Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

... and the tail is floating above the shadow with no visible means for it to be in that position with that head, the head is not partially buried in the sand, so the balance is wrong... and the seagulls have not pecked the eyes out... and etc etc etcEnjoy

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Flat earth Txomin: I am interested in the simplest scientific experiment that a layman can carry out in order to determine rough measures regarding the Earth's shape and size. Think high-school education or less, if possible.

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Hi Panda, TxominI did a google on "flat earth test" and also got many hits with examples, however some were from flat earthers showing how they "refuted" the tests and explained how the earth could be flat -- fascinating reading. I thought this site was the best:http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/flat/flateart.htm

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3. The variation of the sun's elevation with latitude. (This was the basis of Eratosthenes' measurement.)

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The Round Earth.

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Eratosthenes (c 276 to 195 BCE) was probably the first to accurately measure the size of the Earth. He knew that at summer solstice the sun was directly overhead in Syene (now Aswan, Egypt). On that day, vertical sticks or poles cast no shadows, and sunlight fills the bottom of wells. The town of Alexandria is directly north of Syene (on the same meridian), and on that same day vertical poles do cast shadows, because the sun is then 7.2 from the zenith. Eratosthenes assumed this to be due to the earth's curvature.

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Knowing the distance between these cities to be 5000 stadia (from land surveys), he calculated the earth's circumference to be 250,000 stadia. [1 stadium was 1/8 of a Roman mile, or 220 yards in modern measure.] That's a circumference of a little over 24,662 miles, which is nearly the modern value of 24,900 miles. ...

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Note that Eratosthenes made the assumption that the sun was far enough way from the earth that the incoming solar rays are parallel.

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Rethinking Eratosthenes.

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One can reconstruct the origin of these numbers by doing a little geometry, starting from a flat earth hypothesis. Remember the experiment of Eratosthenes, who measured the angular elevation of the sun at two latitudes in Egypt? He assumed that the sun was effectively infinitely far away (or at least so far compared to the earth's size that the actual distance didn't matter). Then he calculated the diameter of the earth using a second assumption: that the earth was spherical.

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But suppose you abandon Eratosthenes' two assumptions, and adopt instead the assumption that the earth is flat. Then, triangulation from the same data gives the distance to the sun: 3000 miles! See how a simple change of assumptions can drastically alter the entire cosmos? However, the round earth was more than an arbitary assumption for Eratosthenes, for he and his contemporaries, had other very good reasons for knowing the earth was round. [Textbooks sometimes mislead by suggesting that his experiment was designed to prove the earth was a sphere. It was not, it was only intended to measure the size of the sphere.]

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Finally, the angular size of the sun is 0.5. Using this fact with a distance to the sun of 3000 miles, gives the sun's diameter: 32 miles. It therefore appears that the flat-earther's figures are based on sun elevation data at just two particular latitudes, perhaps even Eratosthenes' values. I speculate that flat earthers may have picked these out of some book, and when the calculation was finished, they looked no further. For if they had done the calculation with a variety of latitudes, including large latitude differences, conflicting results would have been obtained.

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Still, one could save the hypothesis by assuming that light refracts in a peculiar way. Modern flat-earthers do indeed assume that refraction is at work. They attribute the disappearance of the ships over the horizon to a refraction effect, and even point out that with some atmospheric conditions, ships, icebergs, and distant mountains have been observed to rise above the horizon, and even turn upside down!

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Turning upside down demonstrates that it is a mirage reflection. I have seen this phenomenon from the middle of Lake Michigan looking both east and west.With modern equipment and watches we can now repeat Eratosthenes' experiment with observations made at the same time from different longitudes as well as different latitudes,
and establish a grid of measurements, each with their distance known from a set zero point that becomes the timer for the measurements when the sun is directly overhead.Enlist a bunch of high schools from around the world to participate.Then you could make a list of predictions from each hypothesis and test for them against the resultsCould be a fun project.Enjoy.

