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Earth

The True Story of How the Earth Was Measured Over 2,000 Years Ago ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ Don't let your dreams die

Eratosthenes' ancient calculations confirming the Earth's circumference to the latest AI innovations like OpenAI's partnership with TIME and a reminder from Orange Book to cherish and pursue your own dreams

Zvonimir Fras

• 2 min read
The True Story of How the Earth Was Measured Over 2,000 Years Ago ⋆ AI of the week ⋆ Don't let your dreams die

We'll go back in time, then to the edge of AI, and keep on dreaming...

3 things in 3 minutes. Let's go!

Thing 1 - The True Story of How the Earth Was Measured Over 2,000 Years Ago

By the time Eratosthenes, the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria, set out to measure the Earth's circumference around June 240 B.C., the idea of a spherical Earth was already established among educated Greeks.

Ancient people didn't believe the Earth was flat after all.

Image: Wikimedia

Intrigued by reports of a well in Syene (now Aswan, Egypt) where the sun cast no shadows at noon on the summer solstice, Eratosthenes decided to dig deeper (puns, yo!). He measured the angle of a shadow cast by a stick in Alexandria at the same moment and found it to be 7.2 degrees.

Knowing the distance between Syene and Alexandria through accurate surveys, he used this angle to calculate the Earth’s circumference. His conclusion was about 250,000 stadia, equivalent to ~40,000 kilometers - close to modern measurements (40,075 km aka 24,901 miles).

Eratosthenes's experiment showcased the ingenuity of ancient science and reinforced the spherical Earth, debunking any flat Earth theories among his contemporaries.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

  • Toys "R" Us released the first OpenAI SORA-generated brand commercial
  • Perplexity made voice-to-voice available on Android
  • Meta announced Meta LLM Compiler, a family of models built on Meta Code Llama with additional code optimization and compiler capabilities
  • OpenAI partnered with TIME to enhance responses and provide links to stories
  • Check out some Claude 3.5 Sonnet demos
  • OpenAI trained CriticGPT, based on GPT-4, to help find mistakes of... GPT-4

Thing 3 - Don't let your dreams die

The world is full of people who will subtly manipulate you into working for their dreams whilst making you feel like you should be grateful for that opportunity.

Don’t be deceived.

Respect your own potential.

Don’t let your own dreams die.

- Orange Book

'Till next week!

Cheers, Zvonimir