Offline Roger G

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #360 on: November 12, 2017, 12:18:02 AM »
Hi All,

I had a day off today and after looking at ISS videos and info last night, came across some interesting videos and posts from FE people. Never having taken any interest whatsoever in flat earth theory I came to this website. I read some of the other threads before hitting on this one and how fascinating and entertaining it has been to read through the entire thread.

I have no particular scientific or mathematical background so some of the arguments are over my head, however, I spent many years as a gliding instructor with over 2000 instructional flights and flights of long duration and distance for personal enjoyment. As part of that, I taught students in basic navigation, meteorology and aerodynamics. I have also had a lifelong interest in all things aviation and spaceflight related and an interest in astronomy with an 8" reflector to aid my interest. In addition I have also been an amateur sailor for over 40 years with many offshore trips of varying distances both pre and post GPS.  Oh and I should also mention that I have been a professional photographer and videographer for over 30 years incorporating a camera drone in some of my work. I also have close friends and acquaintances that are currently active in commercial and private aviation. None of that makes me an expert on anything but gives me a good basic knowledge of many subject areas.

May I say that I am extremely impressed by the knowledge and qualifications of many of the contributors here and stunned by some of the absolute ignorance of many others across the forum. I hope that by joining in, I can gain an insight into both sides of the discussion about a radical flat earth theory/belief.

First impressions after only a few hours on the forum is that the vast majority of comments from the FE side are from Tom. I find that somewhat disappointing although I have come to the conclusion that Tom is an extremely intelligent man who is immensely adept at turning any carefully planned and knowledgeable questions or explanations back against the poster, by asking questions and avoiding scientifically constructed answers. The second impression is that many of the core posters are determined to keep chipping away at the FE concept with mathematically and scientifically based arguments that are doggedly repeating the same basic information that is being carefully avoided by the FEs. That leads me to suspect that Tom has set this whole thing up as an intellectual exercise in how to get other highly intelligent and scientifically knowledgeable people to beat their heads against a brick wall over and over again. I don't for one moment believe that Tom genuinely believes the world is flat, he just loves the mental sparring with others determined to disprove his FE postulations. He waits until posters have spent hours and perhaps days working out ways to debunk the FE theory, then when excellent well researched arguments are put forward he is able to put up rhetorical questions and non answers, whilst sitting back watching amused whilst everyone scurries around frustrated, to come at him from a different angle.

I have to admire him for that and wait enthralled for his next twist and turn. Almost as entertaining as reading some of the posts elsewhere from other FEs who are devoted to the master yet are unable to match him for wit and guile. Instead, for the most, they are reduced to making ridiculous unsubstantiated pronouncements, or repeating garbage picked up wholesale from ludicrous youtube conspiracy theorists.

I was quite interested in the repeated references as evidence to the website relating to GPS inaccuracies based on athletics courses. The main thrust of the argument seemed to be that the distances shown over a course by GPS was in considerable variance to the same course measured using a wheeled distance measuring instrument. This was, if I understand correctly, evidence that GPS was inaccurate and way off from the 10ft accuracy claimed. Maybe I missed a post on this, but my immediate thought was of the cross section of a hill on the course being a perfect equilateral triangle for the sake of example. If the base of the triangle was 1 mile and the two opposite points of the base were A & B, then the distance shown between A & B by the GPS would be 1 mile, however the distance shown by the wheeled instrument to the top of the hill/triangle, lets say points A to C, would also be 1 mile, with the distance between C & B being a further 1 mile. That would give a total distance over the course of 2 miles, an inaccuracy by the GPS of 50% to the true distance travelled. However GPS is a Global POSITIONING system and the GPS is correctly showing the positions of points A & B as 1 mile apart horizontally. If that same pattern was applied to a range of adjacent mountains over a 200 horizontal distance, then a foot route would  give a distance of 400 miles travelled whereas of course the GPS would show 200 miles. They are both correct but showing results for totally different parameters. To any aircraft using GPS, the route up and down the mountains would be completely irrelevant and both A & B points would be shown within about 10ft of accuracy. When I plot a course on my car GPS, the distance shown to the destination takes no account of gradient and is therefore constantly updating according to position.

