Adventures in engineering

But no, it really is flat, I tell you!

Yesterday I was sent a link to the Flat Earth Society. They have a discussion site with various forums populated by Flat Earthers and sceptics. Having read a couple of the threads, all I can say is Oh my god! (Okay so I don't believe in God, but that particular exclamation seems to fit)

There were just so many things wrong with the ideas proposed on the site and the spurious "science" cited to shore up the theory, that I kept wanting to sign in and write a reply refuting all their ideas! One doesn't know whether they're posting ironically, or to provoke a reaction (which they certainly get!) or whether they do actually believe. There are a few sane, rational people (who tend to have the better grammatical standards) who post replies exhorting the Flat-Earthers to actually look at all the evidence for a spherical (if not perfectly spherical) Earth.

While Terry Pratchett never really explains in his Discworld books how a flat disc supported on the backs of four great elephants standing on the shell of the great turtle A'Tuin can support life, it doesn't matter, because that's only fiction. No-one in this world should ever believe anything of the sort.

posted by Tamburlaine @ 1:23 pm