Just for fun one more evidence of Earth being a globe. Observe the flight times and routes in the Northern and Southern hemispheres (www.flightradar24.com). If a typical cruising speed of a commercial airplane of around 850 km/h is assumed to be what it is then the routes in the South hemisphere would take much longer time on a flat Earth than on a globe. The optimal routes will be different too.
Pano, I forgot to mention there is no service fee, a golf GPS has absolutely nothing to do with cell phones it uses only the satellites. You can go to Mouser or Digikey and order as many as you want, at some point you have to bite the bullet and join the mass conspiracy folks to proceed along these lines.
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This hit the big time around 2009. Skyhook was one of the first and it looked like they had a bright future ahead of them until both google and apple worked out they could reverse engineer the tech and cut them out. Law suits for all!. The cool thing is, once you have enough users with mobiles the system updates itself.
I was spooked by it in about 2010 when I fired up google maps and found it pinpointed the flat I was living in exactly. Spooky because I had only setup broadband there a few weeks previously, but already google had slurped the location from somewhere. Clever and scary, but a really good way of getting initial fix to 20m or better as long as you have a data backhaul.
NW assist with GSM uses timing advance built into the system from the beginning so only good for about 400m accuracy, which is why wifi assisted is so much quicker. Looking back its pretty amazing how from 1995 to 2005 GPS went from something either really expensive (handheld GPS units) or really rubbish (early phone implementations) to something totally ubiquitous.
Very true. It's been interesting to watch GPS evolve. I had a buddy who worked at HP in the time keeping dept (or whatever they called it) and used to buy the old time servers. Power hungry beasts! He was fascinated by GPS and I learned a lot from him.
The shape is like a pizza. Thickness I don't remember off the top of my head, tho I should. 40 miles sounds right, but I'd have to look it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VxgqEYUzzo one of many videos taken with the ZX1. If you scroll through the linked one there are some shots that would show up fish eye distortion and there is very little. At least IMO.
Damn this thread is making me miss concorde. For 10 years I lived under the flight path and you could set your watch by it. At home or in the office you could not miss the sound it made. It was batsrad loud if you were close (once I was by the heathrow fence when it took off) and left clouds of evil smoke on the runway but I loved it. I mean needing afterburners to take off in a commercial jet, how daft is that. As a form of transport it was lousy. As an object of beauty and an example of sheer bloody mindedness in a group of engineers it is wonderful.
When the first test flight happened after the refit of fuel tank liners we all heard it in the office and looked at each other all thinking 'is that what it sounds like it is'.
We are unlikely to see its equal in our lifetimes. The world has changed for the better. But I'm still sad.
Oh, big surprise! There are people who believe in a "conspiracy theory" (in this case that the earth is not round and associated facts). I'm sorry to read that this is so new to many of you. I have personal experience facing that kind of thing.
Let me start with a related tale about this girlfriend I dated a few tens of years ago. She was a devout (actual name of religion redacted), whereas I am just about the opposite of that. Luckily she had an open mind and I tried to have one, too. One day during a long drive together we got into a conversation about her beliefs about the age of the earth, humans and dinosours living contemporaneously, how the biblical great flood could have possibly happened, carbon dating, etc. etc. Now I have an advanced engineering degree and she was an optometrist AND and pharmacist so neither of us are dumb and we both knew a great deal of background information about these things from our own perspectives. But we would sometimes get to a point where neither of us could produce first or second hand knowledge or evidence of a particular piece of information. It was something we were "taught" and took as a fact. But we both realized that it took some "faith" in what we had been taught on BOTH our parts for us to have unshakable confidence in our positions. We kind of left it there, that we both took on faith certain "facts" about the world and history. This really opened my eyes at the time. I believe in the scientific method, hypothesis testing, etc. and when I read something coming out of the scientific literature I tend to believe it is factual (I have "faith" in it) because I believe that it must be supported by experimental observation that has been checked, tested, and peer reviewed. This kind of "trickle up" theory of knowledge is what bolsters my belief in science as well as the understanding that when an error is discovered it is exposed and corrected.
Jump forward to today. The internet is everywhere, connecting all manners of society and bringing to light all manners of opinion. What was once on the fringe is right there for you to read, from your easy chair. There are plenty of conspiracist or "secret truth" websites. And who doesn't want to know a secret??? It's very tantalizing, actually - it's human nature to believe this kind of stuff! I read an article about this recently:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories/
There are other articles about this topic on the web that you can find with a simple search.
