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by PufPuf93 » Fri Sep 09, 2016 10:59 pm
by 82_28 » Fri Sep 09, 2016 11:19 pm
by PufPuf93 » Fri Sep 09, 2016 11:46 pm
:by Burnt Hill » Sat Sep 10, 2016 7:56 am
PufPuf93 wrote:
23 pages is an excellent run at RI.
I find entertainment.
by divideandconquer » Sat Sep 10, 2016 8:47 am
Belligerent Savant » Fri Sep 09, 2016 4:55 pm wrote:PufPuf, or anyone else: I posted this in the previous page. Take another gander, disregarding for a moment the other aspects of FE theory.
Time and effort was dedicated to reach the conclusions drawn in the above video.
Let's try, for a moment, to forget about all the other "FE" theories. Forget about the words "Flat Earth" altogether. How would one explain the findings in this video? "Refractions" alone won't do it. There are other similar examples of this to be found as well. I've been to the top of Bear Mountain, NY numerous times, and distinctly recall seeing the NYC skyline from the top of the mountain. I'll make it a point to take a snapshot next time I'm up there -- assuming it's a clear day -- and will post the resultant photos of it, along with some calculations Re: summit height, distance to the skyline, and expected curvature.
There may be a straightforward explanation for this, and even if there isn't, it doesn't, by itself, "prove" a FLAT earth, but I remain interested in a workable explanation for this phenomenon beyond 'anecdotal' observations.
by PufPuf93 » Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:22 am
Belligerent Savant » Fri Sep 09, 2016 1:55 pm wrote:PufPuf, or anyone else: I posted this in the previous page. Take another gander, disregarding for a moment the other aspects of FE theory.
by 82_28 » Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:32 am
by Belligerent Savant » Sat Sep 10, 2016 10:51 am
Introduction
People often ask how far you can see, or how far it is to the apparent horizon. These questions are somewhat different — obviously, you can see high mountains farther away than low hills or flat islands — but the answer is affected by terrestrial refraction in both cases.
Let's first consider these distances without refraction, and then add in the complications of varying refraction. Finally, we'll consider other atmospheric effects that play a part.
No refraction
Without refraction, the matter is very simple. Here's the diagram from my dip page:
It shows a vertical plane through the center of the Earth (at C) and the observer (at O). The radius of the Earth is R, and the observer's eye is a height h above the point S on the surface. (Of course, the height of the eye, and consequently the distance to the horizon, is greatly exaggerated in this diagram.) The observer's astronomical horizon is the dashed line through O, perpendicular to the Earth's radius OC. But the observer's apparent horizon is the dashed line OG, tangent to the surface of the Earth. The point G is the geometric horizon.
Elementary geometry tells us that, because the angle between the dashed lines at G is a right angle, the distance OG from the observer (O) to the horizon (G) is related to the radius R and the observer's height h by the Pythagorean Theorem:
(R + h)2= R2 + OG2
or
OG2 = (R + h)2 − R2 .
But if we expand the term (R + h)2 = R2 + 2 R h + h2, the R2 terms cancel, and we find
OG = sqrt ( 2 R h + h2 ) .
It's customary to use the fact that h << R at this point, so that we can neglect the second term. Then
OG ≈ sqrt ( 2 R h )
is the distance to the horizon, neglecting refraction.
Numerically, the radius of the Earth varies a little with latitude and direction; but a typical value is 6378 km (about 3963 miles). If h is in meters, that makes the distance to the geometric horizon 3.57 km times the square root of the height of the eye in meters (or about 1.23 miles times the square root of the eye height in feet).
Now let's allow for refraction.
Refraction, considered simply
Now, let's try to allow for refraction. Usually, the air is densest at the surface, so the rays of light are concave toward the surface; see the bending page for details.
The solid arc OH now represents the curved line of sight; H is the (refracted) apparent horizon. Notice that refraction lets us see a little farther, if the ray is concave toward the Earth, as shown here.
If we can assume a constant lapse rate in the air between the eye and the Earth's surface, and if the observer's height h is small compared to the 8-km height of the homogeneous atmosphere, then we can assume the curved ray is an arc of a circle. This assumption makes things easy, because the relative curvature of the ray and the Earth's surface is all that matters. In effect, we can use the previous result, but just use an effective radius of curvature for the Earth that is bigger than the real one.
