clair002

Well, that is what this guy claims... It's not gravity you see -- it's because fluids magically seek their own level. There is just one little problem... When you remove gravity the fluids no longer know which way is down and no longer have the magic to 'seek their level' just due to air pressure. So he's just Flat Out Wrong.

YouTuber 'Flat Earth Addict' (a good term for them, they know it's bad for them but they can't quit) wonders why a flight going from the UK to LA passes near Iceland ? NO DUH BECAUSE THAT IS CLOSE TO THE SHORTEST PATH ON THE GLOBE Because both points are well into the Northen Hemisphere his line on Gleason's azimuthal equidistant projection ( projection FROM  A GLOBE, LOL).  Beyond that point the Gleason map IS TERRIBLE -- sizes, distances, compass headings, everything is far worse than on the Mercator projection.  The ONLY thing accurate on the azimuthal equidistant projection is distances TO THE CENTER POINT.  All other distances are WRONG and they get more and more WRONG as you go further 'South' (towards his outer edge). Notice how the paths are ALMOST identical?  What is this guy trying to prove exactly? You can find the story, such as it is, here: Why did American Airlines flight travel 1,000 MILES back to London instead of landing in Iceland aft...

Flat Earth Claim The Horizon Always Rises To Eye Level The Facts What I want to know is, how exactly did you measure that? It certainly does not look "eye-level" to me. In fact, trivial observation shows that it drops by pretty much EXACTLY the amount we would expect on an Earth with a radius of approximately 3959 miles. I have a Theodolite application on my iPhone 7 Plus which uses the accelerometers to position a reticle in the camera view marking out level & plumb and has indicators showing the angle of the camera in relationship to level.  In the image below I have purposefully tilted the camera along two axes so you can see that the reticle has turned red indicating that my view is very tilted but it has aligned itself to the horizon while the white cross-marks simply mark center of the camera view. So it doesn't matter if my phone or the plane or anything else is tilted, the angles indicated by the Horizon Angle and Elevation Angle indicators are relative to LEV...

If you want to know more about Physics Richard Feynman -  The Character of Physical Law The first few entries in that playlist cover the basics of how we know what we know about Gravity. Watch some physics classes 8.01 Classical Mechanics Covers all the basics of Classical Mechanics From there - you can check out more classes in iTunesU (iTunes University) and many other online resources.

I would like to believe that this is a joke... A YouTuber named 'Awake Souls' claimed that PI is really maybe 4 or probably 3, because the Bible says so mainly [Wow, he took down his original video ]. It was a 12 minute tour de force of nonsense and non sequiturs that rambles between ancient history, conspiracy theory, Biblical appeals, and Indiana Law from 1897 (HB 246) . But let's just take a quick look at what PI actually is and why it is certainly neither 4 nor 3. What is PI? PI is simply the ratio between the circumference of a circle and the diameter of that circle. That's it, there is nothing magic about it. All circles, no matter their size, have the same ratio. Which is pretty cool because it means that if we know the radius of the circle we can figure out the circumference and area also, or vice versa. All it really means there is a relationship between these measurements. Approximating PI Finding a close approximation of PI is very easy. Just find something t...

Several Flat Eathers now have tried to claim that a 'column of light' cannot possibly form on a convexly curved Earth - which is just ridiculous but here we go… all will become clear. This one I personally took on a sharply convexly curved overpass. Clear columning is observed along the convexly curved surface. Here we observe it with sunlight all the way over the very clearly convexly curved wave! And here is a diagram showing why. And we don't see the full column when the water isn't rippled enough. It's all about the angles, nothing what-so-ever to do with overall curvature or shape of the Earth. Conclusive enough? No, the guy just kept denying and making excuses. Anyone want to try to make a coherent argument against this?

This is a review of the view from Apple Pie Hill to Philadelphia done by professional surveyor Jesse Kozlowski, executed using a Wild Heerbrugg theodolite ( Video ). Technical Data Observation Point (Apple Pie Hill): Ground: 204' Tower: 46' Total: 250' Target (Comcast Center Tower): Ground: 42' Height: 973' Top: 1015' Zenith Angle: 89.95389° [89° 57' 14"] // ~166 arcseconds Distance: 171281' (~32.44 miles) Instrument (Wild Heerbrugg theodolite): I do not know exactly which model of this theodolite was being used but looking at several that looked similar I'll estimate that we have a level accuracy of 30" which gives us about +/- 25 feet at this distance.  But the specifications for these theodolites indicate that they are good for viewing objects about 12 miles away, so this would introduce additional error in our measurements as the angular size of objects over 32 miles away would be reduced, so roughly we might expect 24.912*(32/12) = +/...

