airplanes

As we all know, the world looks like this:

<<http://www.imagehosting.us/imagehosting/showimg.gif/?id=439381>>

So, who wants to tell the class why, when I take a plane from New York to Stockholm, I never look out the window and see a whole mess of puffins playing on the north pole?

Bonus points if you can tell the class why it takes about two hours longer on said trip to fly NY-S than S-NY, considering the earth can't rotate.

Posted: Wed May 25, 2005 6:35 pm    Post subject:  

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 The communist person wrote
Bonus points if you can tell the class why it takes about two hours longer on said trip to fly NY-S than S-NY, considering the earth can't rotate.

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Errrrrrrrr please Sir, would it be because of strong head winds?

::smacks head:: of course, I just forgot that the wind was blowing west-east in each of the two dozen flights I've ever taken from Minneapolis to New York, or New York to Paris or Stockholm.

And by inference, that explains why the wind on the ground is always always west-east too. And strongly so, too.

that was me btw

Bonus points if you can tell the class why it takes about two hours longer on said trip to fly NY-S than S-NY, considering the earth can't rotate.

If the flat earth is rotating (as if on a record player), that might account for the difference in journey lengths.  If you're flying against the rotation, it would take less time to arrive at your destination.

Quote from: "Commie"

Bonus points if you can tell the class why it takes about two hours longer on said trip to fly NY-S than S-NY, considering the earth can't rotate.

If the flat earth is rotating (as if on a record player), that might account for the difference in journey lengths.  If you're flying against the rotation, it would take less time to arrive at your destination.

But if the Flat-Earth is rotating, because the Earth is flat and rotating from its origin (like a record player, as you've said), then the coordinates that the pilots use to fly to one destination to another will be wrong, because the rotation of the flat Earth and the rotation of a round Earth are different.

Quote from: "Commie"

Bonus points if you can tell the class why it takes about two hours longer on said trip to fly NY-S than S-NY, considering the earth can't rotate.

If the flat earth is rotating (as if on a record player), that might account for the difference in journey lengths.  If you're flying against the rotation, it would take less time to arrive at your destination.

Well, duh. That's what Coriolis forces are.

But the interesting thing is that on your record player coriolis forces increase in proportion to the radius from the center. On earth, however, the effect of coriolis forces (as on plane flights, artillery trajectories, etc.) have this interesting property: coriolis forces increase with proportion to radius from the north pole, until you reach the "equator", and then the increase reverses itself past the "equator." This shows that the earth is rotating not only around the north pole but also around a southern point, i.e., the south pole.

Not to mention the fact that the earth rotating at all contradicts the bible.

Well, consider when flying, if the earth was in fact flat, then the shortest distance between two points would be a straight line. However this is not the case, as anyone can see by looking at the flightplan or flightpath of an airplane, it is clear that the shortest distance between two points is a curved line. In much the same way it would take fewer steps to walk AROUND Mt. Everest, than OVER it. Not only that, how would one explain the fact that people have walked around the south pole, which took all of 30 seconds, and by the flat-earth theory, a person walking the south pole would be walking the entire size of the earth. Simply wrong, simply inane, and simply irritating that there are so many stupid people wasting valuable space, air, and food on this spinning ball of rock.

If the flat earth is rotating (as if on a record player), that might account for the difference in journey lengths.  If you're flying against the rotation, it would take less time to arrive at your destination.

As has been said before, if the Earth rotated like a record then the linear velocity around the edges would be a lot faster then around near the center, and we already know this to be incorrect.  Otherwise if it were to only take about an extra two hours longer to fly New York to Stockholm than Stockholm to New York, then it would probably take a quarter of the time to fly from Perth to Sydney then Sydney to Perth.

BUMP