scholars about the shape of the earth (as well as several other stories with zero historical data to back them up). Everybody at the time generally agreed, before Columbus ever set sail, that the Earth is round. That misconception about what the public believed is relatively new, as the book was only published in 1828.

Fact-checking was a much more arduous process back in the 1800s. Back then, you’d typically have to find a book to prove your point, so it’s really no surprise that people just accepted these printed words as the truth, but in this case the book is just full of straight-up lies. Lies that eventually made their way into almost every school’s history curriculum ever since. In fact, there are more flat-Earthers now than at any point in history, and we can probably directly blame Irving for that, for putting such a stupid idea into the public’s eye in the first place.

Interestingly, Columbus was actually WRONG about the shape of the earth. He didn’t believe the Earth was round at all. While most scholars accurately believed it to be spherical, Columbus thought the planet was pear-shaped. But “proving” that was never the point of his voyages, either way.

15 minutes ago, some of you reading this “knew” that people believed the world was flat 500 years ago.

And a +1 for egirls in general.

He should give his boss a real piece of his mind, then.

Valve’s argument isn’t in defense of free speech, it’s in defense of Gabe’s next yacht.

Well done, Henry.

Oh no! The nazi bar has set a drink limit! Guess I’ll just have to continue not drinking there.

Open a new thread and ask again. You’ll get a different result. Open a third thread and ask again, you’ll get yet another result. That’s how LLMs work. You getting a different answer to your prompt doesn’t mean anything.

Of course the anti-woke crowd hate it; it’s a story about young people finding themselves, instead of being told who to be.

My Geocities page had the best cursors.

Wait.

Just look at the hairless pits the character on his shirt has. Clearly this is a man of culture.

No, but it’s the best option for users who are unable/unwilling to switch browsers.

The Lite version still works fine.

AI is more coherent.

You doing alright over there, chief? Your profile text reads like somebody who really needs a wellness check.

The U2 album could be easily removed. The issue is that the average iTunes user doesn’t remove songs from their libraries, and thus had no idea the option to do so even existed and just assumed they were stuck with the album.

Chrome is often baked into pre-built computer images these days.

I don’t remember Gmail ever offering unlimited storage, and I can’t find any record of that offer ever being made, either. When they first launched, they gave 1GB, which was the highest of any free email service at the time by an order of magnitude, but never unlimited.

Who still uses [literally the most-used thing in its field]?

Get a bunch of other parents together and threaten to change schools. They need your money and your children’s enrollments a whole lot more than you need them.