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I finally looked into that 'flat earth' map thing my neighbor kept going on about
He kept saying the flight paths didn't make sense, so I pulled up a globe and a ruler and spent an hour last Tuesday checking routes from Sydney to Santiago. The straight line on a flat map would go over Africa, but on a globe it's a curve over the Pacific, which matches the real flight path perfectly. Has anyone else actually tried to plot a long flight to see if it checks out?
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jessel352h ago
A pilot friend once explained how they use great circle routes for navigation. Those curved paths are the shortest distance on a sphere, which your ruler test proved. It's a solid way to show how the real world works.
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christopher_ellis781h ago
Hold on, doesn't that just prove maps are flat? If the shortest path curves on a globe, @jessel35, but looks straight on a flat map, maybe the map is right. That ruler test seems backwards to me.
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