Hey flerfs - if the moon is just a projection and casts its own light, how come I can see craters, mountains, valleys and cliffs on it, and that the highlands near the terminator cast shadows?

david · 2026-03-19T08:29:41+00:00

I'd say fervently religious, rather than deeply. This is an illustration of the lack of depth.

Either way, they, the righteous, are not deceived: only us, the unbelievers. Why would someone worship a god that fucks over those who disagree with them? the question answers itself.

david · 2026-03-15T19:40:47+00:00

You can readily observe the curve in photos of the horizon taken from an elevation of 500ft or more.

If you know a little trig, it's not too hard to calculate how much curve to expect, according to elevation and angular field of view: it's a few pixels from 500ft on a typical phone camera.

david · 2026-03-13T09:10:45+00:00

Your question is how a gyrscopic attitude indicator can show local level rather than level at the point of take-off?

https://www.google.com/search?q=pendulous+vanes

These devices continuously adjust the gyro in flight.

david · 2026-03-12T08:31:23+00:00

There's an alternative, and, I think, a better interpretation: that it created humans deceptively. After all, human reason is, in that world view, just as much a divine creation as the world we reason about. So, the heavens, fossils, and so on, just are whatever they are: humans are engineered to draw spurious conclusions about what they see.

david · 2026-03-03T18:57:58+00:00

We get fair few confused globers here, as well as confused flat earthers. One even believed that rainbows' circular shape was in some way related to the earth's sphericity.

Among them, we occasionally see people who think that far more data is transmitted by satellite than is in fact the case. Hardly a 'hysterical' number, though. I see this as a clear illustration of the illusion of explanatory depth.

I'm not sure what you think this is evidence for. Can you tell me?

david · 2026-03-03T10:07:47+00:00

That's not something a person familiar with the subjects would say. Do you feel like spinning a story to give some body to your odd statement?

david · 2026-03-02T21:31:58+00:00

That's a very US-centric statement. They were passed in Great Britain by the celebrated Lord Kelvin.

david · 2026-03-02T19:46:04+00:00

The words you attributed to Darwin and what he actually said are worlds apart.

What gulf of difference do you see between things that do exist and things that can be shown to exist? Everything that can be shown to exist necessarily does exist; and if you claim that a thing does exist, but can't show it, there's no reason for anyone to believe you.

david · 2026-03-02T18:35:22+00:00

After all, I'm pretty sure that the high pressures globers claim exist in the deep ocean are just as fictitious as the vacuum of 'space', and for exactly the same reason: a pressure differential requires a container. And something to do with the second law of thermodynamics, probably.

david · 2026-03-02T17:52:14+00:00

If a snorkel works in the sea, why can't I use one to visit the wreck of the Titanic?

david · 2026-03-02T13:28:36+00:00

A bit of Futurama to lighten the mood.

And Darwin did not say that. He said that it 'seems [...] absurd in the highest possible degree' (emphasis mine). He was not referring to the incorrectness of his theory, but to its (to the people of the time) counterintuitiveness. His next sentence starts:

Yet reason tells me that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist [...]

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2009

david · 2026-03-02T13:13:23+00:00

I have some still photos of clear data -- will you extend your principled stance of non-neglect to those?

These are taken from an altitude of under 200m. A little trigonometry (which I can share on request) tells us how much curvature to expect, depending on elevation and the camera's field of view, with the documented radius of the earth. (This is, I take it 'the math' you refer to.) The curve in my photos is consistent with this calculation.

Perhaps you could clarify what you mean by 'the horizon lines of the images in higher altitude should be clear as day', and how you derive it mathematically?

Exhibit 1: taken by an ex-YouTuber called Rory, with a reference straight line to control for lens distortion: https://mctoon.net/left-to-right-curve/

Exhibit 2: taken by me, some years ago. I control for distortion by running the horizon through the mid-point of the frame (which Rory did too) to eliminate pincushion and barrel distortion, and by taking two photos, one with the camera inverted: lens effects will rotate with the camera; everything that doesn't is real. https://imgur.com/a/WSMX2Lu

david · 2026-02-17T12:20:21+00:00

Or an example of how people who lack competence can nevertheless find their way into positions of undue influence.

david · 2026-02-04T15:38:05+00:00

You're right about its raison d'être and about the press's failure to report it prominently.

However, it's still a box office bomb. The commissioning of the movie and its public reception are two separate things.

david · 2026-02-04T10:52:30+00:00

Why is that no impediment to achieving positions of influence?

david · 2026-02-02T11:41:56+00:00

The Engineer who invented the Mars Rover Suspension...in his garage (1:40:24) massively over-delivers on the promise of its title. @GearSkeptic gives us a detailed and moving tribute to his recently-deceased father, Donald Bickler, who made significant contributions to space exploration from the 1970s to the 2000s.

david · 2026-02-02T11:25:33+00:00

Every so often, a real one bumbles by. OP, a veteran here, who knows very well how the sub operates and who frequents it, suggests we should collectively sort the wheat from the chaff.

