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Messages - JocelynSachs

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Looks good to me :)

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 19, 2017, 10:22:14 AM »
Read this section of the wikipedia page on twilight and see if you can wrap your head around the fact that THE SUN DOES NOT TRAVEL STRAIGHT ACROSS THE HORIZON IN MOST CASES:

Either my troll detector is broken, or yours is :)

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 10:40:40 PM »
And how do you move position and get any further from the centre, when the sun is 93 million miles away? No matter where you are, you are always in the centre on a round earth.

Exactly. Which is why the sun always appears to travel an angle of 15 degrees per hour. No matter where you are. No idea why Curious Squirrel is trying to prove the earth is flat all of a sudden but he's doing a terrible job of it.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 10:15:35 PM »
If on  around earth you aligned a sundial with the polar axis, and you lived North of the equator, you'd often never even get a shadow on your sundial. The sun would be underneath the dial 6 months of the year. Try harder.



Nope.

That isn't aligned with the polar axis, is it?
[/quote]

The bit I was talking about is.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 09:57:52 PM »
If on  around earth you aligned a sundial with the polar axis, and you lived North of the equator, you'd often never even get a shadow on your sundial. The sun would be underneath the dial 6 months of the year. Try harder.



Nope.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 09:40:13 PM »
No, go and look up the definitions yourself. Understand what those things are. I pasted a big blue diagram above already. Its not hard.

Get two nice straight garden canes and a sunny day.

Push one garden cane into the soil such that it has no visible shadow (pointing at the sun)

Wait 1 hour.

Push the second cane into the soil such that it crosses the other one and has no visible shadow (pointing at the sun)

Measure the angle between the canes. It will be 15 degrees. If you prefer, wait two hours - it'll be 30 degrees. Or three hours - it'll be 45 degrees. It doesn't matter where you are on earth, and so long as the sun is visible and not covered with clouds at both ends of the experiment, it doesn't matter when you do it either.

The timings you are talking about, with the aid of your excellent diagram, are degrees measured vertically above the horizon, not the angle across the sky the sun appears to travel during a given time.

As for the sundial: you are quite correct that angled fins distort the path of the shadow. As I mentioned earlier: the other type of sundial, which is angled to align with the polar axis and thus present an undistorted shadow projection, has the hours spaced 15 degrees apart.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 04:48:22 PM »
No. A google search will show you ornamental sundials, not functioning ones. The sun does not move 15 degrees from east to west from where ever you view it. You are looking at a sundial. It is showing where the shadow falls. That shadow is not uniformly 15 degrees because the sun doesn't travel uniformly 15 degrees per hour from east to west. It is amazing that you don't even believe your eyes when entrenched in your round earth beliefs.

You asked if the lines on the sundial you posted were spaced at 15 degrees. They are. If you picked the wrong image to illustrate your point, that's hardly my fault.

You're correct that sundials must be calibrated for latitude and longitude (the angle of the entire assembly in ones like this:



The latitude calibration is the same as for an equatorial telescope mount: the assembly is tilted such that the shadow-casting rod is in line with the polar axis. On the type of sundial shown above, where the shadow is cast upon a circular arc centred on the rod, the hours are marked at regular 15 degree intervals. The same way my motorised telescope's RA axis is very precisely geared to turn it at a constant 15 degrees per hour to track stars (works on the sun, too).

I've no idea what that other composite picture is you posted, but it's not a time-lapse.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Sundial
« on: December 18, 2017, 11:46:04 AM »
I get 29.2 seconds as well.

If you're 100 metres from the road and you're facing 80 degrees from perpendicular in order to look straight at a car, that car is:

100 * Tan(80) = 567.12 metres down the road.

If you turn to watch it, then when you're facing 70 degrees from the perpendicular, the car is:

100 * Tan(70) = 274.75 metres down the road.

Since the car is travelling at 10m/s, it will have taken (576.12-274.75)/10 = approx 29.2 seconds to travel that distance.

For the second question, it's Tan(20) and Tan(10). I get approx 1.88 seconds.

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Are those hour lines all 15 degrees?

