A flat Earth thread for Tradosaurus

[bknight]

So tradasaurus, care to go start a topic in "Other Conspiracies" covering:
A) Why in the world everyone who knew the Earth was flat would want to keep it secret.

ooo! ooo! ooo! I know! I know!

It's a conspiracy by the world's airlines. More specifically those in Australia, South Africa and other southern hemisphere countries. You see, by pretending that the world is a sphere, they can advertise much shorter timetables for their flights from, e.g., Pretoria to Perth and Sydney to Santiago and Buenos Aires, by claiming to take great circle routes to the south. (If people knew how long it really took on the flat earth, they'd never buy tickets. And then the US airlines would get all the business. (Oh, wait, I forgot the US is the leader of the scam. Oh well, forget that part. I'll work on it later.) So they went back in time and paid the ancient Greeks to say they'd discovered the spherical shape of the earth. You see, Eratosthenes was actually an Australian agent. He even burnt down the Alexandria library to hide the evidence so today's historians wouldn't find out. Proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

To keep their wicked scam going, the airlines drug every passenger to mess up their sense of time. The flight crews go through and reset everybody's watches and computer clocks so nobody will suspect. Naturally, Big Pharma is also in on the scheme for obvious reasons.

LOL, Nice explanation.  It hit almost all the points

[Peter B]

So tradasaurus, care to go start a topic in "Other Conspiracies" covering:
A) Why in the world everyone who knew the Earth was flat would want to keep it secret.

ooo! ooo! ooo! I know! I know!

It's a conspiracy by the world's airlines. More specifically those in Australia, South Africa and other southern hemisphere countries. You see, by pretending that the world is a sphere, they can advertise much shorter timetables for their flights from, e.g., Pretoria to Perth and Sydney to Santiago and Buenos Aires, by claiming to take great circle routes to the south. If people knew how long it really took on the flat earth, they'd never buy tickets. And then the US airlines would get all the business. (Oh, wait, I forgot the US is the leader of the scam. Oh well, forget that part. I'll work on it later.) So they went back in time and paid the ancient Greeks to say they'd discovered the spherical shape of the earth. You see, Eratosthenes was actually an Australian agent. He even burnt down the Alexandria library to hide the evidence so today's historians wouldn't find out. Proof is left as an exercise for the reader.

To keep their wicked scam going, the airlines drug every passenger to mess up their sense of time. The flight crews go through and reset everybody's watches and computer clocks so nobody will suspect. Naturally, Big Pharma is also in on the scheme for obvious reasons.

I give this explanation 8/10, especially for guessing that Eratosthenes was an Aussie (probably owns the local takeaway but these days spends most of his time at the local Greek club sipping ouzo).

But there's one problem. You talk of the airlines being behind the conspiracy. But what about road manufacturers? According to the map supplied by Tradosaurus the distance from Sydney to Perth is about the same as the distance from Moscow to Vladivostok. Why then do journeys between Sydney and Perth take much less time than journeys between Moscow and Vladivostok?

[gillianren]

And here's another point.  His claims notwithstanding, so far as I know the Catholic Church has never claimed a flat Earth.  Geocentrism, yes.  Flat Earth, no.  So even denying Vatican II does him no good; he's claiming their support for something that was never doctrine in the nearly two thousand years of the existence of Christianity.  Come to that, even though the apology to Galileo was from John Paul II, the Church had been accepting of heliocentrism for some time before that.  I'd have to go back and look it up, but probably within a hundred years of Galileo's death.  By which point it had become clear that continuing to deny it made them look foolish, though not anywhere near so foolish as claiming a flat Earth would.

[DonQuixote]

Say, with the advent of "balloon cams" and such, does anyone happen to know a formula for approximating observed curvature as a function of height? I'm a little rusty on my applied optics and having one handy would help dispel some of the misconceptions around the images in the balloon/rocket videos.

[sts60]

And here's another point.  His claims notwithstanding, so far as I know the Catholic Church has never claimed a flat Earth.  Geocentrism, yes.  Flat Earth, no.  So even denying Vatican II does him no good; he's claiming their support for something that was never doctrine in the nearly two thousand years of the existence of Christianity.  Come to that, even though the apology to Galileo was from John Paul II, the Church had been accepting of heliocentrism for some time before that.  I'd have to go back and look it up, but probably within a hundred years of Galileo's death.  By which point it had become clear that continuing to deny it made them look foolish, though not anywhere near so foolish as claiming a flat Earth would.

