Two thousand cattle

By -
In the early 700s, Ceolfrid, abbot at the Monkwearmouth-Jarrow abbey, sought a land grant for land on which the abbey could raise 2000 head of cattle.

The 2000 cattle were needed to produce... X.

Can you guess what X was?

UPDATE: X is a single unit of a something, so, a good answer would be, "They were going to produce one giant leather dome over their monastery." That is not the right answer, but they were going to produce one of something with these 2000 cattle.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:52 PM

    Parchment. for copying books.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thomas L. Knapp9:26 PM

    I'm not going to Google it. I'm going to guess.

    They were going to produce one ginormous block of cheese.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Keshav Srinivasan1:19 AM

    A single book?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Crosbie2:30 AM

    Without Googling... one bible?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ken B12:32 PM

    One println statement.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more