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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Lord Kelvin, lunars, and Tripos comedy
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2026 Jul 9, 15:03 -0700
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2026 Jul 9, 15:03 -0700
There should be a name for exam jokes like this... The most long-lived in the stable of these that I have encountered proposes various methods for determining the height of a building using a barometer. :)
This article is from The Observatory in 1908, shortly after Lord Kelvin's death. He had travelled from lauded genius to respected icon to strange old man in the popularity contest of science, and he was sometimes an object of mockery in the last decade of his life (occasionally deserved!), which probably explains the tone.
Frank Reed
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