14 ms·

Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line?

• 082349872349872 2y ago
  Considering the birthday paradox, I get 600! = 12655723162254307425418678245150829297671403862274660768187828858528140823147351237817802795619571074765208532598060224803240903782164769430795025578054271906283387643826088448124626488332623608376164081221171179439885840257818732919037889603719186743943363062139593784473922231852782547619771723889252476871186000174697934549112845662596182308280390615184691924446215552586523740084932807259056238962104689731522587564412231618018774350801526839567367444928206231310973619440354723718012867753019556135721376207959558860559933052856914157120622980057169891912595926540427596853441276985006724869558201930657900240943007657817473684008944448183219124163017666607770667585082169598239230274035517738648065600492702095732843492708856036920219883363111527988109277392696562776813446645651238419301586157342867860646666350050113314787911320639668510871569846664873595017518995670958477806411667505346462590471136862647349666243426242677175204732314281064417939041868653741187423064985189556742640111598580035644021835576715752869397465453828584471291269955890393294448315746500268702149708808053100406398480942695623586049403348084970064668900206251516968479727515576425962392136269169089884609794271331061018895634421094082310408889752954265842691732460538911784960000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000L so I'd expect for there to be more than a few seemingly unlikely coincidences among them.
  • defrost 2y ago
    Placement is an interesting problem, assuming a plan to lay them out in a "line", either Geodesic (tricky) or on a common projection of the period prior to construction there remains a few questions: Given a preferred predetermined position, navigating to the desired latitude would have been easy enough for the time, getting to a spot with the correct longitude is a tricky feat prior to accurate clocks. Having found such a location there's no apriori guarantee that site is ideal for a large stone building which would lead to some fudging about to find a near althernative site along a corridor. There's some work to be done upon the order in which these buildings went up and on the locations themselves; for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael's_Mount https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael's_Mount dates as a monastic site back to the 8th Century or so and has very little (almost none) play in position .. it's situated on a rocky outcrop in a strong tidal zone. All of which leaves questions such as when a decision might first have been made to infill later buildings to match a line through which earlier buildings on which projection.
• voidUpdate 2y ago
  > Did the builders knew the earth was round? Yes. This has been known since ancient greek times, and Aristotle calculated the size reasonably well. Maybe not every labourer knew or cared but the architects almost certainly did
  • smeej 2y ago
    Exactly. I think I'm more annoyed at this point with the myth of the ignorant Medievals than I am with the myth of the flat earth itself. Even knowing the earth is round, if I were going to put things in a "straight line" geographically, I'd do it with the reference most people would actually use and see: a 2D map.
    • searedsteak 2y ago
      I'd say the bigger question is whether or not the projection used at the time of design was one that would show the straight line. The Mercator projection was first invented in 1569 [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercator_projection
      • regularfry 2y ago
        This has to be the core of it. If the underlying question is "was this alignment intentional" then you could start by asking whether there are extant maps with better cathedral alignment than Mercator. These places are old. Skellig Michael goes back past 823AD, Mont-Saint-Michel is about the same sort of age, and the Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo goes back to 490AD(ish). San Michele Arcangelo is on top of a pre-Christian pagan temple. Stella Maris is on an Old Testament Biblical site. None of them is less than a thousand years old. The bar for finding a map that happens to align, and then explaining how it was made, is not a low one. There is a projection that might fit, though: Plate Carrée is definitely old enough, and a brief visual sanity check doesn't make it look totally off.
        • smeej 2y ago
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  These took nearly 4K years to build in total. Beautiful to see how much thought went into the placement.
• maratc 2y ago
  Seems reasonable to try to fit a line such that the sum of distances (or square distances) between the cathedrals and the line is minimal. Doesn't have to be a straight line.
• willis936 2y ago
  Cathedrals are the highest tier of vanity projects of one of the most powerful institutions in written history. It's little surprise that the makers knew the top three most import factors for real estate value: location, location, location. Are they pointing to anything though?
  • masswerk 2y ago
    Cathedrals were erected by the townships and were indeed a major economic investment. They generally payed off well, giving raise to tourism (then known as pilgrimage) and elevating the status of the city, both with considerable effects on commerce. If you were a major town or city, or aspired to become one, you definitively wanted to build a cathedral. (And, as already pointed out by several other comments, none of these locations were cathedrals.)
    • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      > and elevating the status of the city Indeed, having a cathedral is a thing that can define a settlement as "a city". Source: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-makes-a-city/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-makes-a-city/
  • ttepasse 2y ago
    At its core a cathedral is just a church where the cathedra (the "throne" of a bishop) stands. Can be any size, take a look at Nin, Croatia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Cross,_Nin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_Holy_Cross,_Nin
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    Harvard has more wealth than the Vatican.
    • willis936 2y ago
      Did they 1000 years ago?
• tokai 2y ago
  > Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence With the number of cathedrals in Europe I don't really think this is supported.
  • chippy 2y ago
    They are all dedicated to the same saint, St. Michael.
    • Broken_Hippo 2y ago
      Which isn't really all that special. In England alone, there are 816 churches named after St Michael. He's pretty popular. It'd be a lot more spectacular if they were all named after someone much more obscure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_England#Most_common_dedications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedications_in_the_Church_of_E...
      • willis936 2y ago
        Only ~30 are cathedrals, still more than a selection of 7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Michael https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Saint_Michael
        • SamBam 2y ago
          Right, but none of the 7 are cathedrals.
      • chippy 2y ago
        That's right. I would actually expect there to be a few more than 7! And if we extend the search to all placenames dedicated to St Michael quite a bit more! It's not pure coincidence but it is a kind of observation error as highlighted in other comment. Increasing and decreasing the variables and measurements effects the odds. Basically you can get a line between many things on earth, but 1) the dimensions of that line cannot be chosen if you also want to choose the things that define it or 2) the dimensions can be chosen but the things that make it up cannot.
• randomtoast 2y ago
  One might begin to calculate the odds of seven cathedrals aligning perfectly in a straight line purely as a result of chance.
  • ot1138 2y ago
    Please do so! This would be a fascinating experiment and perhaps a famous one, given that similar answers are the knee jerk reaction of armchair skeptics the world over.
    • randomtoast 2y ago
      I asked GPT-4. It did the following calculation (summarized): Let's consider Europe as roughly a 10 million square km area. The probability of a single point falling within a 50 km wide band (assuming the band runs the full length of Europe) is about 0.01581 (1.581%). The probability of seven points aligning within a 50 km wide band across Europe is approximately: 10^-14
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        Doesn't the first point have a probability of 1? It's the subsequent ones that become less and less likely.
        • randomtoast 2y ago
          Maybe my question was not right then. But my question was how likely is it that 7 randomly chosen points fall within a given 50 km band across europe. Because I want to test the hypotheses that the 7 cathedrals fall randomly in line that we see. And that one random point falls in that band is not 1.
          • regularfry 2y ago
            It's pretty easy to Monte Carlo, even if you can't get there analytically.
• logtempo 2y ago
  Are they aligned because they are famous, or are they famous because they are aligned? Or are they aligned because if I pick 7 famous monuments aligned I can draw a line, look over my shoulder and say "ho look, if we draw a line it match!" From wikipedia, the list of St Michael churches: St. Michael's Church (disambiguation) Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel (es), San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato Mexico World Heritage Site Sacra di San Michele (Saint Michael's Abbey), near Turin, Italy Pfarrei Brixen St. Michael with the White Tower, Brixen, Italy Cathedral of St. Michael and St. Gudula, in Brussels, Belgium Mont Saint-Michel, Normandy, France – a World Heritage Site St. Michael's Cathedral Basilica (Toronto), Canada St. Michael's Cathedral (Izhevsk), Russia St. Michael's Cathedral, Qingdao, China Chudov Monastery in the Moscow Kremlin Cathedral of the Archangel in the Moscow Kremlin – a World Heritage Site Sanctuary of Monte Sant'Angelo, Gargano, Italy – a World Heritage Site St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, UK St. Michael, Minnesota St. Michael's Basilica, Miramichi, Canada Skellig Michael, off the Irish west coast – a World Heritage Site St Michael's Cathedral, Coventry, UK St. Michael's Golden-Domed Monastery, Kyiv, Ukraine St. Michael's Church, Vienna in Vienna, Austria Tayabas Basilica, Tayabas, Quezon, Philippines St. Michael's Church, Berlin, Germany San Miguel Church (Manila), Philippines St. Michael's Jesuit church, Munich, Germany St. Michael's Cathedral, Belgrade in Belgrade, Serbia Cathedral of St. Michael the Archangel in Gamu, Isabela, Philippines Mission San Miguel Arcángel, San Miguel, California, United States, one of the California Missions St Michael at the North Gate, Oxford, UK St. Michael's Roman Catholic church, Cluj-Napoca, Romania St. Michael's Church, Mumbai, India Church of St. Michael, Štip, Republic of North Macedonia St Michael and All Angels Church, Polwatte St Michael's Church, Churchill, UK San Miguel Arcangel Church, Marilao, Bulacan, Philippines San Miguel Arcangel Church, San Miguel, Bulacan, Philippines St Michael the Archangel, Llanyblodwel, England
  • Maken 2y ago
    But only 7 of those are Cathedrals, and only those are aligned.