Sorry if someone has already pointed that out, I could have missed it, meanwhile I'll have a look at a few more of the other threads.

Roger

devils advocate

Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #361 on: November 12, 2017, 12:56:51 AM »
Hi Roger

Thanks for your post. I love the idea that the simple one wheeled apparatus fails to account for the actual distances traveled and I look forwards to hearing the Flat earth explanation.

DA

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #362 on: November 12, 2017, 01:53:31 PM »
I think the GPS confusion for FE'ers runs something like this:

* In an athletics event where the runners are running (say) a mile, they found a 10' error in the GPS readings - which (indeed) isn't good enough for athletics.

* So the FE'ers say "The error in GPS is 10 feet over a mile - so over 1000 miles, it must be 10,000 feet".

* This is a grave misunderstanding...GPS is an "absolute" measurement system, not a "relative" one.   If you were measuring distance using a wheeled cart - then indeed, you would expect that the longer the distance the greater the error.  If the cart's wheels slipped (say) an inch in every rotation - then the error would grow in direct proportion to the distance measured.

* But with an absolute measurement system, we're not measuring the distance from start to finish, we're measuring the latitude/longitude/altitude of the start line and of the finish line - then calculating the distance between them.  Both measurements could be wrong by 10 feet - so the actual error over the mile could be as much as +/- 20 feet.  The guys who tested it got lucky.

* But over a 1000 miles - the error in calculating the start and finish positions is still only 10 feet - so over 1000 miles, the distance calculation can still only be in error by +/- 20 feet.

This is something the FE'ers either can't (or more likely don't wish to) understand.   Over long distances - it's crazy-accurate as a percentage.   If you can get a signal from enough satellites - the positional error is always +/- 10 feet...and with more modern GPS's - it's usually much better than that.

Evidence of this is that Google Maps can tell whether you're on the freeway or the service road...and where I live, whether you're on the elevated section of the freeway or the ground-level road that runs beneath it.   Both of these imply a positional measurement within about 10 feet of my actual location.   It doesn't matter whether I drive the full length of the USA - the positional reading will still be within 10 feet of my true location - and the "distance travelled" indication will be within +/-20 feet...whether measured over the length of an entire continent - or over the length of my driveway.

You say Tom is very intelligent...but he seems incapable of understanding this - or MANY other simple demonstrations that I've provided - so I very much doubt it.

Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

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Offline Tom Bishop

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #363 on: November 12, 2017, 02:44:56 PM »
* So the FE'ers say "The error in GPS is 10 feet over a mile - so over 1000 miles, it must be 10,000 feet".

Why do you persist in lying?

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #364 on: November 12, 2017, 02:54:17 PM »
* So the FE'ers say "The error in GPS is 10 feet over a mile - so over 1000 miles, it must be 10,000 feet".

Why do you persist in lying?

I certainly don't intend to lie...I didn't say *ALL* FE'ers claim this - just that some of them do.  I talk to a lot of FE'ers - and not just on this forum.

But I'd be very interested to hear what YOU think the GPS error is...clearly it's not this.

Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

Offline Roger G

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #365 on: November 12, 2017, 03:29:25 PM »

You say Tom is very intelligent...but he seems incapable of understanding this - or MANY other simple demonstrations that I've provided - so I very much doubt it.

