Hasta La Gadget!

Aristarchus of Samos suggested it in the third century BC. Nicolaus Copernicus really drove the point home about 1,800 years later. And, in case anyone still had forgotten, Sun Ra reminded us in 1965, with The Heliocentric Worlds, volumes one and two. But the people of Russia apparently don’t listen to a heck of a lot of avant-garde jazz. According to a new study, 32 percent of Russians are under the impression that the sun revolves around the earth.

Says Olga Kamenchuk, a spokeswoman for the organization that did the polling, “It’s really quite amazing. All of [the questions] were absolutely obvious… the data speaks of the low levels of education in the country.”

Also on the survey: a question about whether humans and dinosaurs roamed the Earth at the same time. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed believe they did. The survey polled 1,600 people across the country. The margin of error is 3.4 percent.