Exactly the point I made in his hoax thread.  A flat Earth was never a fundamental tenet of the Catholic Church, although there were the usual proportion of FE believers in the hierarchy in the relatively early going. Even if you buy his Vatican II claim, he's still wrong about the "real" Church.  That's just a basic error of fact; no subscription to any RCC theology is required.

[Gazpar]

Say, with the advent of "balloon cams" and such, does anyone happen to know a formula for approximating observed curvature as a function of height? I'm a little rusty on my applied optics and having one handy would help dispel some of the misconceptions around the images in the balloon/rocket videos.

In my opinion, first you need to know the horizontal field of view of the camera lens to figure out how much horizon are you seeing to know what kind of curvature to expect. There is also other variables such as atmospheric refraction, cloudy horizon, etc.
Here is an article that explains it very well: http://thulescientific.com/Lynch%20Curvature%202008.pdf

[raven]

Am I the only one who finds it amusing the guest of 'honour' has not actually shown up in this thread?

[bknight]

Am I the only one who finds it amusing the guest of 'honour' has not actually shown up in this thread?

Maybe he can't read/understand that it was created for the FE discussion?

[raven]

Am I the only one who finds it amusing the guest of 'honour' has not actually shown up in this thread?

Maybe he can't read/understand that it was created for the FE discussion?

Given what else he doesn't understand, I'll put that down as a solid 'maybe'.

[bknight]

Am I the only one who finds it amusing the guest of 'honour' has not actually shown up in this thread?

Maybe he can't read/understand that it was created for the FE discussion?

Given what else he doesn't understand, I'll put that down as a solid 'maybe'.

Perhaps, I didn't use a definite adverb.

[Dalhousie]

Say, with the advent of "balloon cams" and such, does anyone happen to know a formula for approximating observed curvature as a function of height? I'm a little rusty on my applied optics and having one handy would help dispel some of the misconceptions around the images in the balloon/rocket videos.

Ther is an online calculator here http://www.ringbell.co.uk/info/hdist.htm

[Peter B]

Am I the only one who finds it amusing the guest of 'honour' has not actually shown up in this thread?

There's a certain amusement factor... :-)

Given the religious proclivities of the GOH, it also reminds me of the parable of the Great Banquet (Luke 14:15-24). That is, there's a great feast of knowledge on offer, but with the GOH not in attendance, we can instead share it with the thread's lurkers.

[Dalhousie]

Howdy folks!

Been a good little while since my last post, but I recently ran afoul of a nest of these loons and they threw one at me that has sent me on a little trip down the rabbit hole. Ok, before I lay put the icing on this particular cake of insanity, let me give you some of the details. In their model, we have the following:

• Their earth is flat.
• It's a north-down polar projection.
• Antarctica is an enclosing "wall" of ice along the map's outer edge.
• All satellite photos are "obvious fakes."
• No one has ever conclusively proven(to them) that they have crossed Antarctica.
• And of course the government/Illuminati/Lizard Men are fiercely guarding access to the continent.

Now, as a gestalt, I can poke holes all through that, but there's this one thing I can't seem to lock down. I was hoping to debunk the crossing claim with either some time-lapse of a plane or an expedition crossing, and of all the possibilities I encountered, the real slam-dunk appeared to be the Steger/Etienne team of 1989-90 that went on a true cross-continent traverse, but when I started looking for articles, pics, and videos, all I could really find were 2nd-hand accounts and Stegel's interviews which were sadly devoid of what I was hoping to find.

Would anyone happen to know where I might track down any footage? According to my research thus far, ABC TV received periodic live feeds from the team(and won an Emmy for one of them), but I've yet to locate them on either YouTube, ABC's own archives, or the Library of Congress. I should just let this go, considering how deeply into solipsism they delve, but I would just really like to shut them down.

Don't know about footage, but there have been a number of first hand accounts of crossing Antarctica.  On my shelf I have Hilary and Fuchs, Stephenson (also on the Hillary-Fuchs expedition), Fiennes, and a book by the Transglobe expedition.  Bound to be others - there were other crossings in 1990, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012,  and 2013.  Of course every trip to the South Pole or the interior stations has to cross The Barrier.

[bknight]

And still the "engineer" tradosaurus hasn't visited this thread.

[Dalhousie]

Don't know about footage, but there have been a number of first hand accounts of crossing Antarctica.  On my shelf I have Hilary and Fuchs, Stephenson (also on the Hillary-Fuchs expedition), Fiennes, and a book by the Transglobe expedition.  Bound to be others - there were other crossings in 1990, 2005, 2009, 2010, 2012,  and 2013.  Of course every trip to the South Pole or the interior stations has to cross The Barrier.

Five part documentary of the CTAA starts here