Microblog Memes

Wow. I can't believe my perspective of the world is that distorted. It makes me want to only look at it in 3D. If we've all mainly looked at Mercator projections our whole lives our sense of where everything is relative to everything else and what direction is completely off.

People complain about the proportional sizing of Mercator but the sense of direction it gives us is completely broken. I think the average person knows it's off and people think there is an error factor to consider that a really straight like might be a little squiggly. But nope. This made me realize the Mercator gives pretty much zero accurate sense of direction if real distance is involved.

[PROCEEDS INTO HURRICANE]

Sorry, can't hear you down here in my submarine

The only place you can't sail is directly into the wind. You can go all the other places eventually but it's a lot of back and forth.

Especially going the wrong direction!

It'd be less bad on the return trip, but then you're fighting the trade winds and the Canary current instead.

Just rename it as Pacific Ocean and voila, no storm hence the name!

Can you, though? You'd have to squeeze through the narrow English Channel first, and that would probably require some turns.

I volunteer— not like you go through most dangerous sea passage in the world or anything…

Another fun one is to ask someone if they were to take off in an airplane from Miami and fly due south, which South American countries would they fly over?

The answer is none of them. You end up missing the entire continent because you are too far west.

I went down a rabbit hole about globes and maps recently

Basically, to find the shortest distant between two places on a globe (a 'straight' line), imagine a hoop or circle round the earth that cuts it exactly in half, and rotate it until it passes through both places (still cutting it exactly in half)

That's a great circle.

There are 2d map projections that are built around this, but they only work when one of the locations is at the center of the map. So it could show the shortest distance from, say, London to anywhere with a straight line, but it wouldn't work for a route not including London

That'd be awesome. That probably wouldn't work because it would take 100 years for California to build their first high speed rail

If it doesn't look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.

The Polynesians took the long route.

The European explorers actually took a very similar route, so this seems to be an obvious option for sailors doing island hops in that area.

Y'all, I found the Flat Earther!

Well, yeah..if you want a line that is straight in 3 dimensions then any point on earth at sea level to any other point earth at sea level will require you to go below the surface of the planet.