@Alpha-liar,
Dog offers wise advice in the
post above yours. Calm down.
I have shown you a screen-shot-picture of that google-distance-calculator, so that everyone can see how i was misled, not to defend the trueness of what that google-distance-calculator shows.
You are right, i should have taken the square root of the area of the lake, and avoid such an awful mistake, but we all make mistakes, don't we?
The only difference is that honest men admit their mistakes right away, but scum bag liars don't admit their mistakes, ever. Most often, their mistakes are not mistakes at all, but deliberate and persistent lies.
You were caught out in an obvious blunder and are still trying to foist the blame onto Google. That's not exactly honest.
You weren't misled - the map you provided shows the locations that the reported distance applied to. Maybe it was for the wrong city, maybe it had the city in the wrong location. Either way,
your mistake was
uncritically accepting whatever number you read from the tool and making brash proclamations based on it without even looking at what you were being told.
How could you not notice that Chita was north of Randa on one map and south of it on the other? That's not Google's fault, that's
yours. So stop whining about it.
Admitting your mistake would be "Yeah, I goofed. I should have noticed that it couldn't possibly be measuring the right locations." Not "Google lied to me! I'm the victim! Waaah!"
The purpose of sanity checking is to catch large errors that sometimes slip in. Even though you missed the obviously wrong location when you determined the distance (it happens), a quick calculation would have exposed the obvious blunder: "if that's 200 miles, how big is that lake? 40,000 square miles? Hmmm... I wonder what's wrong?" This is called
cross-checking facts, a.k.a.
careful work. You need to learn how to do it.
We all do make mistakes. A
wise person
learns from them so he doesn't make the same mistake again.
Regarding Salar de Uyuni case, even without wrong supposition about 200 miles distance between two ends of that lake, we still have here an astonishing proof of the flatness of the Earth!
Maybe you didn't notice one important sentence in this Wiki quote:
Salt flats are ideal for calibrating the distance measurement equipment of satellites because they are large, stable surfaces with strong reflection, similar to that of ice sheets. As the largest salt flat on Earth, Salar de Uyuni is especially suitable for this purpose. In the low-rain period from April to November, due to the absence of industry and its high elevation, the skies above Salar de Uyuni are very clear, and the air is dry (relative humidity is about 30%; rainfall is roughly 1 millimetre or 0.039 inches per month). It has a stable surface which is smoothed by seasonal flooding (water dissolves the salt surface and thus keeps it leveled).
As a result, the variation in the surface elevation over the 10,582-square-kilometer (4,086 sq mi) area of Salar de Uyuni is less than 1 meter (3 ft 3 in), and there are few square kilometers on Earth that are as flat. The surface reflectivity (albedo) for ultraviolet light is relatively high at 0.69 and shows variations of only a few percent during the daytime.[6] The combination of all these features makes Salar de Uyuni about five times better for satellite calibration than the surface of an ocean.[4][5][23] Using Salar de Uyuni as the target, ICESat has already achieved the short-term elevation measurement accuracy of below 2 centimeters (0.79 in).
>The combination of all these features makes Salar de Uyuni about five times better for satellite calibration than the surface of an ocean.<
So, NASA uses surface of an ocean for satellite calibration, also? Since the flatness of the surface is what they are looking for (for satellite calibration), then even they (NASA) basically admit that the surface of an ocean is quite enough flat to be used for that purpose.
That figures!
Yeah, I noticed that sentence. "Level" and "flat" in this context mean "at the same elevation". The datum this elevation is measured from is
curved. In this case, it's clearly the geoid, in other cases it might be sea level, which differs from the geoid slightly because of ocean and air currents. Your "astonishing prooooooffff!!!" is, once again, simply assigning the wrong meaning to words.
Get over yourself.