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I don't know the answer to Hepper's questions, but there is an interesting article here on the 'Battle of the Beams', i.e. between the German targeting systems and the British countermeasures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Beams It appears from this that there was argument between...

At the risk of appearing ghoulish (or too knowledgeable on the subject) there can be misunderstandings of how hanging and/or strangulation work. There are three possible types of effect: 1. Breaking the neck and severing the spinal cord. 2. Asphyxiation by restricting the supply of air to...

It is partly a historical legacy. Back in the 1850s or so, when the Flat Earth movement began, Antarctica was completely unexplored, and it was plausible(ish) to argue that distances and areas in the southern hemisphere generally were uncertain. So people like Rowbotham and Gleason fixed on...

Walter Bislin's blog has a long report on a Wallace-type experiment carried out by George Hnatiuk and others on a frozen lake (Rainy Lake) on the US-Canada border, over a distance of 10 km. Two sets of markers on posts were arranged to show what would be expected to appear at eye level on a...

No problem. I see that someone else has independently noticed it and also tweeted to Brian Cox (and copied to Buzz Aldrin!) We'll see if Brian replies to that.

As I mentioned in my post, I already tweeted him and got no reply. Maybe I should have tried again.

Trailblazer: Thanks. I was afraid I had overlooked some glaringly obvious explanation. I had a similar moment a few months ago watching a programme where the presenter (Hannah Fry, I think) said that the gravity on the surface of a planet is proportional to its radius. I thought 'hang on...

This post may be unpopular, but I think it falls within the stated goal of Metabunk 'to find and expose bunk.' The BBC TV series The Planets, presented by Professor Brian Cox, was recently shown in the UK, and will presumably be shown world-wide in due course. The series gives an overview of...

This is a comment on 'flat earth and gravity'. Please excuse me if this is not the most appropriate place for it, but the thread came up when I searched for those terms. I noticed a small nugget of information in today's (UK) Sunday Times magazine. In an article on the CERN Large Hadron...

The video linked by 'xena' makes three claims about the footage from the Dscovr satellite: a) the clouds do not move b) the moon does not appear to be rotating c) the axis of the earth's rotation is in the wrong place, because in mid-July the north pole should be angled towards the sun...

In post #57 I mentioned seeing a photograph of the Bonneville Salt Flats, taken from a hillside, showing noticeable curvature of a long straight road. At that time I couldn't find the photograph, but now I have: Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gopher21479/6780533836/ As is to be...

I was thinking of your second example, and other similar shots by Soundly. If I recall correctly, the first example is created by stitching together frames from a long panning sequence. It does not show what could be seen by an observer in any single view. Moreover, as you point out, the...

we'd actually have to be many thousands of miles away to see the a curve that wasn't the curve of the horizon Not necessarily. In Soundly's images of the Lake Pontchartrain causeway, taken from an angle somewhat to the side, we can see the curve of the causeway, which is not a curve of the...

@Rory says: The calculator I've used above on the 5th Avenue photo is based purely on flat plane trig without refraction. But I thought I'd see how the sphere earth calculator fared, with refraction. Predicted apparent height order is the same (i.e., correct) and these were the pixel height...

That's odd. I have the calculator bookmarked here: https://www.metabunk.org/curve/?d=1&h=100000&r=3959&u=i&a=a&fd=94.4&fp=1920 which shows a default FoV of 94.4 degrees. But several of the other defaults are also different. Maybe I just bookmarked an obsolete version that is somehow still...

If there is a general revamp of the calculator I suggest there should be a look at the 'horizon curve' feature. At present this uses a default field-of-view of over 90 degrees, which is so wide as to be irrelevant for most purposes. It may be based on the maximum field of view of the (single)...

In ancient flat-earth mythologies, e.g. in Egypt, it was assumed that at night the sun went underneath the earth, or under the ocean, into a cave, etc., so that it was dark simultaneously throughout the inhabited world. With modern geographic knowledge and communications this kind of...

Not sure if this is the most relevant thread for this, but I wanted to draw attention to a new video by Al K, showing some more examples of extreme refraction effects, mainly from his own observations on the coast of Scotland: Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR3YctWFj00&t=27s

In this thread and elsewhere it has been mentioned that the curvature of the horizon was visible from the Concorde airliner, flying at over 50,000 feet. Just to confirm this, I was watching the BBC's Antiques Roadshow yesterday, in an episode filmed at the aerospace museum in Bristol. At...

Mathias Kp, who I think is Danish, has made several videos showing the effects of refraction over bodies of water. He has a new one here, with long distance observations of a tall building ('Turning Torso') in Malmo (Sweden) across the straits from Copenhagen over the course of a few hours...