Oblate Spheroid

[00:02] I got a quick one, if anybody else is using a quick one.
[00:06] I have a nice quickie.
[00:07] Yeah, and normally I'm better on the second one,
[00:09] you know what I'm saying?
[00:10] Mm-hmm.
[00:11] Mm-hmm.
[00:16] That's making it a little hot, I'm just saying.
[00:19] Uh.
[00:19] Uh.
[00:21] Oh, sorry, guys.
[00:22] I stopped recording.
[00:23] We're going to have to restart this whole thing now,
[00:26] because we've given Coalson too much to work with.
[00:29] That's going to end up in a damaged angle.
[00:31] Yeah.
[00:32] We do an Undergoogles.
[00:46] That was the play of Super Excited.
[00:49] Told us we had to.
[00:50] So it was, he said we signed up for it.
[00:56] In the end, it's going to be better and more true
[00:58] than Google can give you.
[01:01] Welcome to another episode of the Undergoogles.
[01:05] It's lighting the internet on fire.
[01:08] It is lighting the internet on fire.
[01:10] The tubes are full of flames.
[01:14] And it's just the power that we have over the airways
[01:21] to the internet tubes that Coalson talks so much about.
[01:26] Destroyed all the vacuum tubes today.
[01:30] Sorry, internet.
[01:31] I actually did.
[01:32] I did take an old computer I have to the talk shop today,
[01:38] which had a CRT monitor.
[01:40] So wow.
[01:41] Yeah.
[01:43] I feel like that should be in a museum.
[01:49] This episode, we've got a question from one
[01:58] of our young hosts, Jason.
[02:02] Wait, isn't Jason our oldest host?
[02:04] Yeah, but we're all young.
[02:06] We're all young, it's fine.
[02:07] Young at heart.
[02:08] On the cosmological scale.
[02:09] Young at heart, you know.
[02:10] I mean, he's older than me, so it's
[02:12] my job to make fun of him.
[02:13] Don't take my stuff away.
[02:15] Respect your elders, young man.
[02:17] Fair point.
[02:18] No, believe me, every year when my birthday comes up,
[02:23] my wife Jill reminds me that I'm a year older than her.
[02:26] Many, many, many, many.
[02:27] If it's any consolation, you look five years older than her.
[02:32] Also reminded me, you're older than all of us.
[02:38] Why does he come here again?
[02:39] I don't know.
[02:39] Yeah, I don't remember either.
[02:41] We love you.
[02:44] OK, we were doing a pod a couple weeks ago,
[02:47] and somehow somebody was talking about traveling across the sea
[02:54] and going a certain amount of knots.
[02:58] And you know, you're traveling at so many knots.
[03:04] It's so many nautical miles.
[03:05] What the hell is a nautical mile?
[03:08] I understand that knots are nautical miles per hour,
[03:11] but what the heck is a nautical mile?
[03:13] Why did we come up with it?
[03:14] Is it different than a mile?
[03:17] It is indeed.
[03:17] It's got to be great.
[03:20] It's got to be different.
[03:21] Is it close to a mile?
[03:22] It's relatively close.
[03:23] I think the conversion's only about 20% off.
[03:28] And why is a nautical mile different than a land mile?
[03:33] So my understanding of this is that nautical miles are slightly
[03:40] longer, and that it's actually based
[03:44] on latitudinal, longitudinal measurement,
[03:51] as opposed to just randomly 5,280 feet.
[03:55] So if you extrapolate this mile over whatever,
[04:02] I don't know, 100 iterations or whatever,
[04:06] you get like a degree.
[04:07] Like minutes of longitude or whatever.
[04:09] Exactly.
[04:10] So it's something that somehow the sailors used to parse out.
[04:15] So it predated maybe the term mile, like a land mile.
[04:21] But they wouldn't have had longitude.
[04:23] And when did we even get longitude and latitude?
[04:27] Pretty early.
[04:28] Like you have to circumnavigate the Earth.
[04:30] I mean, Christopher Columbus was not
[04:32] down with around Earth.
[04:34] Right.
[04:36] Right, exactly, right?
[04:38] You can't have longitude and latitude
[04:40] until you have a browned Earth.
[04:42] It'd be real weird if you did.
[04:43] Other people did, though.
[04:45] Other people did.
[04:46] I concur.
[04:46] Yeah, I mean, there was much older civilizations
[04:50] that addressed it.
[04:53] But let's say that it's universally known.
[04:56] The Chinese, or I guess the Japanese
[04:59] had a very good nautical.
[05:00] The Vikings.
[05:02] Oh, the Vikings, yeah, for sure.
[05:04] They were good in boats.
[05:05] They were very good in boats.
[05:07] I don't know if they had longitude and latitude.
[05:10] I don't know that they had that.
[05:11] Because Vikings are very good at sailing.
[05:14] I don't think they were great at math.
[05:16] But I feel like the ancient Greeks, what was that?
[05:20] Greeks?
[05:21] Yeah, and?
[05:22] Or Egyptians.
[05:22] And Romans.
