Before compasses celestial navigation was used. The North Star is to the North, and East and West are in relation to the North Star.
Absolutely, and that exactly makes my point. During pre-compass voyages, you'd use the stars and presumably have to re-adjust your course each night since you can't see the stars you're trying to follow in the day time (other than sailing straight towards them and assuming its still straight of course, not constantly curving around.)
Then along come compasses, and sailors who are used to navigating by the stars suddenly see that to make a truly straight aim towards north, they actually need to constantly veer their ship slightly curved, because according to you, that's what they would need to do in order to circumnavigate, constantly curve around the world without realizing that they're doing it.
So while you've identified the pre-compass method of navigation accurately, you have done nothing to explain the transition between the two not revealing a huge change in people's perspective on the matter.
GPS has not been shown to be accurate. There is good reason to believe that the distances it provides is not accurate. We are talking about this in the irline thread.
Now THAT is a bold claim, sir!
I think I saw the airplane thread you're talking about, and while you might find the math of interlocking triangles somehow very compelling, they don't mean anything to me. Let me tell you why:
Anecdotal evidence, pure and simple. You can disregard it since I know anecdotes aren't science, but I am somebody who has a lousy sense of direction overall. When GPS came along, it changed my life, allowing me to navigate easily and accurately anywhere I was going, from cross-country drives to every short trip. I can verify for myself without any discrepancy trip after accurate trip after accurate trip. Now to be fair, I haven't pushed this to circumnavigation, but at least right now I have very little reason to believe that the program which can guide me unerringly for 6000 miles on my phone is somehow going to completely break down and fritz out if I try to go another twelve thousand.
How do you explain that my GPS is accurate to a 6000-mile journey, yet would somehow stop being accurate if I went just a bit further?