*folds world map in half
*sticks pencil throughI honestly believe that sometimes, my genius, it generates gravity.
You youngsters with your Einstein Rosen-bridges! Always in too much of a hurry to take the scenic route!
A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.
-The Third Doctor, Doctor Who
HYPERSPACE
Reminds me of the movie Event Horizon.
And like 5 million other movies
Low IQ: it’s not a straight line
Medium IQ: it’s a geodesic on a sphere, so it is a straight line
High IQ: it’s not a straight line
He’s right, you know.
About the line?
About everything, damn it!
It’s a straight line through non-euclidean space
unfortunately in reality it is a curved line on a sphere
In actual reality there would be wind and water currents diverting any ship sailing that route from the depicted “line” anyway so the whole argument is pointless
The only straight line paths in the universe are followed by electrostatically uncharged non-accelerating objects in free fall in a vacuum. Or massless particles.
What if we assume the ship is actually a spherical cow
Whole Universe eh? That exists and is bounded on a curved space time.
I’m just joking, but you can really take this to the extreme lol
Spacetime is curved. Inertial paths through spacetime are straight.
Euclidean space is not the only space where straight lines are possible.
It can get a few percent longer if sailing between Madagascar and the rest of Africa but Pakistan-Russia does not have the same ring to it, I guess.
Edit: source (German), they also show the longest land route (across Eurasia of course)That’s not a straight line, although it is possible to follow without changing direction😊
I KNOW IT’S BASICALLY A CIRCLE IN 3D SPACE. There is an exact amount of pedantry at play here, and you’re going over.
Would you say that they… crossed the line?!?! 😏😏😏
In our space time frame of reference, we never change direction, we travel in a straight line. It’s a straight line.
And when Im walking, in my frame of refrence, the houses on the side of the road move behind me. Houses move.
But following the surface of a sphere causes you to constantly change direction
Correct! Technically :P
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Would straight plane be as understandable?
Ridiculous. This line is clearly gay.
This is bi erasure.
Not even 10 am and I’m being erased.
Never thought I’d get to use “bisectional” outside of JD Vance jokes
Saying that it’s bi erasure is gay erasure.
We claimed it is erasure first, and now here’s our flag.
Hey, you even have the eraser right there is the middle! I suppose that makes it convenient?
I really do love convenience!
Lmao at the admission that the entire identity of being bi is claiming erasure and playing victim.
It’s bi sectional.
Today on the internet: Fun with spherical geometry.
This reminds me of some maps by Andy Woodruff.
They weren’t made to find long lines, and picking out a single line can be a tad difficult, but it’s very interesting nonetheless.
South America’s reach is incredible, compared to size that is
And it’s mystery is exceeded only by it’s power.
Well there’s the one guy in Northern India who gets a peek at South America from between Madagascar and the African continent.
There is also just the one straight path from the US east coast (Florida) to Asia.
Your dad and I think you should start looking for a job.
I can’t legally work in my country I’m not old enough
But still, don’t you hunger for the mines?
Fuck it
Eats the mines
Toiling in the meme mines.
Edit: I have just finished reading The Neverending Story and this reminds me of the last part where Bastian works in the picture mines until he finds the right picture.
How can any line that is on the surface of a sphere by straight rather than a curve?
Haa, here people, we found a flat earth denier…
Earth is a lie.
GET THE ROUNDIE!
it’s a bit of a “spirit of the law vs letter of the law” kind of thing.
technically speaking, you can’t have a straight line on a sphere. but, a very important property of straight lines is that they serve as the shortest paths between two points. (i.e., the shortest path between
AandBis given by the line fromAtoB.) while it doesn’t make sense to talk about “straight lines” on a sphere, it does make sense to talk about “shortest paths” on a sphere, and that’s the “spirit of the law” approach.the “shortest paths” are called geodesics, and on the sphere, these correspond to the largest circles that can be drawn on the surface of the sphere. (e.g., the equator is a geodesic.)
i’m not really sure if the line in question is a geodesic, though
What is the slope of a straight line, a linear function? Now what is the slope of a nonlinear function, aka a curved line?
A geodesic would only be accurately labeled a “straight line” IF it was on a plane. On a curved or uneven surface it’s a nonlinear function.
i think it depends on what you mean by “accurately”.
from the perspective of someone living on the sphere, a geodesic looks like a straight line, in the sense that if you walk along a geodesic you’ll always be facing the “same direction”. (e.g., if you walk across the equator you’ll end up where you started, facing the exact same direction.)
but you’re right that from the perspective of euclidean geometry, (i.e. if you’re looking at the earth from a satellite), then it’s not a straight line.
one other thing to note is that you can make the “perspective of someone living on the sphere” thing into a rigorous argument. it’s possible to use some advanced tricks to cook up a definition of something that’s basically like “what someone living on the sphere thinks the derivative is”. and from the perspective of someone on the sphere, the “derivative” of a geodesic is 0. so in this sense, the geodesics do have “constant slope”. but there is a ton of hand waving here since the details are super complicated and messy.
this definition of the “derivative” that i mentioned is something that turns out to be very important in things like the theory of general relativity, so it’s not entirely just an arbitrary construction. the relevant concepts are “affine connection” and “parallel transport”, and they’re discussed a little bit on the wikipedia page for geodesics.