This assumption is made so often that it's conventional in surveying and geodesy to use a “refraction constant” that's just the ratio of the two curvatures. A typical value of the ratio is about 1/7; that is, the ray curves about 1/7 as much as the Earth does (or, equivalently, the radius of curvature of the ray is about 7 times that of the Earth's surface).
Using this “typical” value means we should just use the formula given above, but use a value R′ instead of R for the effective radius of the Earth, where
1/R′ = 1/R − 1/(7R) = 6/(7R) ,
so that
R′ = R × 7/6 .
That would make R′ about 7440 km, so that the distance to the horizon in kilometers is about 3.86 km times the square root of the height in meters (or about 1.32 miles times the square root of the height in feet).
In fact, this latter result (for English units) is nicely summed up by the old rule that 7 times the height in feet is 4 times the square of the distance to the horizon in miles; i.e.,
distance to horizon (miles) = sqrt [ 7 × h (feet) / 4 ].
NIMA has an on-line calculator that offers both English and metric units. Unfortunately, they put out far too many decimal places, giving a misleading impression of precision.
These approximations are all very handy; but how realistic are they?
Variable gradients
Unfortunately, the refraction varies considerably from day to day, and from one place to another. It is particularly variable over water: because of the high heat capacity of water, the air is nearly always at a different temperature from that of the water, so there is a thermal boundary layer, in which the temperature gradient is far from uniform.
Worse yet, these temperature contrasts are particularly marked near shore, where the large diurnal temperature swings over the land can produce really large thermal effects over the water, if there is an offshore breeze. This is particularly bad news for anyone standing on the shore and wondering how far out to sea a ship or island might be visible.
It gets worse. While the dip of the horizon depends only on an average temperature gradient, and so can be found from just the temperatures at the sea surface and at the eye, the distance to the horizon depends on the reciprocal of the mean reciprocal of the temperature gradient. But the structure of thermal boundary layers guarantees that there will be large variations in the gradient, even in height intervals of a few meters. This means that on two different days with the same temperatures at the eye and the water surface (and, consequently, the same dip), the distance to the horizon can be very different.
In conditions that produce superior mirages, there are inversion layers in which the ray curvature exceeds that of the Earth. Then, in principle, you can see infinitely far — there really is no horizon.
Of course, we all know that visibility is limited by the clarity or haziness of the air. And the duct that (in principle) might allow you to see around the whole Earth doesn't really extend that far; it typically exists for some limited region, perhaps a few tens or a few hundreds of kilometers.
So the nice-looking formulae for calculating “the distance to the horizon” are really only rough approximations to the truth. You can consider them accurate to a few per cent, most of the time. But, occasionally, they will be wildly off, particularly if mirages are visible. Then it's common to see much farther than usual — a condition known as looming.
How far can you see?
Still, even with those caveats, it's of interest to consider how far the eye can see under different conditions. Usually the visibility is limited by scattered light in the lower atmosphere; see
Craig F. Bohren and Alistair B. Fraser
“At what altitude does the horizon cease to be visible?”
American Journal of Physics 54, Issue 3 (March, 1986) p. 222
for details. Even under extremely clear conditions, it's unusual to see more than a couple of hundred kilometers.
However, there is one situation in which objects can be made out at great distances: when they are silhouetted against a bright background, such as the setting Sun, or (just after sunset) a bright twilit sky.
Here in San Diego, we rarely can see San Clemente Island, about 125 km offshore. The top of the island should just be visible above our horizon with normal refraction, but it's concealed by “airlight” during the day. Even in the clear air of a “Santa Ana,” which causes looming and raises more of the island above the apparent horizon, it's often hard to make out.
But just after sunset, the island is often visible, if you know where to look. The air between you and the island is only dimly illuminated after sunset, but the sky behind the island — i.e., the air beyond the horizon that is still in direct sunlight — is still fairly bright. Then the silhouette of the island is striking, even if it had been invisible a few minutes before sunset.