Hi Butterflytyrant, Panda, etc. Yes, we should teach both sides of the controversy and let the students decide ... Enjoy

Hi Dr Adequate, Is this with wifi card in the computer or a hard wired modem connection? Is the wifi from your modem connection? Sometimes you just need to reboot the modem (I've had this problem with both cable and DSL wifi modems).First left click the icon to see if that tells you the problem - has it lost ALL connections?Second try "repair" as was suggested for windoze, or see if you can run a diagnostic.The ipconfig was a common problem I had using available wifi systems and worked somethimes. It doesn't work for me with my MIFI air card -- I get a strong signal from the card but the card can be disconnected from the cell service (jez like a phone and I then need to turn the card off and then back on and then re-initiate the connection).Third try just signing off and back on rather than rebooting.Or get an Ipad . . . .Enjoy

Hi Txomin, thanks, and welcome to the fray. One thing I was thinking about uses a boat and a lighthouse on a cliff, with the height of the cliff (lighthouse base) above sea level and the height of the lighthouse light above either sea level or the cliff (much of this information is usually provided on navigation charts because it can be used to determine how far away you are from the light.Initially you can see both the top and the bottom of the lighthouse, and the base of the cliff. Measure the angles subtended by them, and simple geometry tells you how far away you are (assuming a right triangle portrays the geometry with sufficient accuracy, then you check that assumption by assuming it is an isosceles triangle and comparing the calculated results -- each assumption should give you min\max limits to the actual distance, also check it with a gps).Now move away until an observer at the top of a tall mast of known height above sea level sees the base of the cliff is almost obscured by the apparent curve of the water. Draw yourself a picture of that and the lines of sight.You can measure the angle of the lighthouse from top to base and calculate your distance from the lighthouse. And you can check that by also using the full height from the base of the cliff to the top of the lighthouse. Concordance between distances eliminates refraction as it would affect the one to the base of the cliff more. Your line of sight to the base of the cliff is also your line of sight tangent to the surface of the sea that almost obscures the base, and from this you can calculate the curvature of the water\earth.Draw it out to see how it works.Enjoy.

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Edited by RAZD, : tips

Hi crashfrogYeah, I was thinking of using lasers ... That would certainly solve the problem of refraction.Have you calculated how far apart they would need to be to measure the difference?You could use lasers to send two or three beams of light straight up from a good distance apart and see the same effect, with three lasers you could get confirmation in the results.Enjoy

Hi Butterflytyrant, Seashells on mountain tops.This may seem counter intuitive, but there are several basic problems with seashells on mountaintops that show it was not a world wide flood event:

• The sediment where the seashells are found have evidence of mature marine ecosystems that would need decades to produce, more than could possibly occur during a couple hundred days with normal growth behavior;
• There are multiple layers of such deposits, not a single event, and different layers have
  different organisms that show evolution from one layer to the next;
• floods do not produce mountains, plate tectonics does, with current recorded movement consistent with the long development of mountains;
• floods pile debris in low spots, all jumbled up, not sorted on mountain tops;
• different mountains have different ages, and the marine growth on them come from different eras of evolution of life on earth, consistent with the mountain ages;
• there is not one thing I am aware of that is consistent with a world wide flood lasting a couple hundred days at most.

These problems cannot be resolved without invoking magic and made up scenarios that are just ad hoc inventions with no empirical basis.But if I want to argue that the YEC worldview is false I would start with the age of the earth, as laid out in Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1.The evidence shows again and again that the earth is old, very old, 4.55 billion years old.Enjoy.

Hi foreveryoung,Others have replied to this, but I would like to go into a little more detail. It wasn't covered completely, although the current thought is that large shallow seas covered more of the globe than we see today. In addition the land mass may not have developed into continents until the end of the Archean.The Archean Eon and the Hadean

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Because collisions between large planetesimals release a lot of heat, the Earth and other planets would have been molten at the beginning of their histories. Solidification of the molten material into rock happened as the Earth cooled. The oldest meteorites and lunar rocks are about 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest Earth rocks currently known are 3.8 billion years. Sometime during the first 800 million or so years of its history, the surface of the Earth changed from liquid to solid. Once solid rock formed on the Earth, its geological history began. This most likely happened prior to 3.8 billion years, but hard evidence for this is lacking. Erosion and plate tectonics has probably destroyed all of the solid rocks that were older than 3.8 billion years. The advent of a rock record roughly marks the beginning of the Archean eon.