Yes, they are. The spacing of the numerals around the outer edge is irregular because the centre of the rays isn't at the centre of the outer circle, so they are more bunched up where they cross the nearside edge than when they reach the far edge. But the rays themselves are at 15 degree intervals. A quick google image search will show you examples of sundials where the fin is central to the outer circle, and on those you can see the numerals are evenly spaced.

(Edit to substitute 'approx' for tilde, as the font here doesn't seem to display tilde properly and shows it as minus)

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: FET's Credit Score
« on: December 13, 2017, 04:36:44 PM »
To be fair, the “my stomach feels that I’m falling” proof is no proof at all.  Could be your stomach is merely no longer feeling the effect of being pushed up.

Exactly correct. Being pushed by something as it accelerates feels exactly the same as being pulled into it by gravity.

My gripe is with the claim that when you step off a chair you 'become inert', presumably meaning 'cease accelerating'. As soon as you say that, you prejudge the issue. Going on to say that you then 'see the earth rise up' is circular logic.

I think, based on the usage of the word 'inert', that Tom believes the sensation you have when you step off something is uniquely correlated with straight-line travel with no forces applied. But it isn't. Our sensation of weight or weightlessness is not - cannot be - engendered by forces that act on our whole body equally. We could endure - would not even notice if our eyes were shut - an acceleration of 10G, or 100G, or 1000G applied equally to every particle of our bodies. Their relative positions and the forces between them would remain unchanged; we would feel nothing. What we feel as weight is the uneven application of force requiring the internal structures of our bodies to take the strain and redress the balance. We would most certainly, if briefly, feel a 1000G acceleration if the soles of our feet were prevented from undergoing it by the ground.


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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Shadow Object Shown to be...
« on: December 12, 2017, 03:26:40 PM »
Here is a pic of the total eclipse. The solar corona is visible. It is clearly visible that the Sun radiates energy in all directions.

For clarity, might I suggest "Each point on the surface of the sun radiates energy in all directions", because Tom's version of the sun radiates energy in all directions too.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Shadow Object Shown to be...
« on: December 12, 2017, 10:37:10 AM »
I'm pretty sure Tom was suggesting that light only leaves the surface of the sun in a direction perpendicular to its surface at that point. Which is clearly, outrageously untrue.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: FET's Credit Score
« on: December 12, 2017, 10:29:21 AM »
The existence of a Shadow Object is empirically observed. We see a shadow, therefore there is an object to cause it. The existence of the Shadow Object is a certainty.

Technically, we see a change in the quantity and spectrum of light reflected from the moon. A sweeping change in its surface albedo would achieve the same effect. Hey - it's a theory, and we see it happen, so it must be evidence, right?

In any case, according to your wiki the Shadow Object is definitely not the earth. There is no independent verification that such an object exists. Your wiki comes up with (unconvincing) excuses* as to why that might be but that doesn't really matter: as things stand, FET owes us a Shadow Object.

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There is no indication that this Shadow Object is the earth itself, and the Round Earth Theory has not provided evidence to show that it is.

Hang a ping-pong ball from the ceiling in a room with a bare bulb (ideally a dimmable one to reduce bounce-back of light from the walls). Now position your head so that you can see a 'full moon'. Observe that when you do this your head tends to get in the way and cast a shadow on the ball. Note how similar the effect is to a real eclipse. This is RET (sort of; the relative sizes and distances are way out, which is why it's easy to see full moons and eclipses are relatively rare)

Now stand directly beneath the ball and look up. Note that you don't see a 'full moon'. Get someone else to move something between the bulb and the moon to simulate a 'shadow object' eclipse. Observe that it looks absolutely nothing like a real eclipse. This is FET.

For bonus points, move the ping-pong ball around in a small circle (Small compared to its distance from the light). Stays about the same brightness, doesn't it? That's RET. Now move it in a large circle that brings it considerably closer to and further away from the sun. Changes in brightness a lot, doesn't it? That's FET - and it doesn't happen in real life.

