181

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Wiki article of the day: LM Closer Look

« on: May 22, 2019, 04:58:20 PM »

I'm slowly starting to realise that the wiki isn't an attempt at a fact-based repository of information supporting FET, it's just an opinion piece dressed up as something more. Tom won't take your pictures and evidence into account, as he's already seen a picture of the lunar lander, made up his mind, and stuck it on the wiki page.

182

Flat Earth Community / Re: So what if the earth is flat?

« on: May 22, 2019, 04:51:36 PM »

People are interested in finding out the truth, that's what. The earth being flat would make practically 0 difference to anyone's life, but this is the kind of thing that really interests some people.

183

Flat Earth Community / Re: Has the flat earth movement flatlined?

« on: May 22, 2019, 04:43:58 PM »

My main experience of the flat earth scene is from youtube (🤮). I feel like I used to be able to watch videos by FE'ers that were at least thought-out. Now it seems like every upload is just a 2.5 hour stream where they shout at each other. The very few well-thought-out videos are debuked pretty quickly (Mount San Jacinto anyone?).

So yeah, it's certainly going downhill on youtube. Not sure if there are many other popular places that they hang out.
Case in point:

184

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Problems with the Heliocentric Model

« on: May 21, 2019, 08:05:11 AM »

Since you mentioned it, what the heck is a spacetime metric?

185

Flat Earth Community / Re: How do FE-researchers account for limited instrumental resolution?

« on: May 20, 2019, 11:16:23 PM »

Presumably in the same way as non-FE researchers

186

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Solar Eclipse Path Moving in Wrong Direction

« on: May 17, 2019, 11:24:41 PM »

If the Earth is static in your image...

The earth isn't static.  It's rotating at 1000 mph.

If the Moon is moving faster or slower in relation to the Earth's surface, there is an issue either way.

If the Earth is rotating faster than the  Moon, leaving it behind, then the Moon will see the Earth rotating with the East Coast of the United States oncoming to it. And the shadow will begin in the East.

I think this is a really hard problem to visualise, so I whipped up an image to help. This is an incredibly exaggerated version of the globe description of an eclipse.
Here we have the Moon with a lower angular velocity than the Earth, but a larger linear velocity. Yellow lines represent the Sun, and the black box represents shaded region.
Hopefully you can see in my image that the shadow moves from west to east, and the Moon sets in the west. The Earth in my image is rotating towards the east.

187

Flat Earth Projects / Re: Wiki correction: AN/DN

« on: May 17, 2019, 10:22:17 PM »

However, according to the following definition, the nodes should be at first and third quarter when the Moon crosses the plane of the sun, as adopted to the image and as stated in the OP.

The nodes of the moon's orbit precess over the course of about 18.6 years, so the new and full phases of the moon do not always occur at the nodes (otherwise there would be solar and lunar eclipses every month).

The ascending and descending nodes are completely unrelated to the phases of the moon. They only line up twice per year.

188

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Salt Lake City Observations - Need Help

« on: May 17, 2019, 10:00:13 PM »

The quality is simply due to perception of the individual viewer is my point.

Any quantitative change, as I wrote earlier, truly does affect quality.

What you perceive as negligible could appear as having more substantial impact to another.

That is not a dig.

Qualitative does not imply subjective.
As an example: back to my ball-behind-the-wall thought experiment. As the ball is rolling, you could replace the observer with an imaginary "ball detector", that can tell you objective facts about what happens to the ball such as "is the ball in my field of view?", or "is the ball partially hidden?". If you just had this detector, you'd see that the ball is visible, then partially hidden, and then totally hidden as it rolls behind a wall. It gives you no quantitative information about the ball, but its results are both qualitative and objective.

Now take what I've said across the past few comments and apply it to the sunset, and come up with your own conclusion: does refraction alter the qualitative behavior of a sunset? Personally I can see no way in which refraction of a fraction of a degree would cause a qualitative change in the sunset. If you disagree, I would love you to tell me why.