The Sun itself can be seen through a long duct when it is several degrees below the astronomical horizon; however, its image is then so distorted that any intervening terrestrial object (such as an island, a mountain, or even a cloud) would probably also be so distorted that its silhouette against the Sun would be unrecognizable. Some extreme claims can surely be discounted, such as Jessen's 1914 illusion. (Jessen claimed to have seen a mountain nearly 900 km away, but he certainly did not; Korzenewsky (1923), who refers to this report in a footnote, somehow inflated that to 1177 km.)
What's the record for visibility without help from the silhouetting effect? I think that might belong to the report of the expedition led by Korzenewsky (1923), who reported seeing snow-capped peaks of a mountain range 750 km away. Conditions were perfect: the lower atmosphere was in shadow at sunset; the peaks were quite high (4650 meters, or over 15,000 feet); they were covered with white snow, increasing their visibility; and there must also have been considerable looming to bring these distant features above the observers' horizon. As the observation was made on June 1, near the peak of superior-mirage season, the looming is not improbable, though the amount required is hard to believe. The observers themselves were in the deserts of Turkestan [now southeastern Kazakhstan] at a height of nearly a kilometer, where the dryness of the air favored extreme clarity, and looking across a broad, sandy depression. And, of course, much of the air path was in thinner air well above ground level, because of the mountains' height.
For less extreme, but very reliable, observations, consider some listed by Commander C. L. Garner of the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1933. He says that instrumental measurements were made in both directions “between Mt. Shasta and Mt. St. Helena in California, a distance of 192 miles.” [That's 309 km.] Apparently this was done in normal conditions, with no looming; heliotropes having 12-inch [30-cm] mirrors were used. He also credits the 1911 sighting of the Fairweather Mountains in Alaska from the ship Explorer from the Gulf of Alaska, 330 miles [531 km] away.
If you'd like to explore the consequences of various (constant) values for the lapse rate, I have a JavaScript calculator here. It uses the simplistic circular-ray approximation, so take its calculations with a grain of salt.
by PufPuf93 » Sat Sep 10, 2016 11:29 am
by vanlose kid » Sun Sep 11, 2016 2:41 pm
by vanlose kid » Sun Sep 11, 2016 3:15 pm
by backtoiam » Sun Sep 11, 2016 4:14 pm
by Belligerent Savant » Sun Sep 11, 2016 4:40 pm
Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests
What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist.
Something tremendous is happening; over the last few weeks, without too many of its globe-headed detractors noticing, a surprisingly vast community on the tattered fringes of intellectual orthodoxy is in turmoil. A bizarre new theory has turned the flat earth upside down. The flat earth is still flat, but now it’s dotted with tiny imitations of the truly enormous trees that once covered the continents, and which in our deforested age we can hardly even remember.
I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement, the sprawling network of people utterly convinced that the world has been lied to for centuries about its own physical shape. The particulars differ, but here everyone takes it as a given that a conspiracy reaching from your first schoolteacher to NASA to the metaphysical Beyond has deluded humanity, making us believe that we’re nothing more than something that grew on a rock, a layer of biological grease mouldering on the surface of a ball suspended in empty space, when we’re actually living on a flat plane.
Part of this fascination is anthropological: once, if you wanted to encounter an entirely different ontological system, you had to probe deep into jungles and deserts, pith helmet capping your Western arrogance. Now, with the peculiar cosmology of capitalist production subsuming an entire planet into its logic, mythological worlds are increasingly homogenized, and all that difference and weirdness is no longer geographically extensive. If you want to encounter very different realities, you can find them online, and each time the world reveals itself to be a little richer than you’d thought.
Still, among all the bizarre, self-enclosed universes the internet has to offer—gold-standard bores, UFO chasers, people who believe that cartoons are real in a nearby dimension or that the secret rulers of the world are betraying their existence by leaving little clues on the currency—the flat-earthers are special. Flat earth insists on the primacy of direct experience (look at the horizon, really look, and try to see the curve) against abstract domination. It’s an imaginative protest against the stupidity of our actual dreary sphere. As I’ve written elsewhere, “in an era where so much of the world is disenchanting and so much of social existence is already a given—you will have your job, you will have your life, you will be exploited and then you will die—there are people who can dream the Earth itself into a different shape.”