    • tecleandor 2y ago
      I think none of them are cathedrals. There's a couple islands, a mount, a shrine, a monastery, a temple...
• arethuza 2y ago
  When I was a kid (11/12 or so) I was fascinated by finding alignments between ancient things in the landscape (of which there are many here in Scotland!) - eventually I came to the realisation that given the scale of the maps I was looking at (1:25,000) that you can find loads of meaningless alignments if you look hard enough...
  • Oarch 2y ago
    The Great Glen Fault is beautifully straight line across Scotland. Once seen it can't really be unseen.
    • arethuza 2y ago
      My own favourite is the Highland Boundary Fault - the northern edge of the rift valley that is central Scotland: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Boundary_Fault https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Boundary_Fault
    • Shrezzing 2y ago
      I'm not sure if this is concrete fact, or just a theory, but you can continue the line up Norway's western coast too. Then in the other direction, the line was broken, but restarts & progresses from Nova Scotia down through the Appalachians in North America.
      • kitd 2y ago
        IIRC they were all part of the same Pangaian range, and include Greenland east coast and the Atlas mountains.
    • jfengel 2y ago
      I'm gonna be driving along most of Loch Ness early this autumn. Anything in particular I should look out for with respect to the Great Glen Fault? Any less-obvious geologic features?
      • 2y ago
• deleted 2y ago
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• 0xRusty 2y ago
  I feel a new Dan Brown novel coming on! Probably is a coincidence given these countries were basically at war the whole time so getting agreement to even start a project like this is unlikely. Very interesting nonetheless.
  • forgotpwd16 2y ago
    Definitely seems like something that could play a role in one of Langdon's adventures.
• OnACoffeeBreak 2y ago
  Matt Parker ("Stand up Maths" channel on YouTube) gave a very informative and entertaining lecture in 2010 titled "Clutching at Random Straws" [0], which, among other things, covered something similar. From the subtitle of the video: "Did aliens help prehistoric Britons find the ancient Woolworths civilisation?" The answer is "no". Given enough data points, you can find all sorts of patterns. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5OrthVRPA
  • SilverBirch 2y ago
    I've got to assume that this is partly a Birthday Problem - that the probability of something unlikely being true grows rapidly as the population grows. Probability of 3 random churches lining up? Small, probability of 3 churches lining up when there are 100,000 churches in Europe? Basically 100%
    • viscousviolin 2y ago
      That's one of the examples he goes into in his talk, at a high level anyway. I'd love to find a write-up of someone who has done the detailed calculations of how likely alignments and shape occurrences are. Another thing that would be interesting is to look at the effect of non-uniformly distributed birthdays. For example, the day that's nine months after valentine's day or christmas might (?) have a slightly higher number of births than an average day. Then you could look at what kind of an effect this would have on the probability of a common birthday as a function of group size.
  • smusamashah 2y ago
    Thanks for the link. Gist was that with enough data, lots of patterns are inevitable. He gave example from some text taken out of bible with spaces removed. That's lots of letters on one screen, and from those letters he was able find his name, date and topic of the talk, when joining letters at equal distance. Finding unbelievable patterns is not as amazing as we think.
  • abrenuntio 2y ago
    Check it :-) Other popular saints and devotions are "Mary", "Joseph", "Paul", "Sacred Heart", ... can you easily get seven sufficiently special ones on a line for those?