For bonus bonus points, stand under the ball and then walk around in a circle centered midway between bulb and ball, so that you alternately pass beneath the ball and the bulb. This simulates the orbits of moon and sun in FET for someone at the equator on a night when the moon is full. Keep your eyes on the ball. Notice how profoundly the 'phase of the moon' changes over the course of one 'night' (doesn't happen IRL), including a half-moon pointing 'north' (doesn't happen IRL either).

For bonus bonus bonus points, draw some craters on the ball and repeat the above experiment. Notice how you can see very different craters at different times (sometimes the 'front' facing the sun, sometimes the sides, sometimes the underneath) as you observe the ball from different angles (doesn't happen IRL) unless you get a friend to deliberately tilt and turn the ball to keep it pointing at you.

For bonus bonus bonus bonus points, get a second friend to follow you around the circle 180 degrees out of phase and confirm that when the first friend tries to keep the moon pointing at you, it gyrates wildly from his perspective (doesn't happen IRL)

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Per the effect that stops the sun from shrinking, this effect has been documented with several examples which directly shows the effect in action. There is an effect in nature, which is observed to cause light sources in the far field to be consistent in size.

Hey, now I get to use the term 'false equivalence'! Cool.

On a clear day the sun maintains a sharp, crisp outline pretty much all the way from horizon to horizon, during which time, according to FET, it can easily halve and then redouble its distance to an observer. This is completely uncharacteristic of the effects of diffusion upon a receding object, which manifest first as a soft-edged glow around a light source that still has a (visibly shrinking) distinct edge, strengthening until the light-source is reduced to an indistinct, soft-edged featureless blob. By way of contrast, it is possible to observe sun-spots at any time of the day; if the sun retained its visual size by getting blurrier, this would be impossible.

Also, the moon remains crisp and sharp and detailed and the same visual size from horizon to horizon on clear nights, while (according to FET) it halves and then redoubles its distance from us. Not possible to explain away with diffusion.

So no; sorry: FET still owes us weird distortions and discontinuities of perspective.

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The Universal Accelerator is also empirically derived. When we step off of a chair and watch the surface of the earth carefully we can see the mechanism of an upwardly moving earth. We see that the earth moves upwards. A mechanism is directly observed, in contradiction to the mechanisms of "bendy space" and "puller particle" which have never been observed.

We've already been over this.

1. You agreed that my alternative interpretation (I see myself fall) is equivalent.
2. We can't see UA, or 'the' UA. All of the matter we can inspect has weight, therefore, all of the matter we can inspect is not itself subject to UA (not upward UA, anyway). Your interpretation requires a layer of 'special matter', which we've never seen, uniquely subject to an unknown force (that we've never seen either) and lifting everything else with it. Ergo, we have never seen 'the mechanism' of UA. FET owes us that layer.
3. Meanwhile, FET also requires CG to influence terrestrial matter in order to explain observed variations in measurements of UA. How does it work? Bendy space? Puller particles? Doesn't matter, right? We observe its effects, so some mechanism must be there. RET asks for no more than FET here - less, in fact, because FET requires a second kind of 'special matter' to exert CG - something else it owes us. Mote and plank, sir; mote and plank.
4. You've specifically said the distribution of sources of CG is unknown. Therefore, you can't even claim to know in what proportions and directions UA and CG are acting upon any given object. For all you know, the UA part could be zero. Or downward, counteracting excess CG! Right? To claim otherwise is to make a definite statement about the distribution of CG.

To summarise, FET is in the hole to the tune of:

1 x Shadow Object (not the earth).
1 x justification for the phases and appearance of the moon looking nothing like FET predicts
1 x weird discontinuous perspective that first pinches things to nothing in a finite distance and then scales them back up to a fixed visual size.
1 x justification for the (indeterminate) value of UA not being zero
2 x types of special matter, one lifting everything else and the other exerting CG.
plus a bunch of conspiracies and a weird correlation between interest in astronomy and being shit at maths.

And to reiterate: when I say 'owes us', I mean 'these are things FET obliges us to believe in that are not independently verified or which violate well-established, tried-and-tested principles.'