[05:23] Like all of those dudes knew about anybody in the Middle East.
[05:28] They made up math.
[05:28] They came up with like the sextant or whatever
[05:30] to figure out where they were.
[05:31] Yeah, no, they figured out all this stuff for sure.
[05:32] Like direction of the Middle East.
[05:33] And then we forgot about it in the Middle Ages for a while.
[05:37] The colon sextant.
[05:38] Yeah, the colon sextant.
[05:39] That's right.
[05:40] The sextant, yeah.
[05:42] Oh, all right.
[05:44] Shout out to greats.
[05:45] Shout out to man.
[05:50] OK.
[05:51] So instead of being a specific, well, I guess it's the same.
[05:59] I guess it's the same idea.
[06:01] But the way it's, where it came from is different.
[06:06] I mean, basically, it's metric for water, right?
[06:09] Because it's divisible across this method.
[06:16] But it uses the entire circumference of the Earth
[06:21] as you're using a specific fraction of that
[06:24] instead of 5,280 feet.
[06:26] Which I assume came from some garbage dude like, I don't
[06:32] know, Tom.
[06:34] Right, right.
[06:36] Where did a mile come from?
[06:37] Like, I feel like that's a, I don't
[06:41] know the answer to that one.
[06:42] But it feels super random.
[06:45] And I know it doesn't make as much sense as a kilometer.
[06:49] I also know it's better than a kilometer.
[06:51] Don't get me wrong.
[06:52] But I don't know that it makes much sense.
[06:57] Yeah, why are knots different than miles and kilometers?
[07:00] Well, because they're being used
[07:03] across latitudes for ocean-going navigation.
[07:07] And based on that longitude and latitude
[07:09] divided by certain things.
[07:11] Right, so basically, think metric for water.
[07:13] Right, so we can't have this until we
[07:15] have longitude and latitude.
[07:16] And I'm thinking that's going to be, and granted,
[07:20] I get that the knots are coming up from white people.
[07:25] The knots are coming up from white people.
[07:27] They are.
[07:28] What does that mean?
[07:29] No, what I'm saying is, as much as Christopher Columbus
[07:31] didn't understand that the world was round,
[07:33] like we, and as much as people before him did,
[07:38] I'm thinking we don't get knots until like 1715.
[07:43] OK, very specific.
[07:45] I'm just thinking, it took a while for us
[07:49] to get the rounded world longitude and latitude.
[07:52] 1715, obviously.
[07:54] 1715, hooking up.
[07:55] All right.
[07:56] That's my guess.
[07:58] Oh, 1715.
[07:59] They're hooking up the longitude and latitude
[08:00] at that point, and then they come up with knots.
[08:02] That's my theory.
[08:06] No one agrees with that.
[08:07] I'm feeling very Newton-y.
[08:10] Newton's what?
[08:12] 1615.
[08:14] Right, is that right, Jason?
[08:17] Newton, yeah, somewhere around there.
[08:19] I feel like we've got to be pretty close to that.
[08:23] So it's a little bit earlier than what
[08:25] I'm seeing on Wikipedia.
[08:26] So navigation at sea was done by eye until around 1500
[08:31] when navigational instruments were developed
[08:34] and cartographers began using a coordinate system
[08:36] with parallels of latitude and meridians of longitude.
[08:41] That's good.
[08:42] And what year was that?
[08:44] That was 1500.
[08:45] Oh, wow, OK.
[08:47] Was that only off?
[08:47] By the late 16th century, Englishmen
[08:53] knew that the ratio of distances at sea to degrees
[08:56] were constant along any great circle, such as the equator
[09:02] or any meridian.
[09:02] Right, right, right, right.
[09:05] OK.
[09:07] This was assuming that the Earth was a sphere.
[09:10] And they weren't that far off.
[09:12] They're not that far off.
[09:14] OK, it's an oblate.
[09:18] The Earth is actually an oblate sphere.
[09:19] I mean, this is true, but for the purposes of navigation,
[09:23] you're going to, you know, I can't prove the Earth is round.
[09:27] I can't prove it.
[09:28] Stop telling people that.
[09:29] OK, by the mid 19th century, France
[09:32] had defined a nautical mile by the original 1791
[09:38] definition of the meter, 1 10 millionth of a quarter
[09:44] meridian.
[09:47] OK.
[09:48] So if you take 10 million meters and divide it by 90 by 60,
[09:58] I don't know what that is, but you get 852 meters.
[10:03] I mean, that's what I said.
[10:04] I mean, you guys never listen to me when I talk.
[10:06] This is exactly what we were talking about.
[10:08] You guys never listen to me when I talk.
[10:11] I missed this 60 by 90.
[10:13] OK, so French Revolution.
[10:15] So this was 1790, so it was only off by 75 years.
[10:19] I mean, they're in the middle of cutting off thousands of heads
[10:22] and they're also doing math.
[10:24] I got it.
[10:28] OK, so then 90 is a quarter of a meridian, right?
[10:31] Because 90 is a quarter of 360.
[10:35] And 60 is a minute.