But lately, there’s been a change; something new and furious is growing in the community. ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ is an incredible new theory, proposed only last month. Its claim is grand, counterintuitive, and beautiful: we were lied to; our flat earth has no forests. Thousands of people are ready to believe it. This might prove to be important; you can’t understand our reality without understanding those dark and secret places where it’s denied. New discoveries in mainstream science just tell us about the physical universe; earth-shattering developments in the conspiracy-theory fringe tell us what’s happening to ourselves. ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ might be the future of weirdness, and it’s utterly magnificent.
The response to the video has been huge—since it was first posted by a Crimean man calling himself Людин Рɣси, ‘There are no forests on Flat Earth Wake Up’ has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, spawned hundreds of blog posts in the broader flat-earth-o-sphere and, at the time of writing, has gathered over ten thousand response videos. There’s been an ‘explainer,’ a ‘decoding,’ a biblical exegesis, a roundtable discussion (in fact, many, many roundtable discussions), and, inevitably, accusations that the precipitous popularity of the video is proof that it’s all a plot by the ‘control grid’ to distract from the real truth. Unfortunately, the ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ video is also nearly an hour-and-a-half long. You should absolutely watch the whole thing—but if you’re not the kind of dedicated weirdo who wants to waste a decent chunk of their day watching ludic conspiracy-theory pseudogeology, I’m willing to give you a summary.
We start with a montage of forests, peaceful scenes studded with sunlight, the kind of pictures just waiting for some inspirational quote to be plastered on top of them. We’ve all seen forests, we all know what they are; how could anyone claim that they don’t exist? But our narrator knows better. “They make us think that this is a forest,” he tells us, “when you are actually looking at thirty-meter bushes. After watching this video, you will reverse your concept of forests by 360 degrees.” This isn’t a forest at all: only a diminished imitation. Thousands of years ago, a cataclysmic event destroyed 99% of the Earth’s biosphere, and when it happened, it took away the real forests. Real trees are nothing like their stunted cousins, the miserable perishing scraps of wood that we see today; they were truly vast, hundreds of kilometers tall, magical organisms that sustained a total living ecology of the flat earth. These things were the anchor of a beautiful world that has now vanished forever. And how does he know? Because everywhere around us, we can see their stumps.
The first piece of evidence is Devils Tower in Wyoming, U.S.A., a great geological stub (pictured above) rising out of the rolling lowlands on all sides, four hundred meters of towering igneous rock that may have formed as a volcanic plug, rising out of the ground as the sedimentary stone that surrounded it slowly eroded away. Or so they want you to think. See its intricate hexagonal columns, curving up in a way that looks almost organic. See the perfection of its sheared-flat summit. Doesn’t this remind you of something?
For several minutes, our guide to this new reality shows us images of mesas, plateaux, flat-topped mountains, chunks of isolated cliffs, placed next to pictures of astoundingly similar-looking tree-stumps. Every time there’s the same challenge. ‘Name ten differences.’ You can’t. ‘There are only two differences: material and size.’ These things look the same: they are the same thing.
Not just mesas—ordinary mountains are contrasted with the shattered, splintered remnants of trees; the Giant’s Causeway in Ireland is revealed to be a petrified organic structure, because (we’re told) cooling lava simply does not assume these shapes. There is no such thing as a mountain; there is no such thing as inert rock. Everything we walk on was once living wood, the mountain ranges were once tremendous forests reaching up to the stellar canopy, providing a link between humanity and the celestial spheres. The earth was really flat. But some malignant power cut all these trees down using vast machinery, and ever since then they’ve been gouging into the corpse of the earth, mining the dead trees for precious minerals, carving deep quarries that we, in our ignorance, call gorges and canyons (you can see the monstrous tracks leading away from Antarctic valleys); we think they’re natural, we even think that the traces of our destruction are somehow beautiful.
At this point the video starts to lose focus. The narrator alleges that a nuclear war took place in the 19th century, that large bathtubs are proof of the technological complexities of previous ages, that volcanoes are massive slag piles boiling with reactive chemical waste. All this is obvious nonsense, but it’s worth thinking about why it’s had the impact it has.
