It occurred to me today that, although I have stayed in ocean view apartments before, I had never tried very hard to check out the old proof of the world being round by watching closely how a tall ship disaplears from view. The problem is, of course, that you need to spot a ship going in the right direction away from the coast, and not just parallel to it. This is likely the reason I hadn't done this before
Today was my lucky day, and to prove it, I even have the shots taken through my binoculars.
Here's the first shot (just holding the phone lens up to the binocular's eyepiece):
Let me crop that for you:
This was exciting: a ship heading away by about a 45 degree angle. It did go behind a tree for about 20 to 30 minutes.
But when emerged into sight, there was a lot less to see:
Close up crop:
And finally, a bare white smudge, being the top of the ship:
And thus we have the reverse of a tall ship's mast being sighted before the rest comes into view.
I thought this cool, even though my kids just rolled their eyes.
Anyway.. Back to holiday stuff.. Like testing out night mode on my phone's camera:
Nice.
3 comments:
Yes the roundness of the planet was obvious even to the ancients. A fellow called Temple showed that the ancients did have telescopes by the way. It wasn't a renaissance invention. Well it was but that was a rediscovery. The tip of the sails and later the crows nest always came into view ahead of the rest of the ship.
The modern flat earth idiocy is a psy-op. Its meant to target people like me and get bad oligarchical science off the hook. This psy-op was there after the alleged moon landing and it revived again in the second half of 2015. Everyone and his Momma was hiring halls out to talk about the flat earth. Ridiculous.
Geocentrism is pretty silly also but its an order of magnitude less stupid. Really there is no comparison. I mean its still WRONG but not as foolish. More understandable an error.
Great amateur science work. Now you want to apply that same level of evidence criteria to a mainstream hypothesis that is wrong. Rather than to mainstream hypothesis that is right. Doesn't matter what the professionals are forced to believe (certainly by mental pressure but even more so by selection). The same rules must apply.
For example even though the weather people are forced to ignore electricity wherever they can possibly do so, I gave you the example of black cloud raindrops that actually defy gravity for hours on end. How about them apples hey? Thats pretty strong evidence for something going on right? Can't be that officer Barr-Brady deal about "nothing to see here" right? Same with you successfully showing that the top of the boat is visible even when the body of the boat is decisively obscured. In both cases thats the kind of evidence that cannot be ignored.
But yet everyone I know, whether it is here or at Catallaxy, chooses to ignore evidence with great vigour. Like the decisive evidence that our good good friend Mr Lowy needs to be taken in for questioning. .
If you are akarog over at Quiggins place its quite encouraging that you've come out against the extremists and the panic merchants over at Quiggins place. Actually I see a little bit of flexibility creeping into Geoff Miels thinking also. He was so painful. But he got to the point where he thought that we'd have to have battery powered heavy equipment going all the way out to remote mines, mining rare earth elements. Now thats actually completely ridiculous. It can never happen. Yet his ideology requires it. So I can almost see the gears turning inside his mind. And he went and asked me a sensible question for a change. Which I didn't get to answer because I got a bit irate with some wrecker and went overboard.
The other good thing about Miel is that he has this mantra going where he comes out up front and reminds himself that energy is vital, and nothing happens without energy. As a sort of slowly reforming arch-crazy he's laid out all these submissions to the government and he's repeated this energy mantra. So now that he's finally thought through his battery and rare earths mantra he looks like he's on the verge of becoming reasonable.
You guys think that the reason to panic is high CO2 levels. I think the reason to panic is an energy crisis that we are stuck with clear through the end of the century if we are smart, and longer if we are stupid. A crisis potentially occasioning the slaughter of billions of people. But CO2 release and energy efficiency are kind of substitutes for each other. Or at least correlated if we can reverse Jevons paradox. So we (me and you) should have common cause. What stops us from having common cause is this extremism. And the delusion that you can do anything quickly when it comes to energy economics.
With energy economics its ALWAYS a decades long slog.
Always. Always. Anyone thinking otherwise is delusional. With energy economics its a long hard and painful effort to turn things around and the only thing that has mislead us on this matter is these oilwells where you would lance them and the energy jumped out of the ground at you, and almost followed you home.
Oil was so fucking amazing. EROI exceeding 100 to 1. Thats not to be repeated. Nuclear is currently at 4 to 1. Over decades if we work real real hard we can slowly grind that up to 30 to 1 I would imagine. But its going to be a grind and its got to come out of surplus budgets. Professor Quiggin is fantastic in some areas but he's got it wrong this time. He thinks we can borrow a trillion dollars at low interest and put it into solar panels and she'll be right. He's good in some areas but that idea gets an F for fail from me.
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