A discussion on TFES forum

[Red]

By the way, what do you think, was my mental illness caused by or at least exacerbated a lot by me going to a too difficult university? Should I drop out?

From the sounds of it you likely would've graduated by now if you actually did some studying... I think a lot of the stress you had was caused by your own negligence.

[teo123]

By the way, what do you think, was my mental illness caused by or at least exacerbated a lot by me going to a too difficult university? Should I drop out?

From the sounds of it you likely would've graduated by now if you actually did some studying... I think a lot of the stress you had was caused by your own negligence.

Well, it's true I devoted more time to my hobby project and to my project which will be my bachelor thesis (if I ever get to that point), as well as to my research about names of places in Croatia, than to studying for the university. Programming my hobby projects, as well as my project which will be my bachelor thesis, makes me feel like I am learning something useful. Studying for the university does not make me feel like I am learning something useful. And researching Croatian toponyms makes me feel like I am discovering something important. Especially now that I think I have discovered how to apply collision entropy and birthday paradox to calculate the p-values in the names of places. And very few students can boast about having published papers in peer-reviewed journals, like I can. OK, maybe I am barking at a wrong tree yet again, like I was when researching the Flat Earth Theory or the Near-Death-Experiences, but I see no particular reason to think that. My informatics professors Franjo Jović and Anđelko Lišnjić are probably the biggest experts in the field, and they are both rather positive about my work about applying informatics to the names of places.

[teo123]

@brimstoneSalad, what do you think, was my psychotic disorder caused by, or at least significantly exacerbated by, me going to a too difficult university? Should I drop out?

[teo123]

I am thinking about making a YouTube video refuting the Flat Earth Theory, as a former Flat-Earther. Here are the arguments I am planning to use:

1) The dip of the horizon. Flat-Earthers often claim that the horizon is always at your eye-level, like here:

A fact of basic perspective is that the line of the horizon is always at eye level with the observer.

But that is demonstrably not the case. You can observe that in two ways:
a) You can see the sunset twice if you watch the sunset sitting down and then quickly stand up (the sun stays at your eye level, but the horizon imperceptibly falls).
b) You can measure it directly from an airplane using a device with a camera and a gyroscope (like almost all modern mobile phones):

The formula for the dip of the horizon is easily derived from the Round Earth Theory, as anybody who knows high-school mathematics can confirm:


And here we see how is the Round Earth Theory superior to the Flat Earth Theory: it makes such simple and testable predictions. It seems to me that you can never derive an exact formula for anything from the Flat Earth Theory.

2) Why does the gravitational acceleration (9.8m/s2) decrease measurably when you climb up on a mountain? And how is your answer compatible with the rest of the Flat Earth Theory? You don't get to both claim gravity doesn't exist (and that that's why gravity doesn't cause the Flat Earth to collapse under its own weight) and that stars have a gravitational field.

3) If GPS is land-based, how come are GPS devices capable of telling your location, including your elevation, with just three signals? The simple truth is, when you know distance from three points, you can calculate two points where you might be. Those points will be different, mostly in elevation. If GPS devices receive signals from satellites, they can eliminate the point that's above the satellites as impossible. If they receive signals from land-based emitters, they cannot do that.

4) Polar day and polar night on Antarctica. If time zones work the way you claim they do, they would be impossible.

5) A bit of a soft question: Can you point me to any scientific discovery that was made using anything resembling your methods, by making countless ad-hoc hypotheses and asserting massive conspiracies? Yes, science has been wrong before, but scientists were almost always simply mistaken, not lying. Especially not massively colluding with each other.

Do you think that I should change something or add something?

[teo123]

I made and uploaded that video: https://youtu.be/6uldKfUPWrg

[teo123]

By the way, @brimstoneSalad, I still don't understand it, how are you supposed to see with a naked eye from an airplane whether or not the Earth is round? Yes, with a device that contains a gyroscope and a goniometer, you can see the dip of the horizon (the angle between your eye level and the horizon), but you cannot see it with the naked eye. As for the curvature of the horizon, as far as I understand it, you would only be able to see it if the Earth were a cylinder. The Earth is a sphere, and not a cylinder.