I have had lots of exposure to conspiracy theories from one of my close relatives. In our family is is the "black sheep". As a child he was least favored of all of us, was sort of kicked out of the family at one point, and only finished one year of college. Yet he has managed to build a career and earn pretty good money for many years. He's self taught, and sometimes I think that this is the most dangerous thing about him. He knows maybe 50% of something, and then he extrapolates or invents the rest of the info as needed. Like the time that IBM was able to use a scanning tunneling microscope to move individual Xenon atoms around on a metal surface to spell out "IBM". Wow, cool. He said: "well now we can design human DNA by assembling it atom by atom". Of course he has little to no knowledge about chemistry, biology, etc. but he didn't know what he didn't know and so it was easy to jump over the "small gaps" in his statement. Sadly this is an example of the kind of thing he does all the time. Another one of the things he believed in (at least at one point) was an imminent pole shift. Not the magnetic poles (which do shift/flip) but the actual geographic north and south pole, that is the earth would "flip over". He once sent me an email with a link to a web site and claimed that they had listed all sorts of scientific observations that showed that the pole flip was starting to happen. This involved things like the sun being in a certain position at a certain time of day as viewed from a certain city, blah, blah, blah. It was all crap, scientifically speaking, and was full of flaws. But he didn't or couldn't see that. Also he seems to believe that the world is run by a cabal that decides everything, and worries about big government control experiments like chemtrails and HAARP. One of the earliest conspiracies that he believed back in the 1980s was that there was a source of cheap and plentiful energy that would be virtually free but the car and oil companies were suppressing the information because it would ruin their business. There are many more and I could go on. At some point I just labeled him as "eccentric" and left it at that. I can't have a phone call with him because he always bring up some new crazy extreme topic. But to the outside he is just a normal guy with a family and a home, paying his bills, etc. He's not a harm to himself or others. He's not very educated (in the conventional sense) but I get the idea that he feels much, much smarter than the average guy. I think it's empowering for him.
So, here we are in a world of conspiracies. People love to believe them. Look at how successful news stories like a US presidential candidate running a child sex ring from the (non-existent) basement of a pizza parlor have been recently if you doubt that even wild conspiracy theories are readily believed by lots of people.
What can we do about this trend? In today's world we unfortunately do not demand SOURCES for information before blasting it all over the place. As information consumers we all tend to buy into what we hear as fact depending on the source of that information. I think that is a bad trend, because information may (intentionally or not) be predicated upon false or unproven pretenses in the race to get the news out first. Perhaps if there was a "trail" of information that could be associated with a particular piece of information it could be traced back to its roots, and to more fundamental and convincing information, we could all check for ourselves and become informed in a more unbiased way that is not "faith" based.
Let me start with a related tale about this girlfriend I dated a few tens of years ago. She was a devout (actual name of religion redacted), whereas I am just about the opposite of that. Luckily she had an open mind and I tried to have one, too. One day during a long drive together we got into a conversation about her beliefs about the age of the earth, humans and dinosours living contemporaneously, how the biblical great flood could have possibly happened, carbon dating, etc. etc. Now I have an advanced engineering degree and she was an optometrist AND and pharmacist so neither of us are dumb and we both knew a great deal of background information about these things from our own perspectives. But we would sometimes get to a point where neither of us could produce first or second hand knowledge or evidence of a particular piece of information. It was something we were "taught" and took as a fact. But we both realized that it took some "faith" in what we had been taught on BOTH our parts for us to have unshakable confidence in our positions. We kind of left it there, that we both took on faith certain "facts" about the world and history. This really opened my eyes at the time. I believe in the scientific method, hypothesis testing, etc. and when I read something coming out of the scientific literature I tend to believe it is factual (I have "faith" in it) because I believe that it must be supported by experimental observation that has been checked, tested, and peer reviewed. This kind of "trickle up" theory of knowledge is what bolsters my belief in science as well as the understanding that when an error is discovered it is exposed and corrected.
Jump forward to today. The internet is everywhere, connecting all manners of society and bringing to light all manners of opinion. What was once on the fringe is right there for you to read, from your easy chair. There are plenty of conspiracist or "secret truth" websites. And who doesn't want to know a secret??? It's very tantalizing, actually - it's human nature to believe this kind of stuff! I read an article about this recently:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories/
There are other articles about this topic on the web that you can find with a simple search.
