Just ask the parents what (s)he likes.

There was some degree of standardization. Especially for important legal and religious texts alteration, even if accidental, was considered a sin/vice.

Scribes very often simply had to produce 1:1 copies of existing texts. So the standard was right in front of them.

You wouldn’t think how far clerical errors could go when it was laboriously copied by hand by exhausted monks in candlelight.

The whole Mary was a virgin thing (aka immaculate conception) was started because someone mistranslated young woman as (sexual) virgin. In some languages those terms are really close (even today for example in German: junge Frau Vs Jungfrau).

To be fair some languages like English or French have so horrendous and outdated orthography that I’m not going to fault the writers.

Writers. Why is there even a W in that word still? Ridiculous, write?

I initially wrote ‘temptor’ in the title but then double checked. Not today, Titivillus.

It’s quite relevant if you consider that coal mining is concentrated to a much smaller area really. Besides the destroyed habitat, the pollution, the dangers of sinkholes and the cost of renaturation you also have to contend with rain and ground water constantly filling in the mining pits.

Don’t know about the UK but in West Germany’s Rhein-Ruhr area, a former coal mining hotspot, the energy used to operate the pumps that keep the water out will eventually be greater than the energy gained from burning all the coal. Can’t find a source on the quick but I think it might have happened already. Of course it’s not a simple subtraction as all that energy was used to generate more infrastructure and capital that can now pay for the pumps. According to this German source their operation costs around 300 million euros yearly which gives you a rough idea of just how expensive that is.

Well I will argue that they were precisely more media literate because their media literacy applied to a broader spectrum of what was in use and relevant then.

It’s a sweeping generalization of course, but many people alive today had some form of media competency taught to them at school. To my mind what is taught at public school forms the base level for society – the lowest common denominator – because almost everyone receives it and other forms of education build on top of that. That’s how we ensure that everyone knows how to read and has basic numeracy after all.

But media literacy has been geared towards classical print media for the longest time. Because technological progress is so rapid today what you learn in your early years is no longer sufficient to guide you through your entire life in this regard.

Take for example texts, or images generated by artificial intelligence. This wasn’t even on educators’ minds 30-40 years ago, the lag of implementing new and relevant curricula notwithstanding. For many alive today social networks (today’s prime avenue for spreading misinformation) didn’t exist when they went to school. Heck, many went through primary socialisation before consumer grade computers were even a thing.

TLDR: media literacy has regressed in the sense that what most people know is geared towards traditional media while digital communications have grown to be very different on continue to evolve still.

You’re correct. I updated the image.

I recently learned that the Mormons settled and resettled in several states before finally staying in Utah. It’s quite an interesting story, especially given that most religions are so ancient that it’s very hard to track their origins today.

Johnny Harris has great videos about it, this one for instance.

Oh I was thinking about something else and should have worded my question differently: for a given number of vertices, how do you find the coordinates that cover most of the area. So for instance for 3 vertices (triangle): where do you place the three points so that you cover as close as 100% of the area as possible? Overshooting would be allowed, ie a triangle that has an area of 120% of the US would be better than one that has 70%.