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Topics - douglips

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I have noticed that some flat earth believers are perfectly capable of applying critical thinking to discussions as long as it does not conflict with their preconceptions, but then completely reject critical thinking when it hits too close to home.

This is my favorite example from YouTuber Mike Helmick:



Starting at 0:43, Helmick takes on a south-pole centrist. The South Pole centrist notices that flights from Moscow to Anchorage take a very long time, but fails to notice that the flights are not non-stop and in fact make multiple stops.

There is 1 minute of the south-pole centrist speaking, and then starting at 1:44 you have this:
- 1:44 Flat earthers are all on the same team, and South-centrists should team up with North-centrists and even concave earthists
- 3:44 Actual analysis of the moscow to anchorage route problems including:
  - "When you hate somebody, when you have that spirit of anger, you're going to miss the obvious. The obvious is to find a route that is non-stop and find out how long that takes."
- 4:21 he finds non-stop flights from Moscow to Los Angeles, and points out that the route makes sense on both the north-pole centric map and the round-earth map.
  - "It's not about being right all the time, it's about sharing information."

Then, my absolute favorite - he goes on to try to debunk Globe Earth by finding southern hemisphere flights - AND HE DOESN'T LOOK FOR NON-STOP FLIGHTS.

- 5:45 - Johannesburg to Sao Paolo with a stop in London
- 5:56 - he's looking at a webpage that states "2 non-stop flights are operating from Johannesburg to Sao Paolo today" and focuses on the fact that London is the most used stop for such flights. He spends MINUTES analyzing flights with stops and how it doesn't line up with globe earth.
- Skip ahead to 13:44, because he gives many minutes of unrelated stuff.
- 13:44 - he shows southern hemisphere routes on the north pole map and says it's a trick because NASA controls Australia's ATC system.

All of this boils down to asserting that no flat earth map exists and we don't really know where things are.
BUT - he just used the same technique to debunk a south-pole centrist. He's perfectly willing and able to find non-stop flights when it suits him, but forgets about it just a few minutes later.

Please, everyone on all sides of this issue, make sure you aren't blinding yourself - if you are using critical thinking in one discussion, don't throw it out in the next sentence.







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Flat Earth Community / Things I owe Tom Bishop
« on: December 12, 2017, 12:23:52 AM »
I have really enjoyed my time here on the forum, and I especially appreciate Tom Bishop because he is one of the few people willing to have an intelligent discussion from the flat earth side. I ask questions, and he answers them or points me to other threads that are relevant, and I really appreciate that.

One of the things I try (perhaps I don't always succeed) to do is, when he posts a reason why my data isn't sufficient, I don't want to complain about it, I want to go away until I find something to further the discussion.

Here are the things that I can recall off the top of my head that I still owe Tom:

1. Angular velocity of objects.
There is the Boeing vs. Cessna discussion - Tom posits that a Cessna flying low overhead has a much bigger change in angular velocity (very low when far away, very high when right overhead) than a jet flying much higher does, and that this can explain why the sun moves at a constant 15 degrees per hour instead of moving slower near the horizon.
The round-earth/traditional geometry view would be that the angular velocity depends only on the distance from the observer to the object and the tangential component of the velocity vector, but Tom has suggested that at larger distances that the change in angular velocity is diminished or eliminated.

What I Owe Tom
I've been trying to come up with an observation to demonstrate one way or the other. Some ideas include video recording a jet flying overhead and calculating out angular velocity changes. I haven't done this yet, so I stopped contributing on that thread.

2. Horizons rise to eye level
The round earth model would claim that the horizon is slightly greater than 90 degrees from the azimuth, moreso at higher altitudes. The flat earth model claims "horizons always rise to eye level" and thus that the angle from vertical to the horizon is always exactly 90 degrees.

What I Owe Tom
I'd like to make a cheap observational tool out of a goniometer, and measure the angles to horizons in two opposite directions at sea level and also from a reasonably high mountain. Observations of a different angle at the higher elevation would be something I'd love to bring to Tom and see what he says. I don't have this yet, so I haven't continued the conversation.

3. Bishop experiment
Tom claims he can see the Santa Cruz beaches from Pacific Grove. I live near Santa Cruz and could perform similar observations.

What I Owe Tom
I'd like to observe from Santa Cruz to Pacific Grove from just above the beach (say, from the wharf in Santa Cruz) and from a higher point (say, the lookout point in Henry Cowell state park) and see what difference, if any, there is in being able to see the beaches or other low features on the land across the Monterey Bay.

There may be others but I'm not remembering them.

Round earthers, if you can think of a time when Tom gave you a reason you need to refine your data, please point me at it and I'll try to add it to this.

