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How To Do Everything

Mountaintops and Nosebleeds

How To Do Everything

NPR

4.21.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2015

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How to make a mountain shorter and a new use for bacon. Plus, we check in on our exclamation point fast.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Scuffle Pike is the tallest mountain in Great Britain.

0:04.1

And recently somebody stole the top inch of it.

0:07.4

Now I'm wondering does this actually make the mountain officially an inch shorter.

0:12.8

Bill Stone knows about these things.

0:14.8

You go by Bill, right?

0:16.4

Bill Stone is fine.

0:18.1

My former name is William, but I go by Bill.

0:20.8

Stone and my position is that I'm a geoticist with the National Geodetic Survey.

0:27.8

I don't think I've ever heard of a geoticist before.

0:31.4

It's a pretty obscure profession, yeah, and more specifically.

0:36.0

Geodesy is defined as the science of measuring and monitoring the size and shape of the earth and points on its surface.

0:42.0

The National Geodetic

0:44.1

survey is part of NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

0:48.9

So Bill, if you stole the inch from the top of a mountain,

0:53.7

mountain is defined as a tall, pointy, rocky thing.

0:56.7

Would that make the mountain officially shorter?

0:59.6

Well, I guess in terms of official measurement that would be based on some type of

1:05.5

re-survey or re-measurement being done after the fact but that certainly would were

1:11.8

such a survey to be done after the top inch were stolen it would

1:15.3

affect I guess official elevation for that point.

1:19.3

Sure. So if I were a fan of, say, the second highest peak in that country, I could maybe keep going

1:26.6

back and stealing an inch until the second highest peak became the highest peak.

...

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