Sidenote: large qualitative changes can easily cause quantitative changes. If we go back to the thought experiment, you could change the velocity of the ball to zero, which would certainly be a qualitative change.

189

Flat Earth Community / Re: Does the lay Flat Earther understand Physics? Or are just in to conspiracies?

« on: May 17, 2019, 07:12:27 AM »

Questions 261, 273 and 299 are absurdly pure ignorance, no answer.   There are few continents in this world, each one has its own great mountain, some very well known; Everest, K2, Namcha.  The Aconcagua was even depicted on a Disney movie about South America, the small animated airplane trying to overcome it.  Anyone that paid attention in science class remember the name Anemometer.  Christiaan Barnard the first heart transplant surgeon, had plenty of publishing on the media, impossible no one knows his name.

I didn't know the answer to any of these questions. I don't have an interest in mountains and I haven't seen this movie about this mountain, I don't remember being taught about anemometers in science class, and I don't remember reading any news articles about the first heart transplant. Even if I have come across these before, is there a good reason that I should have committed these names to memory? I don't think that not being able to recall useless facts about topics I have no interest in is "ignorance".

190

Flat Earth Community / Re: Does the lay Flat Earther understand Physics? Or are just in to conspiracies?

« on: May 16, 2019, 09:53:23 PM »

Spherical, where did you get your statistics? Most of those things are facts taught in elementary school, which according to Our World in Data is attended by 90% of the world.

Not sure about spherical's stats, but I think this is an interesting article.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-012-0307-9
It's basically a general knowledge quiz. Only 89% of participants knew "the name of the long sleep that animals go through during the entire winter".

And to answer OP: I came across the flat earth on youtube, the proportion of arguments that are not just a manifestation of not understanding basic physics is shockingly low.

191

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Salt Lake City Observations - Need Help

« on: May 16, 2019, 03:37:38 PM »

Thanks.

Now the entirety of your point is predictably shown as purely subjective.

Yes, the points I've made so far have been subjective. The post I was originally replying to was subjective, and your comments have also been entirely subjective. I really don't see how that lets you sidestep the discussion. If you'd like to make a meaningful contribution to the discussion instead of getting in a quick dig, that would be great.

Can we do a thought experiment? Image a ball rolling across your field of vision such that at some point it rolls behind a wall, and is hidden by the wall. Now repeat this, except some refraction (or whatever, the mechanism doesn't really matter) means that the ball appears to be 1 degree behind its "true" position. Would this meaningfully change any of the qualitative behaviour of the ball being hidden by the wall? I don't think it would. The ball will still disappear leading-side first, it will still be hidden at the same rate etc. The only difference would be that it happens slightly later.
Do you think this is meaningfully different to the sunset case?

192

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity is not constant so why is acceleration?

« on: May 16, 2019, 06:42:01 AM »

Air pressure does not only affect scales trivially. See the following illustration and text:

https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/fair-or-foul-how-to-use-a-barometer/

Air pressure decreases as altitude increases.

Atmospheric pressure — or barometric pressure — is simply the weight of the air at ground level. It’s a little easier to understand when you think about the concept of water pressure first. As you get deeper in water, the pressure increases. This is because as you descend, the built up weight of the water on top of you increases. In 1 foot of water, you have the weight of that foot of water pressing down on you. In 2 feet of water, you have the weight of an extra foot of water pressing on you. It’s quite logical, really.

That seems like quite trivial to me - the pressure applied to the scales from the air is just the measured air pressure. One could account for this quite easily.
Does the process of zeroing your scale before measurement not already account for this effect? I'll sit and think about it.

EDIT: I've thought about it some more (and read spherical's post), and I've realised that the picture you linked is in an article talking about barometers. Scales don't behave like that in real life. Air pressure doesn't only push downwards, it pushes in all directions.

193

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Salt Lake City Observations - Need Help

« on: May 15, 2019, 03:55:55 PM »

Looks like it's disappearing into a tree or a hill, not the horizon.

Not to be seen again until behind me 12 hours later. Where'd it go?

Here's one at the horizon. Hey, where did it go?