Please do not belittle or taunt anyone in this thread - I legitimately want to make a catalog of desired data, and name calling and insults won't help from either side.

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I found this interesting project:


What they did was they made 24 hours of video of people around the world calling in on a video call and showing their sunrise, sunset, and possibly solar noon times, as well as observations of sun elevation (and thus latitude).

I'm curious if anybody has gone through the data and tabulated it?

Some people are looking for evidence of 12 hour long (roughly, remember the definition of sunrise and sunset favors daytime) day/night split on the equinox, and I thought this might be useful to think about.

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One explanation for why the Sun doesn't shrink at sunset, especially championed by Tom Bishop, is that perspective doesn't work at large distances.

Round earthers looking at Flat Earth theories often ask things like:
- Why does the sun not shrink as it recedes to the horizon?
- Why does the moon not shrink as it recedes to the horizon?

One answer I have seen is that perspective as we know it on earth-like scales "has never been proven" to work at larger scales. This includes ideas like:
- Objects past a certain distance will stop shrinking so much
- Objects past a certain distance will stop losing angular velocity so much (i.e. why does the sun cover 15 degrees per hour everywhere on the planet at all times)

What is the flat earth explanation, then, for why planets have widely varying angular diameters?

In the Round Earth model, for example, the distance from the Earth to Mars varies from 54.6 million kilometers to 401 million km. If perspective works the same at any distance, this would mean that Mars should be approximately 7.3 times as big in angular diameter when it's closest to Earth than when it's farthest away.

Actual observations of Mars' angular diameter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_diameter#Use_in_astronomy) indicate that it varies between
3.49″ – 25.13″ - a factor of 7.2, which is pretty close.

What's the Flat Earth explanation for this? It has to be the case that the distance to the planets is relatively constant, because you can perform the Eratosthenes experiment on any planet and show that if the earth is flat it's approximately 3000 miles. Are the planets like Mars somehow growing and shrinking? Is that the explanation?

Or are they actually orbiting the Sun on a scale compatible with round-earth theory, and perspective works exactly like the ancient Greeks said it would?

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I tried to ask this once before (https://forum.tfes.org/index.php?topic=7040.0), and it quickly devolved into arguments about whether a particular flat earth map is accurate, or what path the sun follows.

I'd like to respectfully ask round earth theorists to hold their tongue on this thread, because I don't want any arguments about maps - I just want to know about the concept of latitude and longitude and if flat earth theorists accept it or not.

My original question- do you or other flat earth theorists accept the definition of latitude and longitude or not?

For hundreds of years people have observed the following:
- Latitude is the angle from vertical the sun makes at noon on the equinox.
- Latitude is 90 degrees MINUS the angle from vertical the north star makes.
- Longitude is based on time offsets from GMT, and is the east/west angle the sun makes at GMT. I would understand if you can't accept this definition for anywhere that the sun is not visible at noon GMT, but that still would allow us to talk about longitude over about half of the planet.

Further, people have observed that for a given fixed point on earth, latitude and longitude are unchanging.

Here's an article on how to measure latitude and longitude:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/politics-policy-people/geography/diy-measuring-latitude-and-longitude

Here's a book from 1805 showing how to measure latitude and longitude from the sun, moon, and stars.

If you measure the latitude as navigators have done for hundreds of years, or longitude as they have measured for a lower number of hundreds of years, even if it doesn't mean the Earth is round, do you agree that latitude and longitude lines (of whatever shape) exist?

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Flat Earth Theory / What is the equinox?
« on: November 10, 2017, 03:12:36 AM »
In another thread it became apparent that there may be some disagreement about what the equinox is.

The equinox is the moment when the sun is directly overhead the equator.

On the equinox, at all places on earth where it is possible to observe sunrise and sunset, the sun rises directly to the east, and sets directly to the west. On all other days the sun rises and sets in some slightly different direction from due east/west.

The length of the day is approximately equal to the length of the night at all points on earth that can observe sunrise and sunset on the equinox.

Does anybody disagree with these statements?

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Flat Earth Theory / Flat Earth view of longitude?
« on: September 25, 2017, 01:00:11 AM »
I'm hoping to understand how flat earth theory treats longitude and latitude. I'm not looking for a debate, just an understanding of what flat earth theorists think of these concepts.

In round earth theory, latitude is the angle from vertical the sun is at local noon on the equinox. At the equator (latitude 0) the sun is directly overhead at noon. At the tropic, the sun is 23.5 degrees from overhead, and at the arctic circle its 66.5 degrees from overhead. Do flat earth theorists agree that you could measure these angles with a protractor or a sextant and agree with these figures?