• deleted 2y ago
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• SilverBirch 2y ago
  There's a different way of going about this. So the author uses various projections and evaluates whether the churches are aligned. But this is backwards. The churchs were selected because they lined up. And they lined up on a mercator projection. There's simply no way that the churches could line up on different projections (subject to certain conditions). So, let's just look at the churches as they line up on the Mercator projection. If you google the churches one by one, you start to notice a pattern. They all predate the invention of the Mercator projection. You also notice, as someone else pointed out, there's a hell of a lot of Churches called St Micheals.
• Zobat 2y ago
  From the article it's quite obvious they're not on a line (as drawn on a spherical representation of earth), but i wonder if they're close to being on the same plane?
• reedf1 2y ago
  This is probably, given the sheer number of churches (of all saints) in Europe, the look-elsewhere effect. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-elsewhere_effect
• gorgoiler 2y ago
  > Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence… Aha, but two of them will always be on a straight line. It’s only the other five that are the coincidences.
• Talkative32 2y ago
  [dead]
• paipa 2y ago
  He managed to get my attention starting with the cathedrals' polygons and exact bell tower positions, only to pull a "50 kilometers off, nevermind".
  • smeej 2y ago
    I didn't understand what the bell towers had to do with anything. If you're going to pick a piece of architecture that mattered to the architect in terms if "where the thing is," go with the altar.
• kedv 2y ago
  How was this achieved?
• onion2k 2y ago
  I'm not a civil engineer so I don't know for sure, but I'd guess you can't just throw a cathedral up just anywhere you want. The land has to be the right composition, you need to have good enough transport links to get the raw materials to where you're building it, you need local talent to actually build it, it can't be in the sea. It'd be surprising if these buildings were exactly aligned. Presumably people could easily say that the respective diocese(s) are aligned though.
  • lloeki 2y ago
    Tell that to the people that decided that Strasbourg should have a cathedral: the whole area is a freaking swamp (water table + sand and clay). Not to fret, they punched 15cm x 1.5m tree trunks into the ground, as if you were standing on a thousand toothpicks. Local myth has it that the second spire wasn't build because it would topple over. Probably many more examples like this one exist. "I don't care. Figure it out. You're the expert." https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
  • johncalvinyoung 2y ago
    Salisbury Cathedral (highest medieval spire surviving in the UK, at 404 feet!) was built on a floodplain close to the river, with shallow foundations only four feet deep. But the prior cathedral had been on a hilltop with much strife over access to water, and at least that would not be a problem at the new cathedral. https://salisburycathedral.wordpress.com/the-spire/ https://salisburycathedral.wordpress.com/the-spire/ is a glorious essay on the architecture of that spire.
• deleted 2y ago
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• nonrandomstring 2y ago
  Texas sharpshooter fallacy? 800 shots. Pick 7. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy
• yergi 2y ago
  Faulty math because the map that the points are being plotted on needs to match the type of calculation performed for the line placed upon it. Of course it's going to be off with any other method than that of the map itself.
• dougdimmadome 2y ago
  Skellig Michael is not a Cathedral by any stretch of the imagination. It is a cluster of stone beehive huts on an island. It should be recognisable to most people these days as the place Luke Skywalker was hanging out in the new Star Wars sequels, as the movies used it as a filming location in 2015 and 2017. It's a UNESCO world heritage site and a huge tourist attraction long before Star Wars, but it is definitely not a Cathedral.
  • dougdimmadome 2y ago
    ...and, fun fact, the "porgs" only exist because the island is also a wildlife refuge and home to thousands of birds who happily walked across the set during takes, so they had to be CGI'ed out.
    • jfengel 2y ago
      Under ordinary circumstances they would have kept the birds out of the shoot. But Skellig Michael is extremely protected, and that includes not being allowed to touch the birds. CGI'ing over them is a genius solution that makes me absurdly happy.
      • dougdimmadome 2y ago
        me too =)
• lalaithion 2y ago
  > Or did they followed some method that is today lost, possibly based on the position of a start or a constellation, resulting in an alignment on the Mercator projection? I would not say that the method is today lost; while not aligned on a geodesic, the cathedrals are aligned on a spiral starting at the North Pole and ending at the South Pole which always travels at a constant bearing. It’s totally possible to recreate a line like this with a compass by walking such that the compass has a constant reading. Doing so over the Mediterranean, multiple mountain ranges, and bits of the Atlantic would be a bit difficult, though.
