[–] 1 point 48 minutes ago

A restaurant near me used to offer a french toast BLT which was exactly what you think: a BLT using french toast instead of regular toasted bread. I thought it would be great but it was kind of disgusting, mainly because of the mayo. The sweetness of the french toast just did not go well with the mayonnaise taste and texture. But I do respect them for trying.

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  • [–] 2 points 23 hours ago (8 children)

    The Apple II was the first microcomputer that combined color graphics with internal expandability

    The first computer I ever used (not counting punch cards or the VIC-20) was an Apple IIe, and I can confidently say that color was green. Later versions of the Apple II had full color, but that wasn't "innovation" by Steve Jobs, it was just the technology for it becoming affordable.

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  • [–] 22 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (5 children)

    The maps were very accurate in terms of latitude (north/south position) which meant ships could find a particular port or harbor even if they had only a rough idea of their longitude (east/west position) by sailing along the latitude lines until they hit land. How big it made a particular piece of land look was irrelevant.

    It's not well known, but maps started to become super-accurate in terms of longitude as well in the 1670s or thereabouts. Astronomers had observed that Jupiter had eclipses of its moons about a thousand times a year, and thanks to Isaac Newton and others they were able to predict the exact times (in Greenwich England) of these eclipses a few years in advance and publish them. Observers around the world with good telescopes could view these eclipses and note the time differences between their observations and the published Greenwich times and use this to precisely calculate their longitude. It was not really possible to do this reliably on board a sailing ship because of the difficulty of keeping a high-powered telescope trained on Jupiter on a pitching and rolling deck (although many attempts were made) so this led to accurate maps but still not fully accurate navigation until the perfection of ship's clocks a century later.

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