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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Always makes me laugh when you get some dimwit that claims the Earth is flat, but then uses Google maps in his car. Magic!

GPS are amazing. If you understand how they work, and how they reliably know the time etc. you'd think you live in the future; and yet it's everywhere, in our pockets.

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The supply of actual people that think the earth is flat and aren’t trolling far exceeds the supply of people that want to mock a group that largely doesn’t really exist.

There are a couple of dozen of people that seriously think the earth is flat, and a billion people ready to mock them for it.

It’s kind of punching down at shadows.

Science illiteracy looks less like someone vocally exposing that the world is flat, and more like someone who has never considered the topology of the earth from a perspective other than their own eyes.

ITT we've never been around fundimentalist christians or other sorts of easily manipulated counter-culture types

it's more than a couple dozen people.

i'll concede the point that its far, far fewer than those who feel otherwise, and that they like to hate on each other, but the idea that this is tiny and growing smaller is just not true. the surge in homeschooling, for example, would suggest otherwise...

Your first sentence contradicts your second.

If we did drive on a flat surface wouldn't a similar triangulation strategy work? Could be with satellites aka stationary high alt weather balloons?

Yes but the math (which happens in the receiver, so can be replicated by a user with an open source receiver) would be very different. You actually wind up with a 3D position relative to the Earth's center, which then needs to be mathematically mapped to lat/lon - that's what the WGS84 datum is for.

All of which is irrelevant to GPS users. I can't remember the last time I checked the math that my GPS was performing, to be sure it was mapping to a rough sphere.

I worked on a system to do train positioning for the NYC subway system using Ultra Wideband radio beacons using the same sort of multilateration that GPS uses to determine position, so it was basically a flat system (obviously not fully flat, elevations still existed, but the UWB radios were roughly on the same plane as the train tracks at least compared to satellites).

...but at the end of the day the ECEF coordinates we used for everything still require a roughly spherical earth, but I don't think flat earthism is a real thing for most people who talk about it. Most of it is joking/trolling. There are surely some conspiracy-minded people who believe it because they don't give any serious thought to how anything works, but the people that publicly push alternate theories (eg. GPS is balloons, not satellites) have got to just be trolls.

I’ve met thousands of people in my life with all sorts of strange beliefs, but never someone who believed the Earth is flat.

Is this a sort of person you encounter often?

Don't you know, the Google maps team is part of the conspiracy. They calculate everything assuming a flat earth, they just don't tell you that.

That is seriously the logic behind a (very intelligent, well-educated) climate change denier I know: "The stations are in cities, which are locally heating up, and the remote sensor data is being faked."

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