I can't even believe we have to have this conversation but apparently we do. I have a Tsing 300 infrared thermometer that I use for both cooking and A/C analysis around the house. It's an inexpensive model but gets the job done. It reads a 1" spot at 1' - I took readings at this distance. So I went outside on a heavily cloudy night (so there was absolutely no moonlight to magically cool things down) and started testing the temperature of various objects in various locations. First object is a painted railing inside a stairwell. Still night air, all measurements taken on parts of the rail shaded from the two 60 watt bulbs that are pretty far away. Bottom: 69 degrees Middle: 70.7 degrees Top: 75.1 degrees So height seemed to matter a lot (for this spot, we can't assume this always holds), 6 degree increase over approximately 19.25 feet. So that's one possible source of error. Down at ground level, far away from any building or lights I then took several measureme...

Why Don't The Days Shift By 12 Hours Between Summer and Winter? Flat Earthers LOVE to post little memes with low information content, for example... A very good question.  However, the answer is very simple. THEY DO. Sidereal versus Synodic One exact rotation of the Earth is called a sidereal  day which is a period of 86164.09054 seconds or 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.09054 seconds.  This is measured as the Sun being in the same relative position as the distant stars. However, the '24 hour' period we all know and love is called a synodic  day or 'mean solar day', this is the average amount of time from Noon to Noon and it is literally just a little bit more than one full rotation of the Earth to make up for our motion around the Sun.  Our orbit around the sun isn't a perfect circle so the actual length of a day varies slightly but on average it is 86400.002 seconds -- this is why Noon is still Noon from Summer to Winter. And if you look at the stars just b...

Reasons Why Nearby Sun Is Impossible Parallax A nearby Sun would produce a profound amount of parallax motion that would be obvious to a moving observer or observers in different locations. Parallax motion is like when you drive down the road and the nearby trees appear to move through your field of view very rapidly, slightly more distant objects move more slowly, distant clouds move even more slowly, and a sun that is only some 3000 miles away would move as well. But we observe the sun remaining in the same place even when viewed from fairly distant locations at the same time. The amount of angular difference we should see in a 3000 mile distant sun for even just 100 miles between observers would be 1.9°!  The sun is only 0.5° across in the sky so this would be almost FOUR solar distances shifted.  This would be trivial to observe but in actuality the angle difference is too small to be measured without extremely specialized and costly equipment (less than one quarter of an ...

I've seen a lot of Flat Earthers pointing to the V2 footage and proclaiming 'THERE IS NO CURVE!' Yeah, that looks pretty flat all right.  I guess I should give up... Because we all know that looking at one, isolated, narrow FOV image proves the Earth is flat - even though we know from Visually Discerning the Curvature of the Earth  and my post on  high-altitude balloon footage  that we require a wider field of view to even expect to see the curvature.  This is how Flat Earth arguments 'work' -- for some odd reason, you have to look at only their evidence without considering all the evidence. What do those other frames look like? credit: NASA Oh my... So which is it Flat Earth?  Are these evidence or not? Watch the video at Air & Space (especially around the 9 minute mark) to really get a sense of this footage. And here is a large, professionally stitched version from reddit : The numbers I get for 65 miles gives us a ground distance to the horiz...

"As one-half the circumference of the earth is approximately 12,000 miles long there will be, roughly, thirty deviations." ~Nikola Tesla Source

Well... no, not even a little bit... Not So Fast Almost all the footage from high-altitude balloons shows the apparent curvature fluctuating from ...concave (when the horizon line is below center of the lens) Figure 1. Horizon below lens center bows the horizon down, would flatten any actual curvature ...to convex (when the horizon line is above center) Figure 2. Horizon above lens center bows horizon up ...to flat? Figure 3. Horizon through lens center is most accurate This effect is called 'Lens Barrel' and is almost unavoidable when you are using the wider-angle lenses common for this purpose, especially on cameras such as the popular GoPro series. Lenses that try to compensate for this are called Rectilinear lenses but it's more difficult, and more expensive, to make a wide-angle Rectilinear lens. I marked a big X on the last frame to help us find the center of the image (the other two are obviously far from center). What we find is that the closer the horizon line is...