Longitude is the angle from overhead that the sun is at noon GMT. If you are on the prime meridian, the sun is overhead at noon, if you are 15 degrees west, the sun is 15 degrees from overhead at noon GMT. Do flat earth theorists agree with this to any extent? In Europe at least, it should be possible to measure the angle of the sun exactly at noon GMT.

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Flat Earth Theory / Constant angular speed of the sun
« on: September 25, 2017, 12:08:15 AM »
Using an equatorial sundial you can demonstrate that the sun moves through 15 degrees every hour, no matter what time of day it is.
Example construction of such a sundial:


This has several implications, all of which are problematic for flat earth theory.

A) DISTANCE TO THE SUN
If you know the distance between two points at any given latitude between the two tropics (e.g, between say Ziguinchor, Senegal, and Gondar, Ethiopia at 12.6 degrees N - at most about 7400 km), you can calculate the exact distance to the sun. If you believe in longitude, you can just go by the angle difference in longitude. If you don't believe in longitude, you could send a team of two people, one to each location, and measure the exact time the sun passes over head as well as the angle the sun makes at the time the sun passes overhead the other location. Since that is exactly what longitude is, it will work out to the same value.

For this particular example, Google thinks you can drive from one to the other in about 7400km, and the longitude difference is 53.7 degrees. This means that at noon at Gondar the day the sun is directly overhead, the sun is at a 53.7 degree angle in Ziguinchor, and vice versa.

On a flat earth, this means you can draw a triangle where one leg is the line on the flat earth between the two locations, one leg is vertical from the location where the sun is directly overhead, and one leg is from the sun to the other location. This triangle would have angles of 53.7, 90, and 36.3 degrees. The length of the earth leg is at most the driving distance between the two cities, and the vertical distance from the earth to the sun at the location is the tangent of 36.3 degrees * at most 7400km, or about 3400 miles.

B) ANGULAR SIZE OF THE SUN
Because you now know how far the sun is from the earth, you can determine how much farther away the sun is at a time other than noon. In the above example, the sun would be 7400km/cos(36.3 degrees) at the location that is not directly under the sun, or about 5700 miles away. This is 1.7 times farther away than the sun is at noon, meaning that the angular size of the sun should be significantly smaller at the location where it is not noon.

However, the angular size of the sun is always about 1/2 of a degree, this means the sun's distance from you does not change significantly during the day, or the shape of the sun is weirdly shaped such that from different angles it appears larger. Such a weirdly shaped sun would be impossible to eclipse, for example.

C) PERSPECTIVE
Since the angular velocity of the sun is constant, in flat earth theory this means that the sun must be moving faster when it is farther away from you. However, if that were the case, people in different areas of the earth would see the sun moving more quickly overhead, because while it is 4 PM where you are, it's noon somewhere. Either the person where it is noon would see the sun moving faster, or you would see the sun moving slower.


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On Wednesday, September 20, 2017, I flew on Southwest Airlines flight 1293 from SJC to DAL. It happened to be flying over Texas right at local sunset. In addition, to the northwest of Dallas was a beautiful tall thunderstorm. I was able to take pictures of the following phenomena:

- The aircraft clearly illuminated by direct sunlight after local sunset
- A tall wall of clouds illustrating direct sunlight at the top, darkness at the bottom, and twilight illumination in between
- A high layer of clouds illuminated from beneath, and the shadow of a lower cloud cast upon the higher layer

Some of the photos were taken just a few minutes before local sunset (as seen from the ground at the location directly under the aircraft) and some just a few minutes after. The last two photos were taken approximately 5 minutes after local sunset and clearly show that the aircraft is illuminated by direct sunlight.

I view these photos as supporting Round Earth Theory and would be interested in other possible interpretations.

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Flat Earth Theory / Summer solstice in southern vs. northern hemisphere
« on: August 28, 2017, 05:19:49 AM »
If you go north of the Arctic circle, you can see the sun 24 hours a day near the summer solstice. This seems consistent with both round and flat earth models.

If you go south of the Antarctic circle, you can see the sun 24 hours a day near the (southern) summer solstice. This seems inconsistent with a flat earth model. How can you see the sun 24/7 in the south, when the sun is so much farther away on any of the flat earth maps?

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Flat Earth Theory / Star tracks in the southern hemisphere
« on: August 28, 2017, 05:16:01 AM »
If you take a time exposure photo at night, you see star tracks. In the northern hemisphere, these seem consistent with both flat earth and round earth models.
e.g. https://www.flickr.com/photos/65685660@N07/6779850168

But in the southern hemisphere, the star tracks appear to be circling a south celestial pole. In the flat earth model, shouldn't star tracks in the southern hemisphere be on an ever increasing radius?
http://oldweb.aao.gov.au/images/captions/aat006.html

What's the mechanism for southern hemisphere star tracks appearing to circle a pole?

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