I take my hat off to you. You've built an entire belief system based on a staggeringly varied set of criteria for your standards of evidence.
Do you not believe that the distance between LA and Tokyo is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000-6000 miles? If you do then it sounds like you've built an entire belief system based on a staggeringly varied set of criteria for your standards of evidence.
You won't believe a shred of evidence from the official Bing documentation
Yes I would. If their website said their calculation was based on a formula and someone set up a set of data points, say 100, which were based on the formula and compared those to 100 red pin measurements from Bing and all of them matched then I would believe that the red pin distances were based on the formula.
If Bing shared their source code and documentation about it then I believe the claims made by the Bing website.
If you Bing says the sky is yellow that is not evidence that the sky is yellow.
A claim made by a website on the internet <> evidence
because anybody could have written or changed it, whereas in reality it is likely that only a few dozen people in the world will have the necessary security permissions to permit that and they will all be subject to scrutiny from their peers and line managers, so the likelihood that this documentation is anything other than what Microsoft intend it to to be is non-existent.
I've already stated, multiple times, that I've developed websites at the request of the CEO which contained incorrect information. You don't seem to understand that this DOES happen.
By that standard, you can't ever believe anything anyone has ever written anywhere because anyone could have written it or changed it.
Like in school I'm reading these books and the teacher is demonstrating how the claims in the book are accurate. They are giving specific examples, drawing diagrams, and effectively DEMONSTRATING that what is in the book is at least somewhat accurate. Even so there are many documented cases where stuff makes it into the text books and gets taught by teachers which is 100% a LIE like w/ Germany and the holocaust. Or in North Korea where they teach, in textbooks, that children are kidnapped and forced into slavery by Americans.
But when it comes to the distance from LA to Tokyo, you can just get the necessary information to work it out online or from a couple of people you know or you just ask a flight attendant (so where do they get their information from?). This is your standard of evidence gathering now is it?
They get their information from a Pilot who gets his information from the speedometer. Based on this I believe the distance between Tokyo and LA is between 5000 and 6000 miles. Do you disagree?
You claim a non-stop flight time between 10 and 11 hours between the two airports. I just checked flightradar24 and quickly found a couple of examples, one was just over 11 hours, the other 9 hours 15. They both use a Boeing 777 which has a cruise speed in the range mach 0.84-0.89. Now cruise speed varies with altitude and temperature and ATC may assign a common speed for separation in busy periods, so the aircraft might not be able to fly the speed they ideally want, but lets work some approximate figures out.
Cruising at 40,000 feet, mach 0.84 equates to 554mph and with a 9 hour 15 flight time, that gives a distance of 5,125 miles.
Cruising at 30,000 feet, mach 0.86 equates to 583pmh and with an 11 hour flight time, that gives a distance of 6,413 miles.
So that's 5,769 miles +/- 644 miles, i.e. +/- 11%
Plus or minus eleven percent! That's a level of accuracy you're comfortable with? The answer is certainly correct, the actual distance is 5487 miles, so well inside the range just calculated.
On those flights did the Captain announce the cruising speed or are you just making one up? If the captain did not announce a cruising speed did you ask the flight attendant what the cruising speed was or are you just making it up?
Now lets have a look at Bing maps. You've used this for 15 years, never knew it had a distance measuring tool ("red pin"). Took me all of 5 minutes to discover that and I'm not a Bing user.
If you're not a Bing user then how are you using Bing to measure red pin distances?
You start off saying you trust Bing maps, now you've backtracked somewhat and you trust just the driving and walking distances. Out of interest, how do you measure walking distances, surely not with a GPS device?
There are many different ways. You can use a rolling measuring tape, GPS, you could walk along a road where you can use an odometer, you can use a bicycle odometer.
But Bing maps covers the whole world, most of which is covered in water, so what you are really saying is you trust Bing maps for the 30% of the earth which is dry land, but only the bits which have marked roads or tracks you can measure.
You claim without offering any evidence whatsoever that Bing maps distances (i.e. the ones you trust) are based on real world distances which include taking elevation into account. Where do you get this from?
From comparing predicted driving distances to my odometer when driving up and down steep hills in San Francisco multiple times.
Of course none of this proves anything about how Bing actually goes about calculating driving or walking distances, but it certainly suggests that simply using the "red pin" method to calculate each segment of a path is giving the same answers.
And we've already established to everyone's satisfaction apart from yours that "red pin" is Haversine and Haversine is based solely on spherical trigonometry.
Show me one shred of evidence other than "This website says it so it must be true". Please keep in mind that I've personally developed websites at the request of the CEO which contained incorrect information. You don't seem to understand that this DOES happen.
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