  • mensetmanusman 2y ago
    I wonder if the answer is along these lines. Eg. a star path relative to the horizon from some reference point…
• bsza 2y ago
  Even if they are not on a great circle, they could be on a circle (still unlikely as 4 of them would have to be aligned with the other 3).
• TillE 2y ago
  More interesting to me here is the history of the "line". Is this a medieval idea or a modern one? Wikipedia is surprisingly unhelpful. "According to legend", yeah ok. Who first wrote about this? Who picked those seven sites? The earliest source mentioned is from 1969, and it's not even about this particular line. There's no shortage of writing about esoteric Christian topics throughout the centuries, but this one seems really thin and really modern.
  • SamBam 2y ago
    Right, that's the biggest thing. If medieval builders were deliberately placing these in a line, there would be documentation and discussion about it.
    • deleted 2y ago
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    • loceng 2y ago
      This comment has helped me realize that most people likely don't have an understanding of the deeper or more evolved spiritual-religious communities. For example, the Santo Daime church originating in Brazil - and who drink Ayahuasca at the beginning of and throughout what they call works [Ayahuasca is in Brazil's constitution as a right, and Canada also has it legalized for the church to import legally] - and then sing from hymns depending on the type of work and time of the year, their hymns containing the teachings, sung mostly in Portuguese; arguably those teachings will have been divinely transmitted to the people, mostly the founder to begin, while in the altered-connected state; the biologic pathway for part of this experience is the concept of ego death-dissolution, where your ego temporarily is out of the way to allow your senses to be more aligned with the more holistic - your senses not "calcified" away from feeling more than just your strongest stimuli of your own senses and the signals of your ego mind - both that can mask the more subtle - and can be repressed if disconnected from it at a young age due to various reasons. Furthermore, if you read the book The Immortality Key, there is the belief circulating that wine - "the blood of Christ" - historically wasn't alcohol but wine was a mix, and arguably an entheogen-psychdelic that then connected people to an altered state to help open the mind and heart, and heal vs. alcohol which is a depressant and poison; where the knowledge that Jesus taught/shared was supposedly from 300 years prior from the Greece region, where millions of people would pilgrimage to annually arguably to partake in drinking the "wine." Part of the misunderstanding is that it's believed that Christ has already resurrected but in energetic form, where he joined the divine celestial order, along with St. Michael and other energetic-conscious beings. I've thought it's an interesting idea, whether it was oppressors who wanted to prevent this healing and weaken people's connection to God - which arguably gives people strength when they have a faith in something invisible [and unengaged most of the time], and/or if it was authoritarians incidentally working with or benefitting from industrial complexes - producers and merchants of alcohol who decided to claim their alcohol was the "wine" that "everyone was talking about and pilgrimaging for" - and in high demand, for the sake of profits; which would have also caused people to not ride the wave of word of mouth transmission toward drinking Ayahuasca et al; it makes me think partly of the more recent "war on drugs" that happened to suppress-control and prevent access to arguably highly effective non-patentable and relatively natural medicines, that are now coming to light again - Ayahuasca, mushrooms, ketamine, MDMA, etc. In conclusion, St. Michael or anyone in the divine order - conscious energetic beings who can influence at least in so much as giving guidance - could have guided each builder or person picking the build site independently, potentially leading to such a phenomenon - whether the St. Michael's Sword line was simply coincidence or happenstance, or perhaps could simply be decided to be human-made and simply a recognition to honour St. Michael; to me it boils down to a fun-playful thought exercise, but where it could be dangerous in that an ideological mob could use it to demonize people who let's say are needing or desperate for hope or truth of the divine - and haven't yet reached a faith state.
• deepsun 2y ago
  > Did the builders knew the earth was round? Long before St. Michael was born, yes.
  • neaden 2y ago
    St. Michael is an Angel, so either has existed since before the Earth was made or if you want the earliest literary reference from the Book of Enoch which dates to around 300 BCE but might have existed in an oral tradition before that. Earth being round dates to around 500 BCE so depending on how old the oral tradition of the angel Michael were around was probably earlier but maybe contemporary.
    • 082349872349872 2y ago
      > "Once upon a time, there were four little angels who went to the police academy and they were each assigned very hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that and now they work for me. My name is YHWH." —not Aaron Spelling
• karaterobot 2y ago
  Are any of these actually cathedrals? I see some monasteries and sacred sites, I don't see any cathedrals in that list. The difference is that 7 cathedrals, all named after St. Michael, found in a basically straight line would certainly not be a coincidence. It would be like there being 7 Google complexes in a straight line spread around the world: something's going on here. But 7 random religious sites named after one of the most famous saints is more like there being 7 Burger Kings in a basically straight line: much easier to believe as a coincidence.