Thank you for the informative answer
This whole post is a good illustration to how math is much more creative and flexible than we are lead to believe in school.
The whole concept of “manifolds” is basically that you can take something like a globe, and make atlases out of it. You could look at each map of your town and say that it’s wrong since it shouldn’t be flat. Maps are really useful, though, so why not use math on maps, even if they are “wrong”? Traveling 3 km east and 4 km north will put you 5 km from where you started, even if those aren’t straight lines in a 3d sense.
One way to think about a line being “straight” is if it never has a “turn”. If you are walking in a field, and you don’t ever turn, you’d say you walked in a straight line. A ship following this path would never turn, and if you traced it’s path on an atlas, you would be drawing a straight line on map after map.
I think those last 2 paragraphs are due to people approximating math that would otherwise be quite complex to calculate, or making models that are approximations due to widespread available technology. Just because I don’t turn if I cross over Mt Everest, does not mean that is the fastest route by foot.
I’m not saying to not use these approximations.
I really recommend the book “Where Mathematics Comes From,” to really think deeply about what math is to us as an animal. Even other animals can do some rudimentary math, and arguably athletes are doing math innately as they perform their sports. Birds and dolphins do physics and calculus. Sort of. In this view, what we teach as math to each other as humans is essentially a language describing these phenomenon and how they work together. Calling this approximation a “straight line” in this language sense isn’t very accurate and it’s what’s causing the debate.
Stop making up bullshit to justify it. It’s not a straight line so don’t say that it is. Words have meaning.
By defining the coordinate system as a sphere.
Basically, there are multiple right answers, but the most correct answer depends on how you define coordinates.
In “simple”, xyz it’s not a line.
In Euclidean geometry, a straight line can follow a curved surface.
In bullshit physics, everything is warped relative to spacetime so anything can or cannot be a line, but we won’t know.
Yup, found the round earther.
Globists will argue that on a globe this is a straight line. Seen these arguments before, don’t work on me
Nice. Be proud.
Dunno what of, but be proud anyway!
Thanks! I’m very proud of seeing the truth. Watch this short video and you will being to understand. But watch it to the end, it’s short enough
The ending really brings the whole video together. Thanks for sharing!
You’ve made a believer of me.
You know, I’d never actually thought of it that way. Very informative video for it’s short length. Thank you for sharing.
I’ve seen that video a hundred times and it never fails to disappoint
One of the most compelling arguments I’ve heard. I must say I was a skeptic before but this really opened my eyes
Don’t know about other clients, but vger shows a thumbnail of the video
Better?
Got error: “Sign in to confirm that you’re not a bot”
Hmm, really makes you think…
Every line is a straight line in one dimension
Line that is straight in two dimensions.
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Would clarifying words have helped? “If you only sailed with forward force…” or “Following along the surface of the earth…” or… what?
Obviously they mean that you don’t need to make any turns and that straight means an arc around the earth and not through the Earth, unless someone has a very different idea what sailing means…
Depends on what you mean by help. Yes, it would communicate the point better, but it’s engagement bait, so the ambiguity is a feature rather than a bug.
Yes I think they mean it’s a continuous line, not a “straight” line. As in the line is uninterrupted (continuous). It’s also possible they mean the line qualifies as a nonlinear function since it also doesn’t double back over itself (A function is a relationship where each input value (X) will create only one output value (Y)).
Math is hard. Describing lines like this is math - calculus actually due to the curve, and actually not just basic calculus but vector calculus because it involves an x,y, and z axis. Most laypeople will struggle to describe a line with the correct jargon.
THAT would be one god damn brutal sail. Both horns, Southern Atlantic crossing followed up by the Indian Ocean.
The range of foulies you would need to bring would be 3/4 of your pack. Foulies underwear and A sock (you’re going to lose one anyways)
I feel like this is related to the can’t measure the coast’ thing.
Like if you zoom in enough you are always traveling in a straight line.
I don’t know… straight, I would assume, means that I could walk or drive a vehicle and not turn at all, ignoring any external influences like waves and currents in this case.
But your vehicle would itself “curve” “downwards” due to gravity, surely a straight line means that you can point a laser, or a hypothetical 0 mass particle beam, uninterrupted from your starting point to your destination.
Depends on your frame of reference. When traversing the surface of a globe, your described concept of a straight line isn’t intuitive.
in ur every day life if u travel in a car without changing direction would u say that u went in a straight line or in an arc. Clearly u are just trying to be a pedantic cunt for no reason.
It’s more that 2d projections of 3d objects are wonky and unintuitive.
There was a conversation I read a while ago that showed how a sailboat could travel a straight line over water from Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, travel southeast and end up on the west coast of British Columbia.
Basically sailing from the east coast of Canada to the west coast of Canada in a straight line.
The line was published by David Cooke in this YouTube video. It lies on a plane but is not quite a great circle (in practice, you’d be turning slightly) and good luck sailing over the Antarctic ice shelfs this decade.