I have had lots of exposure to conspiracy theories from one of my close relatives. In our family is is the "black sheep". As a child he was least favored of all of us, was sort of kicked out of the family at one point, and only finished one year of college. Yet he has managed to build a career and earn pretty good money for many years. He's self taught, and sometimes I think that this is the most dangerous thing about him. He knows maybe 50% of something, and then he extrapolates or invents the rest of the info as needed. Like the time that IBM was able to use a scanning tunneling microscope to move individual Xenon atoms around on a metal surface to spell out "IBM". Wow, cool. He said: "well now we can design human DNA by assembling it atom by atom". Of course he has little to no knowledge about chemistry, biology, etc. but he didn't know what he didn't know and so it was easy to jump over the "small gaps" in his statement. Sadly this is an example of the kind of thing he does all the time. Another one of the things he believed in (at least at one point) was an imminent pole shift. Not the magnetic poles (which do shift/flip) but the actual geographic north and south pole, that is the earth would "flip over". He once sent me an email with a link to a web site and claimed that they had listed all sorts of scientific observations that showed that the pole flip was starting to happen. This involved things like the sun being in a certain position at a certain time of day as viewed from a certain city, blah, blah, blah. It was all crap, scientifically speaking, and was full of flaws. But he didn't or couldn't see that. Also he seems to believe that the world is run by a cabal that decides everything, and worries about big government control experiments like chemtrails and HAARP. One of the earliest conspiracies that he believed back in the 1980s was that there was a source of cheap and plentiful energy that would be virtually free but the car and oil companies were suppressing the information because it would ruin their business. There are many more and I could go on. At some point I just labeled him as "eccentric" and left it at that. I can't have a phone call with him because he always bring up some new crazy extreme topic. But to the outside he is just a normal guy with a family and a home, paying his bills, etc. He's not a harm to himself or others. He's not very educated (in the conventional sense) but I get the idea that he feels much, much smarter than the average guy. I think it's empowering for him.
So, here we are in a world of conspiracies. People love to believe them. Look at how successful news stories like a US presidential candidate running a child sex ring from the (non-existent) basement of a pizza parlor have been recently if you doubt that even wild conspiracy theories are readily believed by lots of people.
What can we do about this trend? In today's world we unfortunately do not demand SOURCES for information before blasting it all over the place. As information consumers we all tend to buy into what we hear as fact depending on the source of that information. I think that is a bad trend, because information may (intentionally or not) be predicated upon false or unproven pretenses in the race to get the news out first. Perhaps if there was a "trail" of information that could be associated with a particular piece of information it could be traced back to its roots, and to more fundamental and convincing information, we could all check for ourselves and become informed in a more unbiased way that is not "faith" based.
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Samuel Birley Rowbotham AKA Old Parallax is the man from whom so much of current flat earth theory derives. I never met him, he died long ago, but I do have his book and have visited his test sites.
Rowbotham gives the circumference of the Earth's disk as 16,262 statute miles at the latitude of Valencia and 23,400 statute miles at Sydney. I'll have to dig a bit to find the thickness. 😉
Rowbotham gives the circumference of the Earth's disk as 16,262 statute miles at the latitude of Valencia and 23,400 statute miles at Sydney. I'll have to dig a bit to find the thickness. 😉
Have you published this before? It seems very familiar. Thanks for sharing.
Let's do try to keep this away from religion and politics, which is going to be hard to do, given they are both tightly involved in this subject.
The great flood might have happened, at least to the world as seen by a nomadic tribe 4000+ years ago. Certain there is evidence in archeology for Sodom and Gomorrah. For any story in the aural tradition there is likely to be some truth in it for the reference frame of the people whose myth it was.
LOL
Pano you are the best thank you for sharing all your information. My buddy said the same thing about the UN flag. He said they are rubbing it right in our faces with that.
This is getting good😱
Just realised I got my timelines wrong. Whilst handheld GPS dropped 10fold in price between 1995 and 2005, with for example the first TomTom launched in 2002, phone GPS lagged a bit and was pretty clanky until after the iphone launched (Nokia N95 had usable GPS, but history has kind of forgotten that). Still remarkable leaps in technology, even if the flat earthers believe its all done with cell towers.
You're welcome! For me it's like being a tour guide in a city I've lived in for 20 years. People come to visit and say "Oh, you have such tall buildings - and so much traffic!" Yes, we do, but there is so much more to it. 😀
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