I don't actually think he is incapable of understanding at all, in fact exactly the opposite. I think the intellectual sparring and confrontation is his raison d'etre  :D

Roger

Offline Mark_1984

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #366 on: November 13, 2017, 05:05:09 AM »
To be honest, in this day and age I didn't think anybody really believed that the earth is flat, but the movement actually seems to be gaining popularity.  To the point where there are conferences to discuss flat earth theory and beliefs.  I suspect that as the tickets are expensive, only devout believers would bother attending (a fool and their money are easily parted) so the discussions are a little one sided.  It's only on forums like this, where us interlopers can enjoy picking apart their theories and laughing at their ridiculous attempts to discredit GPS.
« Last Edit: November 13, 2017, 12:43:30 PM by Mark_1984 »

Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #367 on: November 13, 2017, 08:43:08 AM »

You say Tom is very intelligent...but he seems incapable of understanding this - or MANY other simple demonstrations that I've provided - so I very much doubt it.

I don't actually think he is incapable of understanding at all, in fact exactly the opposite. I think the intellectual sparring and confrontation is his raison d'etre  :D

Roger
Hence his unique style of writing.

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #368 on: November 13, 2017, 01:10:38 PM »
To be honest, in this day and age I didn't think anybody really believed that the earth is flat, but the movement actually seems to be gaining popularity.  To the point where there are conferences to discuss flat earth theory and beliefs.  I suspect that as the tickets are expensive, only devout believers would bother attending (a fool and their money are easily parted) so the discussions are a little one sided.  It's only on forums like this, where us interlopers can enjoy picking apart their theories and laughing at their ridiculous attempts to discredit GPS.

If you watch those presentations on YouTube (many are posted there) - they appear to be addressing audiences of Religious Fundamentalists.  Those are people who will decry ANY scientific result if they possibly can because they recognize that science is slowly but surely eroding the evidence for their beliefs.   Hence, they deny global warming, they deny the moon landings, they claim that bullshit like Homeopathy and that vaccinations cause Autism.   Any scrap of anything that is out there that denies science is something they'll grab a hold of and run with.

Most of the presentations talk about the dome of the firmament and quote the handful of bible passages that kinda-sorta-maybe make it sound like the Earth is flat.  These are NOT things that TFES generally supports.

So as far as I can tell, this "rise in belief of FET" is really just a rise in religious fundamentalism.

The bible says that the Earth is fixed and immovable - and therefore the Earth doesn't rotate on it's axis.  But that doesn't fit with Universal Acceleration where the Earth is rocketing upwards at impressive speeds.   Logically, it would suggest that geocentricism is supported by the bible and helocentricism isn't.   Galileo got into a lot of trouble with the Catholics about that exact thing...but then, in 1992:

Quote
Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture....

— Pope John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) – November 4, 1992

Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

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Offline TomInAustin

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #369 on: November 13, 2017, 04:06:48 PM »
To be honest, in this day and age I didn't think anybody really believed that the earth is flat, but the movement actually seems to be gaining popularity.  To the point where there are conferences to discuss flat earth theory and beliefs.  I suspect that as the tickets are expensive, only devout believers would bother attending (a fool and their money are easily parted) so the discussions are a little one sided.  It's only on forums like this, where us interlopers can enjoy picking apart their theories and laughing at their ridiculous attempts to discredit GPS.

It's good to see this thread resurrected.  This one topic is the absolute proof the earth is not flat and that any flat earth map out there is wrong.
Do you have a citation for this sweeping generalisation?

Offline Roger G

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #370 on: November 13, 2017, 04:31:55 PM »
To be honest, in this day and age I didn't think anybody really believed that the earth is flat, but the movement actually seems to be gaining popularity.  To the point where there are conferences to discuss flat earth theory and beliefs.  I suspect that as the tickets are expensive, only devout believers would bother attending (a fool and their money are easily parted) so the discussions are a little one sided.  It's only on forums like this, where us interlopers can enjoy picking apart their theories and laughing at their ridiculous attempts to discredit GPS.