  • grahamlee 2y ago
    If you add every single other church or shrine that's dedicated to St. Michael to the map, what's the straight line you can draw that contains the most of those locations?
    • margalabargala 2y ago
      As this article found, the answer to that question depends heavily on the map projection you use.
      • pdabbadabba 2y ago
        Perhaps we have yet to discover the real St. Michael's sword, which would, of course, be aligned along a geodesic line.
        • hef19898 2y ago
          Yeah, spherical geometry exists. But using various projections makes for better click bait.
          • seanhunter 2y ago
            In TFA he tries the geodesic line first before trying the various projections. It doesnt' really fit any of them because even with these extremely cherry-picked seven points, you can't retcon them into having been designed to be in a line when they weren't.
• rpz 2y ago
  The article checks the Mercator projection but doesn’t check the Equirectangular projection, which could have been known to the builders of each cathedral. I wonder if the line is bang on in that projection.
• Duanemclemore 2y ago
  I wish I could link to a great portion of the Eco book Foucault's Pendulum here - it's quite relevant to how we go trying to find meaning in things. If you haven't definitely a novel worth a read. I'm surprised no one has mentioned From Hell here, which plays with the concept of drawing symbols using lines between landmarks. Alan Moore got a lot of his ideas for that from Iain Sinclair, whose books are well worth a read as well. Specifically, the material Moore references is from Lud Heat iirc.
• dark-star 2y ago
  > Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence A very far-fetched claim without any proof. Simple answer: selection bias > Did the builders knew the earth was round? If he had just googled that he would have gotten the answer, which is, of course, "yes"
• tantalor 2y ago
  > though this distance would not be a “real” distance in any meaningful sense Huh?
• dave333 2y ago
  The location of the 3 northernmost sites is on existing geographic features that predate Christianity so there was no choice of location for those. However the church may have noticed these three were in a straight line and extrapolated from there.
• irrational 2y ago
  > we know that the cathedrals are not aligned on the geodesic Maybe not exactly aligned, but looking at that image of the geodesic line and the location of the churches, they all seem close enough to make me think their locations are not random chance (especially since they were laid out in the days before satellites and airplanes). I presume these are all Catholic churches? Could the medieval Catholic Church have had a plan to do this?
  • SamBam 2y ago
    I also wondered about the strategy of joining the first and last church. The authors switched to a regression for their last test, but only on the Mercator projection. (I actually remember in 7th grade that our math teacher had to repeat time and again that a line of best fit does not necessarily need to join the first and last dot. For some reason it's a very instinctual thing to do.)
• m3kw9 2y ago
  Is there selection bias so a straight line is made by selecting the ones that fit?
• klaussilveira 2y ago
  This is why I come to HN. Fascinating investigations, perfectly executed by genius fellow hackers. Thank you.
• denton-scratch 2y ago
  How many other cathedrals/shrines are not "on" this line? If the surrounding countryside is peppered with shrines to St. Michael, then any line you choose to draw would pass through/close to a number of them. That is: TFA seems to be ignoring the null hypothesis.
• pjs_ 2y ago
  https://archive.org/details/b29827553 https://archive.org/details/b29827553
• mcswell 2y ago
  My name is Michael, and I approve of this article. Wait, you want to know if I'm a Saint?
• bowsamic 2y ago
  What’s with the use of “we” everywhere?
  • forgotpwd16 2y ago
    "Authorial we" is/was common in academic writing although its usage has declined nowadays. Shouldn't be mixed with "royal we". Rather it's meant to specify "the author and the reader", that is "I and you" (even if what you do is basically follow along an already done work).
    • bowsamic 2y ago
      Right but in this case we is being used to express quite personal opinions and so is not appropriate (my first instinct was, in fact, in total sincerity, that the author has a multiple personality disorder/DID)
• classified 2y ago
  But was there Mercator projection at the time these sites were built?
• aredox 2y ago
  Nobody to mention that the property of Mercator projection is that it preserves angles? Meaning that the points are not on the shortest path, but are close to being at the same azimuth one to another?
