During the Eclipse of 1995 -- the only totality I've witnessed personally -- the Kingdom's Prime Minister and his wife fled the Capital and led a drunken ritual to appease Rahu, the Demon God of Darkness. The ritual succeeded; and the Kingdom survived.
Marjorie Taylor Greene said:
God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.
I read that scientists have now revised their projection of the eclipse's center line by a few hundred meters. Was this due to God fine-tuning his aim? Any news on whom specifically He is targeting now?
I think that was because the earth is oblate rather than spherical.
The prime meridian (0° longitude) no longer passes through the Greenwich Observatory in London, as a consequence of the Earth being non-homogenous and non-spherical.
The position of the meridian was fixed in 1884 by the Airy Transit Circle Telescope, and at that time was defined to pass directly through that device. But then GPS came along, and required a definition based solely on Universal Time (formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time). On a spherical Earth, this wouldn't be a problem. The time at which the Sun is directly overhead is called "noon", and a two dimensional plane orthogonal to the gravitational field of the Earth that passes through the centres of both Earth and Sun at noon UTC is your prime meridian.
But what does "overhead" mean? Well, it's measured by a spirit level or plumb line - 90° from the horizontal is "overhead" (Airy actually used a pool of mercury to obtain his "horizontal" reference. It's nice and dense, so it levels very rapidly and is difficult to perturb; and it's reflective, so you can use it as a mirror in your measuring devices to get really high precision results). But this kind of level is powered by gravity - its output is relative to the local gravitational field. And at Greenwich, you are on the Western edge of Eurasia, and the eastern edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Oceanic crust is denser than continental crust, so the gravitational 'vertical' at Greenwich - the direction a plumb line points -
misses the centre of rotation of the Earth by about 102 metres.
The 1984 World Geological Survey, which defined the GPS standards (almost precisely a century after the establishment of Greenwich as the longitudinal baseline), decided that time was more important than space. To keep noon UTC as the time when the Sun is directly overhead at the Greenwich Observatory, they had to define the longitudinal prime meridian as a plane parallel to the measurement plane of the Airy telescope and its successors at Greenwich, but which passes through the geographical centre of the Earth, rather than the gravitational centre.
If you take your GPS device to Greenwich (as I have), you will find that the 0° longitude line
misses the Observatory completely, passing to the East of the buildings. The closest point on the line is marked by nothing other than a rubbish bin.
The alternatives would have been to move the UTC time datum 102m in the opposite direction, taking it outside the Observatory to the West; Or allowing "Mean Sea Level" on the Equator at the 90°E and 90°W meridians to be defined as being 102m away from the actual surface of the actual seawater (The waters around Manhattan Island would be about 300ft above GPS sea level in such a scenario). They decided at WGS84 to keep the UTC datum at Greenwich, preserving Greenwich Mean Time, and to keep Mean Sea Level as close as practical to the mean level of the actual sea (GPS sea level nevertheless fails to match actual sea level by a few metres in many places).
My counter-proposal to use a big lathe to reshape the Earth into a perfect sphere, and to place balancing weights to align the centre of gravity with the geographical centre of the now spherical planet, was rejected on budgetary grounds.
You have definitely criticized AOC for working as a bartender, among other things unrelated to her politics. Don't try to deny it. We've all seen it.
indepthnh.org
