Distance on Earth’s Surface

I would like to present a simple way to estimate the straight-line distance between two points on the surface of Earth using only their coordinates and the calculator provided with MS Windows in scientific mode (any scientific calculator is sufficient).

I assume that Earth is a perfect sphere with constant radius, some references gives Earth a radius of 6378 Km others 6380 Km.

I designate (North, East) as the positive side and (South, West) as the negative side. For example a point with coordinate (23S, 33W) becomes (-23, -33). The choice has no effect on the calculation, as long as all numbers are consistent.

Weekly Lesson (15)

“[The Taliban] are, in fact, among the most principled and most pious rulers modern Afghanistan has ever had. They are perhaps also among the pious and principled rulers the present day world has. It was indeed their piety, their principled behavior coupled with their strong convictions as well as their iron determination that helped them save the tyrannized people of Afghanistan from the clutches of the most cruel tyrants of the [civil war] period.” 

-The Afghanistan Foundation’s White Paper or Dark Paper? by M. Hassan Kakar [author of Afghanistan]

A Ptillion Dollars

A ptillion dollars is a thousand trillion dollars or ten to the power fifteen dollars or $1,000,000,000,000,000.

This number is no longer a theoretical measure but an economic reality: Total debt in the US-public and private-has been estimated at $0.1 ptillion; the value of short-term interest-rate futures traded on exchanges is $0.548 ptillion (notional).

When the coming hyperinflation hits the word ‘ptillion’ will become a household word, so I thought I would jump the gun and put it in print: let no one claim to be the first.

Weekly Lesson (14)

“For [the English] appear to constitute that people in Europe which, limited to the understanding of actuality, is destined, like the class of shopkeepers and workmen in the State, to live always immersed in matter, and to have actuality but not reason as object.” 

-Hegel’s History of Philosophy, Bacon.

Weekly Lesson (13)

“There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”

-Marx, Capital—Preface to the French Edition.

Weekly Lesson (12)

“A preoccupation with originality destroys originality itself, and true independence is given only to those who do not stop to think of the possibility of not being independent. Only the feeble talk of their strength of character. And only the man who is afraid of being easily discomfited is afraid of exposing himself to the influence of others. Current preoccupation with originality is a preoccupation with form. A man who has any real content will not worry unduly about originality. Preoccupation with form leads to baseless fabrications and emptiness.”

-Nikolai Chernyshevsky [my emphasis].

Weekly Lesson (11)

“It is not so much from as through slavery that man acquired freedom.”

-Attributed to Hegel’s History of Philosophy.

Weekly Lesson (10)

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

-Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte—Section I [my emphasis].

Weekly Lesson (9)

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”

-Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy-Preface.

Weekly Lesson (8)

“Truth may be ascertained by several methods, each of which however is no more than a form. Experience is the first of these methods. But the method is only a form: it has no intrinsic value of its own. For in experience everything depends upon the mind we bring to bear upon actuality. A great mind is great in its experience; and in the motley play of phenomena at once perceives the point of real significance.”

-Hegel’s Shorter Logic, §24n [my emphasis]

Philosophical Graphs

Here are some graphs that I find useful in visualising some philosophical points.

First are five graphs of bifurcation:

Weekly Lesson (7)

“Applied mathematics is generally not an immanent science, precisely because it involves the application of pure mathematics to a given material and its determinations as derived from experience.”

-Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, §202 [my emphasis]

Weekly Lesson (6)

“From the history of nature and human society that the laws of dialectics are abstracted. For they are nothing but the most general laws of these two aspects of historical development, as well as of thought itself. And indeed they can be reduced in the main to three:

• The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;
• The law of the interpenetration of opposites;
• The law of the negation of the negation.

All three are developed by Hegel in his idealist fashion as mere laws of thought.”

-Engels’ Dialectics of Nature.

Weekly Lesson (5)

“Freedom is just thought itself; he who casts thought aside and speaks of freedom knows not what he is talking of. The unity of thought with itself is freedom, the free will. …It is only as having the power of thinking that the will is free.”

-Hegel’s History of Philosophy, French Philosophy.

Weekly Lesson (4)

“Greece…, a small country that developed late at the periphery of an ancient civilized world.”

“The great Athenian achievement was not the empire and its fleeting temporal authority (both rather modest achievements by the standards of the ancient Near East).”

-Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity, by Gregory Crane [my emphasis].