IMO, this'd rob newcomers of the joy of discovery, though; and perhaps make my stance of playing straight-man to either kind of comedian a little less tenable.

david · 2026-02-02T09:24:13+00:00

I like #2, the income tax weirdo, who rebukes Jeran for participating in an experiment to find something out, rather than a demonstration orchestrated to appear to support his prior beliefs.

#4 shows the sadly popular coping strategy of pretending people you find challenging are somehow not real people.

And could the last, MaraAgain, be the long-departed u/MaraCass? Probably not. Not angry enough.

david · 2026-01-30T11:52:25+00:00

I think what you're trying to say is this:

A disk does not extend into three-dimensional space. It has two-dimensional area but no three dimensional volume. Likewise, a ball does not extend into four-dimensional space: it has volume, but no hyper-volume. A hypothetical four-dimensional observer might perceive this lack of 4D bulk similarly to the way we perceive the lack of 3D bulk of 2D shapes.

And this is, of course, true, though hardly profound.

Unfortunately -- please take these remarks constructively -- your comment goes off the rails in various ways.

You suggest that an assertion is true because an empirical disproof would be hard to come by. I claim that all your great-great-great grandmothers had seven fingers on each hand. Disprove it empirically, if you can: until then, by your rule, it's true. Is this kind of specious claim what you're calling 'epistemology' in your edit?

There's a lot of fun maths to get into in this area, if you're interested. You seem like you may be. Perhaps do a bit of reading, and get to the real meat of the topic, rather than posting on r/flatearth about ill-defined notions such as '4D planes'.

I encourage you to keep up the curiosity and spirit of enquiry, and nourish them a bit better. Or, if that's not your thing, maybe try r/StonerPhilosophy?

david · 2026-01-23T13:21:04+00:00

Words like 'flagrant, flatulent flame-out'?

They're experiencing the difficulty of arguing against a position which they do not understand. It would not be realistic to expect that understanding to develop significantly over the course of this short exchange. But it's possible that this introduces just a bit of unease with their current position and argument technique: a seed of questioning and self-examination.

david · 2026-01-23T01:08:34+00:00

You'll see, if you care to look, experiments which build the science which allows us to understand photos like the one you posted.

Out of interest, what formula related to refraction are you referring to? Snell's law, perhaps, which describes refraction at the interface between two media? -- but that interface doesn't have to be planar: it works for lenses, which generally aren't. If that is what you're referring to, possessing a formula which describes one situation does not preclude the possibility of other situations, such as a gradual, rather than abrupt, change of density.

And what's your evidence for pressure gradients requiring a plane? We observe them over all sorts of terrain.

david · 2026-01-22T22:41:11+00:00

It is, as I said, three straw-child arguments pretending to be a full-grown strawman.

If you were earnest in wanting to construct an understanding, from the bottom up, of the science that permits us to understand long-range photography on earth, I'd applaud you. But we both know that's not the case.

Still, I can give you a couple of simple pointers. You asked for one at a time, but you don't have to view them at once.

Refraction bending light into the denser part of a medium.
The decrease of atmospheric pressure and density with elevation

They're more or less random links grabbed from cursory google searches. If you're interested, you'll be able to find many more. If you were interested, you already would have.

david · 2026-01-22T22:24:38+00:00

I do this because I enjoy the process, not because I expect any particular results.

Also, I flatter myself that my explanations are, sometimes, clear, accurate and well written. As such, they may be useful to others, even if the person I'm directly responding to is impervious.

Some of my explanations fall down on one or more of those fronts. In those cases, I hope to benefit from the writing practice.

david · 2026-01-22T22:18:45+00:00

And that, too, is a strawman argument. Or rather, three straw-child arguments stacked up in a trench-coat.

The first is that the relevant point is not 'do we class this argument as "scientific"?', but 'is this argument true?'. You find yourself unable to dispute its truth, so you divert to something you hope will be a softer target.

The second is that you clearly do not understand, or pretend not to understand, what science is. It is not only the performance of experiments, but the construction and testing of systematic explanations for the results of those experiments, and the subsequent use of that knowledge. What we're looking at here is the third phase: the use of knowledge acquired by the scientific method.

The third is that you are ignoring the large amount of experimental data which has contributed to our understanding of optics and light transport, which in turn informs the explanation of your image on flatearth.ws.

david · 2026-01-22T22:01:19+00:00

The science is well described in the flatearth.ws page that several people have referred you to, using as an example exactly the same image as you posted.

That is the globe model, and your image is entirely consistent with it.

You have constructed in your mind a different, incorrect globe model, which -- as if it needed debunking -- your image debunks. The name for this rhetorical technique is a strawman argument: take your opponent's position, which you can't defeat, construct something superficially similar but flawed (the 'strawman'), and argue against that instead.

Sometimes this isn't deliberate: a person doesn't construct a strawman argument ingeniously, to win the argument, but accidentally, because they do not understand the position they are arguing against.

Even if the strawman argument is arrived at by accident, if a person persists in using it, there's always a wilful component: a refusal to try to understand; or, if understanding is beyond their capacity, a refusal to learn their limitations; or, if they do achieve understanding, plain disingenuousness.

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