*Unconvincing excuses for the shadow object not being visible:

"It's too close; the sun washes it out" - we can see Mercury and Venus transit the sun. At its brightest, we can see Venus in full daylight. With a telescope, you can even see Jupiter in the daytime (done it myself). Moreover, a 5-10 mile object passing 'close' in front of a ~30 mile wide lightsource would, from the perspective of something thousands of miles away, block no more than 12% of the light; a barely perceptible dimming. The 'puppet-show hand' analogy is another false equivalence unless (as you say in another thread) light only leaves the sun's surface at 90 degrees. Which it clearly doesn't because, y'know, we can see it not doing that.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Shadow Object Shown to be...
« on: December 12, 2017, 12:43:15 AM »
The diagram assumes certain p[r]operties of the sun. If the light from the sun were exiting its surface in a direction that was only outwards from its center, like a point light source, the shadow would be solid.

point light source!?!?!?!? After years of "studying" FE theory that's what you have?!?!?! point light source... ... ... ...

I won't waste our time in asking for any proof to support that supposition. Instead, I'll suggest that you already have in your possession the empirical evidence (which FEers seem to prize and cherish, after all) to refute your own proposition. You have, I'm somewhat certain, actually seen the sun, or at least a photo of it (taken by an FEer). Did it appear as a point source? In my own experience it almost never does.  :)

Nowhere did I say that the sun was a pointed light source. Pay attention to the details next time.

Well, you did suggest that light might be leaving the sun as it would leave a point light-source: only directly outward from the centre. And since we see things based on the light leaving them, that would mean we would SEE something that looked like a point light-source. Yes? A point on the sun's surface towards the edge, as we looked at it, would not be pointing straight at us, and would therefore appear dark to us (well, sky-coloured; dark as in 'not the blinding brightness of the sun'). Only the very centre, as we looked at it, would be aimed in our direction and appear bright. Hence, the appearance of a point light source.

14
Flat Earth Theory / Re: FET's Credit Score
« on: December 12, 2017, 12:38:17 AM »
The majority of a consumer credit score (in the US) is based on revolving debt to credit ratio.

I’d also suggest looking up what an analogy is and what a false equivalence is.

Well, in simple terms, here in the UK you build up creditworthiness by borrowing and repaying. I struggled to get a mortgage when I first wanted to buy a house, even though I'd always been in credit and with a decent job, purely because I hadn't borrowed money before.

As for the latter:

Banks on the whole lend more readily to those with a history of borrowing and repaying than to those who never borrow at all, and much more than to those with who have already borrowed without repayment.

We lend much more credence to the as-yet unfulfilled predictions of a theory if it has made predictions that have borne fruit in the past. We point our telescopes where it directs, and expect to see something.

If a theory has never made useful predictions before, we are more cautious.

If a theory has produced nothing useful, made a string of unfulfilled prophecies, and demands - with no justification other than it's necessary for the theory to be correct - profound discontinuities, modifications or exemptions from well-tested rules and principles... why should we lend it any credence at all?

Sorry; I'm not seeing the false equivalence here. Seems like a decent analogy to me.

15
Flat Earth Theory / FET's Credit Score
« on: December 11, 2017, 10:36:21 PM »
Most people understand how a credit score works. Your credit score determines how much debt banks think you're good for. You build up a good credit score by borrowing responsibly and making the payments. I think this concept extends usefully to theories, including FET.

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As pointed out by Tom before, the evidence for the shadow object is the lunar eclipse. There has to be something blocking the light of the sun, and since it can't be the Earth or any of the planets, there must be something else up there that has never been seen doing it. Ergo, shadow object and evidence for said object.

This quote from another thread bothered me when I read it, and the concept of a credit score helps me articulate why.

The lunar eclipse is not evidence of a Shadow Object. Rather, FET requires one. It has borrowed one - or to put it another way, it owes us a Shadow Object. Until we verify its existence, FET is in debt.

In much the same way, gravitational theory diverged from observation to the tune of one Neptune, and later a Pluto. But it already had a good credit rating and paid its debts once more: we found those planets. For these reasons and the many other useful and accurate predictions it has made, gravitational theory has built up a AAA rating.