The Round Earth Theory states that the sun is already under the horizon all throughout that animation via an illusion.



You are showing us what is claimed to be illusion. Pretty odd that you would use an illusion to show us that there is not an illusion occurring at sunset. Screaming that there is no illusion while simultaneously showing us one from your model makes your argument rather invalid.

Refraction causing the sun to appear above the horizon after it's already physically behind it is a quantitative change in exactly when the sunset occurs, and does very little to change the qualitative behaviour of the sunset. This discussion is about the qualitative behaviour of the sunset, not small quantitative changes in time of sunset or apparent position of the sun.

I would submit anything that changes or causes an appearance of change in quantity certainly affects the perceived quality of the thing or things perceived.

I said "very little" qualitative change, not zero. Small quantitative changes generally lead to extremely small qualitative changes. My point is that the sun being perceived as being some fraction of a degree away from its "real" position is a small quantitative change, and does not lead to any significant qualitative change in the sunset, certainly not enough to invalidate any claims that Tom has claimed that it does.

You could take this argument to its extreme and say that technically in any observation, the light is travelling through some non-perfect vacuum and so it distorted by some tiny amount before reaching your measurement device, therefore your observation is invalid.

194

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Gravity is not constant so why is acceleration?

« on: May 15, 2019, 02:52:27 PM »

The typical criticism is that the weight of the air, air pressure, changes by latitude and altitude. The Poles are of higher pressure than the equator. Sea level is at higher pressure than higher altitudes.

Can you reference scale weight experiments that have taken place in a vacuum at different locations?

Presumably one could account for varying air pressure rather than doing the experiment in a vacuum. I think the calculation is just Archimedes' Principle.

Alternatively, maybe some back-of-the-envelope calculations could quantify how much of an effect air pressure would have on an object's weight:
1m^3 of steel is 8000kg, and 1m^3 of air is 1.225kg at STP.
The resulting weight of the block according to Archimedes would be
(8000-1.225)=7998.775 kg.
If we now double the pressure, we have 2.45kg of air displaced, so the weight is now
(8000-2.45)=7997.55 kg,
which is a decrease of ~0.015% in the measured weight.

The actual measured discrepancy is apparently ~(9.76 - 9.83) m/s^-2 = ~0.7%, so even in this very generous case where we considered doubling the pressure, we're missing an order and a half of magnitude from the measured value. Unless I did something dumb in the maths, I'm confident in saying that changing air pressure cannot possibly be the primary cause of this discrepancy.

195

Flat Earth Investigations / Re: Salt Lake City Observations - Need Help

« on: May 15, 2019, 12:31:02 PM »

Looks like it's disappearing into a tree or a hill, not the horizon.

Not to be seen again until behind me 12 hours later. Where'd it go?

Here's one at the horizon. Hey, where did it go?

The Round Earth Theory states that the sun is already under the horizon all throughout that animation via an illusion.



You are showing us what is claimed to be illusion. Pretty odd that you would use an illusion to show us that there is not an illusion occurring at sunset. Screaming that there is no illusion while simultaneously showing us one from your model makes your argument rather invalid.

Refraction causing the sun to appear above the horizon after it's already physically behind it is a quantitative change in exactly when the sunset occurs, and does very little to change the qualitative behaviour of the sunset. This discussion is about the qualitative behaviour of the sunset, not small quantitative changes in time of sunset or apparent position of the sun.

196

Flat Earth Theory / Re: Universal Acceleration - how does the ISS maintain an orbit?

« on: May 15, 2019, 09:17:35 AM »

The exact same way literally anything maintains an orbit. Great to see that you've completely altered your question, though.

How would something maintain an orbit above a flat plane? I think we've all agreed that the ISS is moving relative to the plane, and due to the fact that it stays above the plane it must have some acceleration that keeps it "circling" above. This acceleration is parallel to the plane of the flat earth, and I think we can say pretty safely that a man-made engine would not be able to sustain this kind of acceleration without constant refuelling. Where does it get this acceleration from?