In the roundtable discussion, various theorists rhapsodize about how deeply the video ‘resonated’ with them, they laugh that mainstream geology might just buckle under the weight of this incredible new research. And there is something that resonates. Against both the panpsychicism of hippie ecology, the bleary-eyed invocations of some dismally all-encompassing Mother Earth, and the pedantic materialism of most sciences as they’re actually practiced, ‘No Forests on Flat Earth’ proposes a kind of hylothanatism, a pessimism for our own weary age: this world was once alive, everything was once beautifully connected, but not any more. This earth has been dead for millennia; what we think of as progress is just the rot spreading through the cadaver of the world.
There are mythic assonances here—beyond the familiar world-trees of Norse cosmogony, the notion of a world built on a corpse has always fascinated people; Babylonian mythology, for instance, has the entire universe butchered out of the body of Tiamat, the primordial mother. Its mode of argument—‘this thing looks like this other thing, therefore they’re the same thing’—is also familiar. In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the medieval episteme: “It was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” The world was configured as one single text, a great chain of being explicable to those who knew how to read the signs. Bestiaries would record not just the physical characteristics of various animals, but their symbolic attributes. If a plant resembled a part of the human body, it could be used to treat its diseases; the map of the cosmos is also a map of the human body, and the pattern of the stars is also a horticultural manual. Foucault quotes Crollius: “Just as each herb or plant is a terrestrial star looking up at the sky, so also each star is a celestial plant in spiritual form, which differs from the terrestrial plants in matter alone.”
Foucault himself has a very ‘No Forests’ sadness for the loss of this world of interlinking resemblances in the 16th century, lamenting that “there is nothing now that still recalls even the memory of that being. Nothing, except perhaps literature.” The experience of modernity is one of a lost unity, and with an emerging capitalism came a world no longer required to be explicable, only fungible. But this lost world is not just something that falls away with modernity—as Freud points out, the formation of the conscious mind is similar: the ego is a “precipitate of lost objects.” Freud occasionally talks about an ‘oceanic’ feeling of unity, a remnant of very early childhood, when the mind is unable to distinguish between itself and the outside world. In the oral stage of psychosexual development, the child considers its mothers breast to be as much a part of itself as its own body. We are what we are because something else went away; when we become ourselves, we lose the vastness of everything else.
There’s a sense in which ‘No Forests’ could be seen as a way of getting this feeling back: if you believe in the giant trees, if you follow the chain of resemblances back to its megadendric origin, then you too can participate in the unity of all things on our flat earth. But at the same time it refuses the impulse to simply regress back to childhood. The trees are gone forever, and we’re not getting them back; we mourn for them, but the question of what we can possibly do now is unasked and unanswerable. ‘No Forests’ doesn’t give us cheap and easy solutions; instead, it just simply and starkly provides a map and mirror for our abandonment.
by 82_28 » Sun Sep 18, 2016 2:13 pm
With the possible exception of 'is the Earth flat?' it is (according to Discover magazine at least) the most basic question in science: 'does the Earth orbit the sun?'
The good news is that 74 per cent of Americans know the answer.
The very bad news is that means 26 per cent really don't.
These results, which appear in the National Science Foundation (NSF) survey of 2,200 Americans, will form part of a report set to be presented to Barack Obama and lawmakers in congress, and are likely to once again raise the issue of educational standards in the United States.
Other startling results from the survey included that only 39 per cent of Americans believe "the universe began with a huge explosion". And fewer than half of the people surveyed (48 per cent) agreed that "human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals".
Meanwhile, 51 per cent of Americans knew that antibiotics don't kill viruses.
The study also demonstrated that a total of 42 per cent of Americans thought astrology was either "very scientific" or "sort of scientific".
The survey, as reported by Agence France-Presse, is carried out every couple of years in order to analyse whether America is making educational progress.
Despite the somewhat negative findings of the study there is a significant glimmer of hope.
The survey revealed that nearly 90 per cent of Americans believed the benefits of science outweigh any dangers. Thirty per cent believe science deserves more funding from government, and around 90 per cent expressed an interest in learning about medical discoveries.
by Wombaticus Rex » Sun Sep 18, 2016 2:22 pm
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