I wonder how the FE believers who attend those conferences actually find their way to them if they don't trust GPS. RE maps or aircraft route accuracy? :o

Roger

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #371 on: November 13, 2017, 04:40:15 PM »
To be honest, in this day and age I didn't think anybody really believed that the earth is flat, but the movement actually seems to be gaining popularity.  To the point where there are conferences to discuss flat earth theory and beliefs.  I suspect that as the tickets are expensive, only devout believers would bother attending (a fool and their money are easily parted) so the discussions are a little one sided.  It's only on forums like this, where us interlopers can enjoy picking apart their theories and laughing at their ridiculous attempts to discredit GPS.

I wonder how the FE believers who attend those conferences actually find their way to them if they don't trust GPS. RE maps or aircraft route accuracy? :o

Roger

At the risk of earning another warning from Junkers, that’s hilarious !

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #372 on: November 13, 2017, 06:36:16 PM »
I wonder how the FE believers who attend those conferences actually find their way to them if they don't trust GPS. RE maps or aircraft route accuracy? :o
I don't think it's accurate to say they don't trust GPS and aircraft routes, they just don't think those things represent a round earth.  More than once I've seen it suggested that airplanes follow the routes their GPS tell them to without knowing that a better flat-earth route exists.
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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #373 on: November 13, 2017, 08:48:23 PM »
I wonder how the FE believers who attend those conferences actually find their way to them if they don't trust GPS. RE maps or aircraft route accuracy? :o
I don't think it's accurate to say they don't trust GPS and aircraft routes, they just don't think those things represent a round earth.  More than once I've seen it suggested that airplanes follow the routes their GPS tell them to without knowing that a better flat-earth route exists.
Which would be fine if the FE map route was faster!  It's often three times longer.
Hey Tom:  What path do the photons take from the physical location of the sun to my eye at sunset?

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #374 on: November 15, 2017, 01:41:12 PM »
Which would be fine if the FE map route was faster!  It's often three times longer.
We don’t know that, as nobody actually travels the flat earth routes.

Actually, I think some of the long flat earth nonstop routes accidentally mimic some multi-leg routes.  I might spend some time looking.
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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #375 on: November 15, 2017, 01:51:41 PM »
Which would be fine if the FE map route was faster!  It's often three times longer.
We don’t know that, as nobody actually travels the flat earth routes.

Actually, I think some of the long flat earth nonstop routes accidentally mimic some multi-leg routes.  I might spend some time looking.
How can there be a flat earth route without a map?

Offline RJDO

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #376 on: November 15, 2017, 02:19:28 PM »
The interesting thing about the FE'er's assertions that GPS is broken is that it was developed by the US military - primarily to allow cruise missiles and other long range/high-precision weapons to achieve ~2 foot precision on targets anywhere in the world.

The coordinates take you to real places if you attempt to follow them. The distance between the coordinates are based on a globe.

This isn't like wiring a house, Tom.  You don't just bring a whole bunch of it and stop spooling it out when you make landfall, because undersea cable is very expensive.  And even if you did, undersea cables have repeaters emedded in them every so many miles to boost the signal.  The owners know how many repeaters are in the cable, which means they know how long the cable is.

Are you an owner? Do you have access to their records for us?

As usual, we have the passive-aggressive effort to sow confusion and doubt rather than draw back the curtains and open the window to allow enlightenment and debate.

The point here is that the people who lay undersea cables - and the people who pay for them to be laid - and the people who run the system by remotely querying those regularly space repeaters would all have to be bundled up into your increasing spiral of conspiracy.

So now, the big undersea cable companies are a part of the same conspiracy as NASA, SpaceX, GPS and cellphone providers, the Russian, Chinese, Indian, French, South African and (now) North Korean governments?

Is there anyone besides Tom Bishop who is NOT a part of this coverup?

Isn't this just the teensiest bit paranoid?


Where did I say anything about a conspiracy? You are making a lot of assumptions on how submarine cable layers operate and I am asking for further information to demonstrate what was claimed is true. How do we know that they didn't run out of cable at one point and learned that they needed to bring more cable for these things?

