Why not machines

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Yeah and he didn't find fast passage to India either. If the New World weren't stuck in the way, he and his crew would have died every one of them.

Basically, only dumbasses believed the world was flat at that time. That the Earth is round and its circumference (with very little error) were determined by a Greek scientist in Alexandria named Eratosthenes hundreds of years before. To do this, he used the anal-retentive 'science' and 'math' that every conspiracy theorist here so despises.

related to machines how?

From Slashdot:

Of the five finalists at this year's Loebner prize Turing Test at least three of five computers managed to fool humans into thinking they were human conversationalists. Ready to speak about Eminem to Slaughterhouse Five and everything in between, these machines are showing they we're merely a clock cycle away from true AI. '...I was fooled. I mistook Eugene for a real human being. In fact, and perhaps this is worse, he was so convincing that I assumed that the human being with whom I was simultaneously conversing was a computer.' Another of the entrants, Jabberwacky can apparently even woo the ladies: 'Some of its conversational partners confide in it every day; one conversation, with a teenaged girl, lasted 11 hours.' The winning submission this year, Elbot, fooled 25% of judges into thinking he was human. The threshold for the $100K prize is 30%. Maybe next year..."

The Turing Test is a widely criticized method for determining whether a machine can think or not. The consistently high scoring of Jabberwacky is an excellent example of its flaws. While a very amusing bot, it is pretty obvious the he isn't doing much that could be called thinking, unless the contest versions of him are dramatically better than the online version.