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Topics - ronbegon

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Flat Earth Debate / Weather
« on: December 28, 2019, 07:15:21 PM »
I was reading the FAQs and noticed a short blurb about weather.  It mentioned local weather causes, like adiabatic effects and differential heating.  But it also mentioned that the prevailing wind flows from west to east, with no further explanation or discussion.  That seems like something which demands an explanation. 

First, I am sorry the author has never experienced the delights found in the tropics.  Because in the tropics, the prevailing winds are called the Trade Winds and they tend to blow east to west, not west to east.  But I digress.  The question is, why?  Well, look in your toilet bowl and flush.  See the winds in the temperate zones are trying to flow toward the poles, because of the differential heating and air pressure.  The winds in the tropics want to flow toward the equator for the same reason.  But the spinning of the spherical earth adds in the Coriolis effect.  This is another of those fun things that you can see with your own eyes, in the smoke rising from your joint to the stuff spinning down the drain in your toilet.  Dust devils, cyclones of all their various names, oceanic whirlpools...  none would exist on a flat earth.

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Flat Earth Debate / telescopes, radar and LIDAR
« on: December 28, 2019, 03:57:58 AM »
Flat earthers love the six mile canal story, but ignore the day to day experience of the tens of thousands of individuals sailing the seas and flying the sky.

Why can I see Mars with a cheap telescope but not Mt. Everest?  Why isn't a ship's radar useful for hundreds, even thousands of miles?  Why can't a LIDAR beam from Mt. Rainier hit Mt Fuji?  On a flat earth I should be able to see Hawaii from San Fransisco.  But I can't.  On the other hand, I can count the rings on Saturn, even with a cheap Walmart device.

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Flat Earth Debate / No gravity?
« on: December 27, 2019, 12:51:11 AM »
Ok, I love the no gravity argument.  This isn't the Einstein version involving space time, but a totally fabricated one with neither mathematical calculation nor evidence.  It does however reference "dark matter."  Now I personally am totally stumped how a belief which is supposed to be based solely on observed evidence (the earth looks flat, feels flat, so it must be flat...) can conjure up the idea of dark matter.  Surely dark matter is just another of the multitude of fabrications by the thousands of scientists from multiple countries, cultures and even religious backgrounds involved in this spherical earth conspiracy, right?  Or to put the sarcasm aside, how does a believer decide which scientific evidence to believe and which is just part of the conspiracy?

Here's something to chew on.  There are good historical records of humans going back at least 5000 years.  Even young earth believers acknowledge at least 5000 years.  Now if the earth was at 0 5000 years ago and just started accelerating at 32ft/second squared, how fast would it be going now?  Let's see 5000 years is 157,784,760,000 seconds times 32 feet per second squared equals... 3,461,300,860,246 miles per hour.  Ok, the speed of light is about 670,616,629 miles per hour.  Around 5100 times the speed of light.  Hmm.

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Flat Earth Debate / The Sun is a spotlight?
« on: December 26, 2019, 08:59:55 PM »
This is possibly the nuttiest idea so far (next to "there is no gravity") so I had to start with this. 

First, how would the sun be focused into a spotlight?  What is the mechanism?  What is the evidence? 

Even if the sun were a "spotlight" it would still be visible from everywhere on the surface of a flat earth.  For example a spotlight pointed at a stage performer can still be seen by everyone in the audience, and by all others on the stage, even when they are not in the spotlight.  Even a laser, which is more focused than a spotlight, can be seen from positions outside the focal point. And even if we couldn't see the actual "light" we would be able to detect both the beam of light and the source.  Remember those WW2 movies of the spotlight beams crisscrossing the night sky above Berlin?  But we can't see the sun at night, nor the tell tail beam. 

The sun hitting a flat earth would illuminate every part simultaneously.  But that is not what happens on this earth.

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