This is an interesting Website :D. Not sure how I wound up here, and not sure how i ended up reading this thread.

Anyway. Tom, cable laying ships are extremely precise. I did a brief stint (9 days) aboard one such vessel, MV Wave Venture (http://www.cablesm.fr/Wave%20Venture.pdf). at the time I was working as an engineering intern for a company which contracted this vessel to do some work. I spent a lot of time in the operations room as well as on the cable deck and learned about the cable laying process.

The supplies aboard the ship are precisely measured and inventoried. This is necessary as the ship is enormously expensive to operate and running out of cable or other supplies mid-tour would be disastrous.

If you go to that PDF I linked, near the bottom are photos of the two cable handling drums. Those large drums play cable in and out. Their circumference is known and their motion precisely measured. Up in the control room, there are readouts on rate of cable pay-out, tension on the cable, amount of cable played out (easily calculated from drum diameter and # rotations of drum).

If the ship moves ahead too quickly and tension rises, the cable will snap. This would be catastrophic. To this end, tension is monitored careful and ship movement must be precisely controlled. The ship uses a dynamic positioning system, based on GPS. The accuracy is around 2 meters (the 400-something ft long ship can maintain its exact position within 2 meters and a degree or two of heading using directional "azimuth thrusters" and high performance GPS receivers positioned around the ship).

The GPS positioning system agrees closely with the cable run length, measured physically using the cable drum over long distances. This experimental "proof" of GPS accuracy is performed on every cable laying run. If the ship has moved 1 mile on GPS, but an unexpected amount of cable has been played out, this would be obvious in the ship control room (would probably indicate an unexpected underwater feature and the ship would back up/pick up cable and figure out what went wrong before re-laying).  Note that the cable laying plan also takes into account underwater topology (based on oceanic surveying, done via sonar).

-----

On another note of interest. A lot of land surveying these days is done via LIDAR. Basically an aircraft (or for smaller areas, maybe a small UAV) flies over and a lidar sensor takes millions of point distance measurements (worked based on speed of light and reflections, does not rely on any notion of round or flat anything). The end result is a dense "point cloud" or high resolution 3D map of an area.

Here's a  little clip that shows a bit of the process and what the results look like:

In order for the measurements from the moving aircraft to be combined into a coherent 3D model, the precise location of the aircraft & LiDAR at each moment must be known. Otherwise, the map would be an enormous mess (jumble of points). There are two major methods of inferring the location of the lidar at each time step

- SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping)
- Sensor-based (GPS + Inertial measurements)

The slam method is much more difficult and is the subject of current research. With the slam method, in each new time step, you try "sync up" your new laser scan with the last one, finding an overlapping match and thus inferring the new position of the laser.

The sensor-based method uses a combination of GPS and an IMU (accelerometers and gyros) to log the precise position and orientation of the sensor in 3D space. By combining the long-term accuracy of GPS and short-term precision of inertial methods, and using filtering techniques, centimeter-level accuracy can be achieved.

In either of these methods, if the position of the laser cannot be accurately determined in 3D space for every moment in time (lets say GPS or IMU failure or inaccuracy), the map will look like a mess with all kinds of overlapping, incoherent points. In this event, the instrumentation will have to be repaired and data will have to be re-collected.

Now, if GPS worked consistently but with a scale offset, ie measured wrong distances, there are two issues. Firstly, the sensor fusion would fail (the inertial measurement unit would disagree with the GPS measurements). Secondly, the created map would be accurate, but at the wrong scale (distances incorrect). While the former takes some knowledge of signal processing to understand, the second can easily be analyzed empirically.

You can personally download LiDAR data sets, tagged with GPS data as well as aircraft data (altitude, position, velocity, etc). To prove to yourself that these GPS data sets are of accurate scale (since you don't seem to want to trust anyone else), you could download a dataset for somewhere local to you and look at the 3D point cloud. Measure a distance in the pointcloud between two known locations (lets say measure out the distance between two buildings). Then, in real life, go out there and confirm this data empirically using whatever equipment you like (laser range finder, radar, measuring tape, whatever).