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The molten surface cooled, volcanoes were common, and they released water vapor that then fell down to form the seas.Archean Eon | Atmosphere, Timeline, and Facts | Britannica

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The Archean eon, which preceded the Phanerozoic eon, spanned about 1.5 billion years and is subdivided into four eras: the Neoarchean (2.8 to 2.5 billion years ago), Mesoarchean (3.2 to 2.8 billion years ago), Paleoarchean (3.6 to 3.2 billion years ago), and Eoarchean (4 to 3.6 billion years ago).*

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If you were able to travel back to visit the Earth during the Archean, you would likely not recognize it as the same planet we inhabit today. The atmosphere was very different from what we breathe today; at that time, it was likely a reducing atmosphere of methane, ammonia, and other gases which would be toxic to most life on our planet today. Also during this time, the Earth's crust cooled enough that rocks and continental plates began to form.

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It was early in the Archean that life first appeared on Earth. Our oldest fossils date to roughly 3.5 billion years ago, and consist of bacteria microfossils. In fact, all life during the more than one billion years of the Archean was bacterial. ...

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The earliest terrestrial materials are not rocks but minerals. In Western Australia some sedimentary conglomerates, dated to 3.3 billion years ago, contain relict detrital zircon grains that have isotopic ages between 4.2 and 4.4 billion years. These grains must have been transported by rivers ...

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Archean oceans were likely created by the condensation of water derived from the outgassing of abundant volcanoes. ...

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Throughout the Archean, oceanic and island arc crust was produced semi-continuously for 1.5 billion years; ...

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... Other rocks that occur in granulite-gneiss belts (zones of rocks that were metamorphosed in the Archean mid-lower crust) are exhumed remnants of the lower parts of the Archean continents and thus preserve evidence of deep crustal processes operating at the time.

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We have continent formation with rivers, so there were areas that were not flooded. There is no record of life before the Archean eon, there was no wood to build an ark with, no people to build the ark and no animals to put in the ark.It seems to me that a better (yet still imperfect) match is with chapter 1 of genesis:

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1:9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
1:10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

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I also note that a separation of land and water is a common motif in religions.Enjoy.

CrytoGod asks Is evolution based on empirical science?The short answer is yes.All science is empirical. It is based on the scientific method. Evolution is based on the scientific method, and many empirical tests and observations have been made: evolution is science. Mutations of hereditary traits have been observed to occur, and thus this aspect of evolution is an observed, known objective fact, rather than an untested hypothesis.Natural selection and neutral drift have been observed to occur, along with the observed alteration in the distribution of hereditary traits within breeding populations, and thus this aspect of evolution is an observed, known objective fact, and not an untested hypothesis.Studying these processes via the scientific method is what the science of evolution does.The rest of his post is argument from incredulity and ignorance, common to creationist misunderstanding of the evidence, the science and the theory of evolution, and which will be shredded by many people once this post is promoted.Nobody has seen a mountain form by plate tectonics, and the reason is simple: people don't live long enough.Enjoy.Edited by RAZD, : subtitle

Hi dwise1, Indeed.And also mention that evolution is observed in every generation of every species.But the likely problem will be hat because he doesn't understand evolution that he won't know even when he is told.Cognitive dissonance is like that.Enjoy.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sophiq/

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Admission to this group is based upon convincing evidence of an IQ "somewhere around 165" (or higher)! High verbal ability is particularly cherished, as is an insatiable, inimitable, impractical sense of bad humor!

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Is this our latest poster?Enjoy.

hi hooah22002 Why?You could try Ubuntu 10 for free.Enjoyh

depends on whether or not he shoots them ...