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • hazn 2y ago
    the article mentions it
    • forgotpwd16 2y ago
      Read it twice but didn't see any mention of this.
  • forgotpwd16 2y ago
    Basically a straight line on a Mercator projection is a rhumb line (i.e. a path of constant true bearing). This enabled sailors/merchants to plot a straight-line course by maintaining a constant compass direction. Could explain the appearance of those sacred sites in such line.
• santiagobasulto 2y ago
  I live very close to the one in Italy (close to Turin). It's SO impressive. The early cathedral was built around the year ~800AD. And it was not "built" in the sense that they placed bricks one over the other. Instead, what they did was "cut" the stone of the mountain to shape it as a cathedral. The steps of the stairs are just cut and shaped stone, the walls are just stone. It can be summer and 90degrees in Turin, and inside the cathedral is 30 degrees and so chill. If you ever find yourself close, go visit it, it's a very humbling experience.
  • sokoloff 2y ago
    > It can be summer and 90degrees in Turin, and inside the cathedral is 30 degrees and so chill. Which temperature scale are you using here?
    • enedil 2y ago
      Probably not Kelvin.
    • pbmonster 2y ago
      Shitty life-hacks: you can ballpark converting from Celsius to Fahrenheit by multiplying by 2!
      • throw_pm23 2y ago
        This life-hack is significantly improved if you change it to: C->F: multiply by 2, then add 30 F->C: subtract 30, then divide by 2.
        • thruway516 2y ago
          Ill say. If I follow GPs life-hack for 30C I get 60F, which is significantly different from 86F. Some life-hack.
          • dEnigma 2y ago
• SebastianoF 2y ago
  Hello! Being the author of the blog post commented here, I'm glad it became food for thoughts. Here a few of the salient points: > They are not cathedrals! True! As I learned after writing the blog post, a Cathedral is not simply a large church. As written in several comments there has to be a bishop. > Fallacy of using other projection than the Mercator one. It was known that they are "visually" aligned on the Mercator projection. The question is: does it mean that they are aligned on the surface of the earth? That question was the crucial one underpinned the post. > Birthday paradox and Texas sharpshooter fallacy. These are two really interesting take on the problem that I did not considered or knew about. Certainly worth exploring in a next blog post. Also I have to inform you that the blog is temporarily suspended. This decision is after an unfortunate billing policy from the provider netlify. It has nothing to do with the comments received here. On the contrary the comments received here had encouraged me to write more (and to document myself better beforehand). I hope to be able to bring it up back soon with a different provider, that would not add extra costs with no capping for going "viral" and exceeding the allowed free bandwidth.
  • SebastianoF 2y ago
    Blog is up and running again there: https://sebastianof.github.io/GeoDsBlog/posts/gds-2024-04-20-cathedrals/ https://sebastianof.github.io/GeoDsBlog/posts/gds-2024-04-20... Sorry for the temporary disruption.
  • loceng 2y ago
    Hi, I'm at least one person who emailed you to let you know this was on front page of HN. I just wrote another comment that may interest you to some degree: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607523 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40607523 It's probably best to reply to each person's comment, letting them know first also know you're author of the article/project.
  • koolala 2y ago
    Hi the website was down. Thank you for sharing your ideas! When you say "strait line" is it globe based curved path like the flight of a bird? Why was it called a sword? Edit: found a working link! still extra extra curious!
• jasonvorhe 2y ago
  Anyone else getting a Site Not Found?
  • comonoid 2y ago
    Me too (Barcelona, Spain).
  • macintux 2y ago
    Yep, same here (central U.S.).
• cozzyd 2y ago
  Since the only geodesics that are closed on an ellipsoid are the meridian and equator, doesn't they mean that all points are (eventually) connected by a geodesics? Obviously this isn't what anybody means by a straight line though. I'm surprised I can't find a "short" (no longer than the largest distance between points) geodesic fitter anywhere. Sounds like a fun hour-long project using GeographicLib.
• d-z-m 2y ago
  Link appears to be broken.
• ouraf 2y ago
  Saint Michael wielded a Katana, it seems
• seabass 2y ago
  Is there a mirror link? The original has been down all day
• ngcc_hk 2y ago
  Mercator projection seems to be a mapping approach. Very confused about the alignment to star constellation mentioned in the blog and further perhaps a clear explanation of the code use as well.