In this manner, you will have proven the following:

A) the physically measured 3D pointclouds agree with published aerial maps (ie what you would find on google earth)
B) Aircraft are able to accurately determine their location, speed, position, orientation and altitude
C) GPS is able to accurately measure distances within a tolerance of several feet of absolute non-compounding error.

The underlying assumptions here are:

- The speed of light is ~ 3*10^8 m/s (required for lidar measurements)
- Time can be accurately measured (again required for lidar measurements)
- You are capable of personally measuring distance in the order of a few hundred feet to empirically verify the data

This is real, undisputable physical data that you can empirically verify yourself.

My credentials:

Bsc. Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
BSc. Aeronautics & Astronautics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

My graduate thesis involves navigation of autonomous vehicles and as such relies on accuracy of systems such as GPS from a small, directly measurable scale up to larger areas. We work in GPS-available and GPS-denied environments and must fuse data from inertial systems, Lidar, RADAR, GPS, cameras, etc. to have both aerial and ground vehicles navigate precisely.

Hopefully my suggested experiment gives you an avenue to prove to yourself the performance of GPS :). I prove it to myself daily in my line of work. Once this business of distances is sorted, I believe the rest of the proof is clear cut using the geometry already presented by others. I should probably get back to work now.

Right... so you spend 9 days on such a vessel and that makes you an expert on exactly what kind of extra cable and supplies they bring along. Are we to assume that you interrogated the captain about his extra cable?

How do we know that there is no excess cable? You are assuming that a possible Flat Earth model must cause a cable shortage, when the opposite can be true as well.

Troll level 1000.

How trolling works on the internet:

Post something for people to argue over. People post about this or that. OP comes in and says something along the lines of "prove it" etc.. More arguing from other side. Then troll is out done, so you attack the person. Then say something silly like "Are we to assume that you interrogated the captain about his extra cable?" then back to more silly statements like: "How do we know that there is no excess cable?"

Fun to read, and fun to post to, but man, really starting to believe this whole page is nothing but a huge internet troll experiment.

**EDIT**

I am sorry for not adding something to the actual debate. But, as I am very convinced, Tom does know how you can very accurately know how much cable a vessel brings aboard. You can very easily compute this. You just need to know the size of the drum and its core diameter size, and the diameter of the cable.  While I can spend my time adding the math here, I am going to ask Tom to look it up, as it is easily available to find on Google.

It frustrates me that you attack the person, and not the problem. Like I said, troll level 1000.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 02:41:01 PM by RJDO »

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #377 on: November 15, 2017, 04:19:24 PM »
How can there be a flat earth route without a map?
Good point.  My statement applies to those folks who hold DO believe one of the flat earth maps.  Those who have no map typically still claim that GPS is lying to us and therefore not useful as proof of anything, even while they also have no opinion on better routes.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2017, 07:00:01 PM by Rounder »
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Offline Mark_1984

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Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #378 on: November 15, 2017, 05:17:35 PM »
You’d have thought, regardless of the topography, the earth would be reliably mapped by Now.  After all, people have been travelling all over it for hundreds of years !

By the way, are there any flat earth believers left here ?

Re: Using airline flight data.
« Reply #379 on: November 15, 2017, 05:43:50 PM »
I think the GPS confusion for FE'ers runs something like this:

* In an athletics event where the runners are running (say) a mile, they found a 10' error in the GPS readings - which (indeed) isn't good enough for athletics.


One possible source of extra errors in the athletic course case is that you are using GPS to measure a twisty course, so the 10 foot error creeps in at every corner and can accumulate. On average the errors will cancel out, but there is a chance they will add up (i.e. random walk).

Your point about absolute measurement versus relative measurements still stands, especially for long straight courses.