[10:38] Right.
[10:40] Because also time doesn't make sense.
[10:42] Because we go by 60s instead of 100s because we're dumb.
[10:45] Right.
[10:46] Sure.
[10:48] And there you go.
[10:50] Bob's your uncle.
[10:54] None of that makes sense.
[10:56] Did I learn anything?
[10:57] I don't know.
[10:58] French came up with it.
[10:59] What's the ratio of a nautical mile to a regular mile?
[11:04] 1.15 miles to a nautical.
[11:08] So about something like that.
[11:10] Can we get all the miles on the same page?
[11:12] Come on.
[11:15] 1.1508.
[11:18] And land miles are statute miles.
[11:23] So can you tell me where the mile came from?
[11:25] Because.
[11:28] Linking shoes or something like that.
[11:32] Just Charlemagne.
[11:34] He's like, this is how far I can comfortably walk in the morning.
[11:38] I feel like that's what it was.
[11:43] So but that is OK.
[11:45] But that's a metric for water.
[11:49] The mile.
[11:49] It actually made sense.
[11:51] The mile is made sense.
[11:54] According to Britannica, it goes back
[12:01] to Roman times, I believe.
[12:05] Probably just has to do with parceling land somehow.
[12:10] It was 1,000 paces.
[12:12] There you go.
[12:12] Yeah, no.
[12:13] Sounds about right.
[12:15] So 5,000 Roman feet.
[12:22] Also, to make the knots are nautical miles.
[12:26] But then you've also got the way to measure these.
[12:34] There's a staple under my foot.
[12:35] Thank you.
[12:38] I'm sure it's fine.
[12:40] Yeah, it'll be great until I step on it.
[12:42] We got this.
[12:43] You guys go ahead.
[12:49] I told him not to fidget, so he went for the sharp stuff.
[12:54] That sounds about right.
[12:55] You got owned.
[12:58] You forgot to cult improve your house.
[13:01] Take away all the staplers.
[13:07] In the 17th century, to measure the speed of the ships,
[13:14] you would use a device called the common log.
[13:16] And it was a rope with knots at regular intervals attached
[13:20] to a piece of wood shaped like a slice of pie.
[13:23] So you would drop that wood piece into the water
[13:26] and let it float behind you as it's moving with an hourglass
[13:34] that runs.
[13:35] And then when it's up, they count
[13:36] there's knots at regular intervals,
[13:38] and you count the number of knots between the ship
[13:42] and the piece of wood.
[13:43] And that was math.
[13:44] Right.
[13:46] Well, that was just addition.
[13:48] Addition, you know.
[13:51] It may be some division.
[13:53] Some division, yeah, for sure.
[13:54] Yeah.
[13:55] But again, I can't prove that the Earth is round,
[13:58] because it's just shocking to me
[14:01] that anyone without a satellite knows that that's true.
[14:04] Or like an active eclipse, right?
[14:08] Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
[14:11] So what is the, it's a spherical obeloid?
[14:16] What is it?
[14:16] Oblate sphere.
[14:17] Oblate sphere.
[14:19] Or spheroid.
[14:21] We're not quite certain.
[14:25] It sounds like one of you is going to go counter-protest.
[14:29] You're going to counter-counter-protest
[14:31] in a flat Earth thing.
[14:33] People are going to say, no, the Earth is round.
[14:35] And you're going to say, no, it's not round.
[14:37] It's snowblades.
[14:38] Snowblades, yeah.
[14:40] It's a snowblades sphere.
[14:41] So Joey, gravity.
[14:43] Wait, Coalson's got it.
[14:44] Gravity pulls everything at the same rate, right?
[14:48] Does it now?
[14:48] Ideally, you would create just spherical objects,
[14:53] because the gravity at the center of the plate.
[14:55] Me being God, of course.
[14:57] No, no, I'm talking about math.
[15:00] You're talking about math.
[15:01] Math creates objects.
[15:02] Yeah, exactly.
[15:04] So we've got the gravity at the center of the planet.
[15:06] Then all the things pull equally, and you create a sphere.
[15:09] Now, here's the problem.
[15:12] That sphere is spinning.
[15:15] And when that spinning happens, it pushes against as you've
[15:18] got things pushing against the gravity, which
[15:21] is centrifugal force.
[15:23] And so what you create is an oblesque thing
[15:26] instead of a round object.
[15:29] I agree with a surprising number of those words.
[15:31] Thank you.
[15:33] Is that centripetal or centrifugal force?
[15:35] I feel like we've done this on the Googles,
[15:37] and I still don't know the answer.
[15:38] It's centrifugal.
[15:40] So a fugal is away from centripetal is towards.
[15:45] So a centripetal would pull it in.
[15:47] What I'm saying is I've listened to enough of these things
[15:49] that I feel like I know some stuff now.
[15:51] So I know about gravity now, and that's why we're oblisk.
[15:55] Nailed it.
[15:56] We haven't talked to you about staples yet.
[15:58] No, no, no, no.
[15:59] We'll get to that.
[16:00] We're definitely going to step on one of those.