FET, by way of contrast, has zero credit rating. It has achieved nothing useful. All it does is borrow. It owes us a Shadow Object, it owes us perspective that pinches things flat within a few miles but allows the sun and moon to double their thousands-of-miles distance from us without changing size at all. It owes us a moon where the bright half points north. It owes us something the earth rests upon that's accelerating upwards. Its ledger is nothing but red. Nothing required by FET has any independent verification.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Shadow Object Shown to be...
« on: December 11, 2017, 05:02:35 PM »
I’ve never understood how a good zetetic can support the idea of a Shadow Object in the first place.  Zeteticism is supposed to be all about observation, but the wiki admits “The shadow object is never seen because it orbits close to the sun” (emphasis added)
As pointed out by Tom before, the evidence for the shadow object is the lunar eclipse. There has to be something blocking the light of the sun, and since it can't be the Earth or any of the planets, there must be something else up there that has never been seen doing it. Ergo, shadow object and evidence for said object.

Is it, though?

If I start with an unsafe assumption, and then do nothing but pile on excuses for why it doesn't look like my assumption was correct, can it really be said that my observations constitute evidence?

For instance, if I were in a windowless room with the door closed and the light off, I might hypothesise that it's night-time. Suppose the door opens and I can see a bright sunny day outside. If I respond to this by saying "My hypothesis requires there to be an elaborate 3D projection system outside my room," can I really claim what I'm observing is evidence of the existence of that projection system?

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: The Shadow Object Shown to be...
« on: December 11, 2017, 04:35:57 PM »
The diagram assumes certain poperties of the sun. If the light from the sun were exiting its surface in a direction that was onky outwards from its center, like a point light source, the shadow would be solid.

...and the sun would appear to be a bright point rather than a bright disc. Like, as you say, a point light source.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: Flat-Earth "gravity" - explain
« on: December 11, 2017, 12:27:38 PM »
According to FE theory, the Earth is a plane accelerating upwards at a rate of 9.8ms^-2.  This will create the effect of gravity. 

Not quite. According to FET, there is something we can't see beneath the earth accelerating upwards, and the earth is resting on it.

(My money is on a really big frying pan, and the earth is just about done on one side...)

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: I have been all around this planet
« on: December 10, 2017, 07:10:34 PM »
If you travel a lot, especially to different latitudes, the easiest way to see that the earth is spherical is to look at the stars.

You'll notice that wherever you are, constellations look the exact same shape. From this you know that they must be very, very distant compared to the distances you are travelling around the world (because the thousands of miles you've travelled are not enough to give you a significantly different viewpoint on them).

If you travel to different latitudes, you'll notice the pole star appears at very different angles from the vertical.

The only explanation for these two observations is that 'up' is not the same direction at different places on the planet.

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Flat Earth Theory / Re: UA is redundant in FET
« on: December 09, 2017, 03:58:54 PM »
Right, terminology mistake.

OP: Are you proposing that all the force we think of as gravity is celestial gravitation, and that none of it is UA?

I'm saying that there is no need or empirical justification for UA in FET.

I strongly suspect, based on the choice of terminology (universal acceleration) and the deafening silence that has greeted my last few posts, that its proponents have never followed the logic of it through to the point of realising none of the matter we see can be undergoing UA. All matter we can inspect has weight, and weight (absent gravitational effects) is the result of something that isn't innately accelerating being pushed by something that is.

Meanwhile, FET invokes CG to act upon terrestrial matter and explain tides and other phenomena. Empirically, it is not possible to attribute any particular proportion of an object's weight to CG. Heck, I could just as easily claim that UA is acting downwards to alleviate hundreds of gees of CG - or sideways for that matter.

So while it's possible to imagine that somewhere below us, a force is acting upon matter we can't see and pushing everything else ahead of it, that's pure speculation and quite unnecessary.

I agree with the opening post. Instead of reaping all the confusion caused by UA, why not just postulate that the flat earth is many times bigger than our known world so that the gravity "lines" are for all intents and purposes parallel and vertical for us (in other words, so that gravity acts essentially straight down for all of us)?

This is part of the reasoning behind the infinite flat Earth theory.

That's not necessary either. A distant, powerful source of CG below the earth would suffice.

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