• DUMBASS
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    01 year ago

    I dont know much about straight lines, but he sure does look happy.

  • Mossy Feathers (She/Her)
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    01 year ago

    Why’d they go that way? They could have gone the other way and the line would have still been technically straight, but the route looks like it would have been shorter.

    • @bstix@feddit.dk
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      01 year ago

      The picture was about sailing the longest direct line.

      It’s not the longest anyway, but that’s what it was about. Technically one could sail infinitely many times around Antarctica in a straight line.

        • @bstix@feddit.dk
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          01 year ago

          Well, I stand corrected. I guess we’ll need to wait for the ice on the North pole to melt before we can make a more stupid voyage.

        • @lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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          01 year ago

          It would, however, seem like a straight line to whoever was on the boat, because they’d be traveling due west the whole time, and the course corrections they’d have to make to keep going west would look the same as course corrections needed to account for wind, ocean currents, etc.

    • @Varven@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Because going in that route would make it touch land which in the twitter post it says straight line without touching land

  • @lugal@sopuli.xyz
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    01 year ago

    Globists will argue that on a globe this is a straight line. Seen these arguments before, don’t work on me

    • @kazaika@lemmy.world
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      01 year ago

      Space-time itself is curved, therefore everything is moving in a straight line, it only appears to be curved to the outside observer

    • @Angry_Autist@lemmy.world
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      01 year ago

      Not true, as when space bends, it bends the rulers and compasses too. We experience no spatial distortion.

      A person traveling near the speed of light doesn’t feel like time is slower for them (but it is and we can measure it)

      The principle is equivalent.

      That said, it’s not a straight line in any topology standard I am aware of.

      Sure you could CREATE a topology framework where this would be considered a straight line, but there is no real world model that could come even close without so much mass being concentrated in static relative areas, and EVEN THEN it would only be straight for a predetermined instant before the mass deforming spacetime began interacting with each other.

      That’s the problem with spacetime deformations, almost no layman takes into account the ridiculous amounts of static mass to make those strange topologies.

    • @HereIAm@lemmy.world
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      01 year ago

      Please correct my layman understanding if I’m wring here. But isn’t everything traveling in a straight line until an external force is applied. For example the earth orbiting the sun is traveling in a straight line in a curved apacetime. Also if you jump, the moment you leave the ground until you touch it again coming back down you were traveling in a straight line.

      • @sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        In my understanding, since gravity is acting on us, an external force is applied when we jump. That’s why a jump is a parabola. “Gravity’s Rainbow”

        • @Zink@programming.dev
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          01 year ago

          What they are getting at is that gravity is not a force so much as your mass trying to travel in a straight line through curved spacetime. The weight you feel is because the surface of the earth is in your way.

          Get into low earth orbit and that straight path has you going in apparent circles around the planet. You are very much within the earth’s gravity but you don’t feel “weight” because the surface of the earth is no longer blocking your path. You still have mass and inertia and all that, of course.

      • KillingTimeItself
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        01 year ago

        Also if you jump, the moment you leave the ground until you touch it again coming back down you were traveling in a straight line.

        relative to the body of earth, including its rotation it would be an arc path, and including it’s tilt it would be 3d, if we also include the travel around the sun in orbit, that elongates it around the orbit, so uh.

  • @xlash123@sh.itjust.works
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    01 year ago

    Low IQ: it’s not a straight line

    Medium IQ: it’s a geodesic on a sphere, so it is a straight line

    High IQ: it’s not a straight line

          • @Wilzax@lemmy.world
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            01 year ago

            In actual reality there would be wind and water currents diverting any ship sailing that route from the depicted “line” anyway so the whole argument is pointless

            The only straight line paths in the universe are followed by electrostatically uncharged non-accelerating objects in free fall in a vacuum. Or massless particles.

            • Snot Flickerman
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              01 year ago

              Nuh uh. My fifth grade math teacher told me that if I drew a line with an arrow on graph paper and no other line intersected it, that it would continue on into infinity!

            • @DogWater@lemmy.world
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              01 year ago

              Whole Universe eh? That exists and is bounded on a curved space time.

              I’m just joking, but you can really take this to the extreme lol

              • @Wilzax@lemmy.world
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                01 year ago

                Spacetime is curved. Inertial paths through spacetime are straight.

                Euclidean space is not the only space where straight lines are possible.

  • @thejoker954@lemmy.world
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    01 year ago

    I feel like this is related to the can’t measure the coast’ thing.

    Like if you zoom in enough you are always traveling in a straight line.

    • @filcuk@lemmy.zip
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      01 year ago

      I don’t know… straight, I would assume, means that I could walk or drive a vehicle and not turn at all, ignoring any external influences like waves and currents in this case.

      • @Tudsamfa@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But your vehicle would itself “curve” “downwards” due to gravity, surely a straight line means that you can point a laser, or a hypothetical 0 mass particle beam, uninterrupted from your starting point to your destination.

        • @linkhidalgogato@lemmy.ml
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          01 year ago

          in ur every day life if u travel in a car without changing direction would u say that u went in a straight line or in an arc. Clearly u are just trying to be a pedantic cunt for no reason.

        • Seeker of Carcosa
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          01 year ago

          Depends on your frame of reference. When traversing the surface of a globe, your described concept of a straight line isn’t intuitive.

    • You just discovered the field of calculus! If you look closely enough at any smooth function it looks locally linear, and the slope of that linear function is it’s derivative

      Not quite what’s happening here, here the problem is if you consider geodesics on a sphere to be straight. In special geometry they are, for all intents and purposes, but in higher euclidian geometry they form large circles

    • Balthazar
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      01 year ago

      To clarify, as youve not understood the joke, nor read the comments. As far as I understand it, were you to start sailing at the first point, you never have to turn to arrive at the second. That’s why it’s “straight”. On the 2d plane you are completely correct however.

      For proper and better informed explanations read the other comments :D

  • Tlaloc_Temporal
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    1 year ago

    This reminds me of some maps by Andy Woodruff.

    They weren’t made to find long lines, and picking out a single line can be a tad difficult, but it’s very interesting nonetheless.

  • IninewCrow
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    01 year ago

    There was a conversation I read a while ago that showed how a sailboat could travel a straight line over water from Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada, travel southeast and end up on the west coast of British Columbia.

    Basically sailing from the east coast of Canada to the west coast of Canada in a straight line.