Hum, so it's a straight line, but it's curved, and the compas turns half way.
this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2025
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Hopefully someone shares this with Geowizard, ultimate straight line challenge.
This isn't actually surprising, like in a vacuum it is but when you conceder that each point on earth has a full 360 degrees of points that means a line can be drawn to every possible point on earth unless something happens to be in the way, the Earth's surface is 70% water so you only have a 30% chance of hitting something that is already low but it gets much much lower since we know this is cherry picked as the most exaggerated example you only need one instance on the entire earth of a point that can reach around it out of all the infinite points.
30% wouldn't be a lot if the land were all even-sized islands, but it's all in big chunks; most of which is in a pair of unbroken masses that runs from more or less the North Pole to the Drake Passage. There aren't any straight lines from the British Isles to Hawaii or to Indonesia, or even to Australia if I'm doing the geography correctly; nor are there any straight lines from Madagascar to Greenland, or from Iceland to anywhere in the Pacific, at least by liquid water.
Add in the fact that we're not used to seeing the roundness of the Earth from any perspective other than along the equator and split on the date line, and it's really just something that puts two things into a category together that don't seem like they should be connected.
It's like the fact that Mercury is (on average) the closest planet to Venus, but also to Earth, Jupiter, even Neptune. Ok, yes, that shouldn't be a surprise, because it's the closest to the sun and the sun is always in the middle; but it's not the way we usually look at the Solar System, and also we know that Neptune is so far away from Mercury that it's mind-boggling that Mercury could ever be the closest planet to it. It's very unintuitive based on our usual perspective and existing understanding.
straight line
So the azimut you set to your compass would be a constant, right??
/s/j
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Straight line? That looks hella curved, innit? Can't fool us with a globe. A flat map, maybe. But not a globe. Despite it being a 2D representation of a globe
If it doesn't look right, change the way the data is presented and projected.
A great circle. It only works on a globe.
Comms Officer: Sirs, we still have quite a bit of time to change course.
Red: But we're going straight.
Purple: Yeah. Turning's no fun. Why is this happening? Make it not happen.
This is my new favorite globe trivia.
Fun fact, the UK is about the center of the land hemisphere and new Zealand is about the center of the water hemisphere
/kyr'sɛd/?