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Showing posts from December, 2016

Flat Earth Follies: The Sun Gets Smaller As It Sets

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Flat Earth Claim The Sun Gets Smaller As It Sets The Facts No, all you have done is allowed your camera sensor to be overwhelmed and as the Sun (or Moon) gets closer to the horizon it is going through much more atmosphere which filters out more and more of the light, so the exposure becomes closer to correct and the bright object appears closer to actual size. I took the following two pictures with my iPhone at the same time, when the moon was well in the sky. Moon closer to proper exposure: Moon overexposed, taken about the same time - just wrong exposure. The moon didn't get bigger in the few seconds between the images. Here is a random pic I took of the moon on my iPhone on a completely different day, properly exposed & through binoculars.  Hi Moon. And here is a streetlamp magically getting closer and closer and closer - according to Flat Earthers. Another image series that I personally took: Here is a debunking I did... Far away? The sun is about 32 arc minutes wide, that...

No More Excuses - Flat Earth Fails

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What is the distance from the North Pole to the Equator? ~ 6214.9 miles. What is the circumference around the Equator? For Flat Earth assume we mean the ground track path of the Sun at the Equinox. ~ 24,902 miles. Whoops, Flat Earth just failed the most basic of geometric tests. On a North Pole centered Flat Earth the distance of 6214.9 miles would be a radius and would give a circle of circumference of ~ 39049 miles for the Equator (or path of the sun at the Equinox).  This is BASIC geometry - 2π × 6214.9 That is NO WHERE NEAR the actual value.  You can compare hundreds of sources of information about both distances - thousands of flights, shipping routes, people driving.  We know for a FACT it's nowhere even close to 39049 miles. Flat Earth DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Spherical Triangles Explained

What is the sum of the angles on a spherical triangle? Here is a simple version that ignores the technical details: Tiny triangle on huge ball, triangle sum will be close to 180° but never exactly 180° Along the equator, cuts ball exactly in half, is exactly 540° (3x180) Go all the way around and you get (3x360)-180 is just under 900° And the ball radius matters to figuring out the actual angles but doesn't change the minimum or maximum possible values. Here are the technical details along with a (hopefully easy) to understand rationale: The first point I would like to make is that we first have to define what we're going to count as the angles.  On a simple plane we're ALWAYS talking about the INTERIOR angles of the triangle but a sphere doesn't technically have a natural INTERIOR / EXTERIOR - so you have to define what you want to measure.  Usually people just take the smaller of two and know there is an inverse as well but you can calculate both sum of angles just as...

Flat Earth Follies: Great Circle Lies of the Flat Earth

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Flat Earth Claim Mr. Thrive & Survive has a YouTube video " MAJOR LIES EXPOSED By TRIANGE RESEARCH " (sic) about how Great Circles are a lie and he used to sail and they never sailed a Great Circle path and his triangle research somehow proves all this. The Facts As per usual, it is an unnecessarily long and rambling video (I might ramble but I try to stay on point) that ultimately fails when it tries to make its point.  Let's cover a few of the more obvious misconceptions from the video... Great Circles vs Rhumb Lines A Great Circle path is the 'straight line' of a sphere. It doesn't mean that you go in a circle on the surface, you go in a radial circle around the Globe itself.  The length of the Great Circle is the circumference.  That's all it is. If you put a string between any two points on a globe and pull it taunt it will mark out the Great Circle path.  That's all the more "math" you need to plot one on a globe and it works for e...

Flat Earth Follies: Clouds Lit From Underneath Prove Flat Earth, say what?

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Flat Earth Claim Sunlight hitting the bottoms of clouds proves Flat Earth and yet (somehow) is impossible on a Globe (even though on a Globe it would be much further away and so the same argument would actually apply in both cases-except that argument is just Flat Out wrong and absurd as I will show). The Facts I wish these guys would just get to the point -- this is 42 minutes of mind-numbing rambling. There are a whole slew of errors in this video, I'll hit on a FEW of them.  Feel free to post more in the comments.  I had to skip forward... like a lot... At around 13:15 he shows a diagram with a greatly over tilted Earth.  He even notes this is tilted too far, but he still uses it to make the point that "all this area" would be in total darkness.  Well yes, it is in winter... but it's far LESS area than shown and this actually matches reality. At 13:58 he goes on a numerology rant about it being tilted at 23.3333° "which leaves 66.66666° off of 90°" ---...

Flat Earth Lies - Lake Pontchartrain Causeway

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You should pretty much never trust anything a Flat Earther posts. Always verify every detail. This meme came across my timeline today... Do the math..Earth Is Flat . #flatearth pic.twitter.com/FPdpslI9rX — Flat Earth (@FlatEarthTshirt) November 7, 2016 Here is the full sized meme: So I do the thing where you compress the width of the image to make any horizontal change stand out: Ok, wow, that is VERY flat.  Maybe a little too flat? Although I have no idea if their distance measurements are correct.  I seriously doubt that is only 2.9 miles to the horizon, my bet is closer to 10 miles total although the last several miles of that is going to be just a few pixels in this image and you can probably only make out details for about 1 mile. But I don't trust memes, Flat Earther memes least of all, so I did an image search and found this was the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway taken by Robert Holmes. You can find that image in several locations, for example, at Travel and Leisure ...