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  • This geographic puzzle feels like the modern day version of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg

    by divbzero
  • But what would flat-earthers consider the longest possible paths to be? Not the ones shown in the article, presumably?
    by 1313ed01
  • > Figure 9: Longest Drivable Straight Line Path on Earth.

    Walkable, maybe, but definitely not drivable (it crosses directly over the Alps, for example).

    by shrx
  • It reminds me of a bit I did a few years ago trying to find the "longest straightest" line in Atlanta [PDF]: https://matthewritch.com/pages/LongestStraightestLine.pdf
    by mdritch
  • I made a "first person" perspective rendering of this: https://mrgris.com/img/landfall/longest.png
    by mrgriscom
  • I know the globe is unintuitive (it still blows my mind that Muslims in New York City face roughly northeast to point toward Mecca) but it still seems bizarre that the water route can start near the arctic circle, cross the Pacific ocean, nearly touch Antarctica, cross the Atlantic ocean, and cross the Indian ocean to end well north of the equator and still travel only 80% of the way around the globe. This view of the rest of that great circle helped me visualize it: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=58%B037%27N+162%B014%27E-25%B01...
    by gcanyon
  • There's a longer land path that starts in or near Senegal and ends in China. But they miss it because it goes near the Dead Sea, and they treat anything below sea level as water.
    by OscarCunningham
  • The paper is basically like this (spoiler alert):

    “Some random user on Reddit posted a picture claiming that this is the longest straight line path on water possible on the Earth. We implemented a smart algorithm to solve this problem, found the elevation data, ran our algorithm... yes, that random user was right. Also, here's the longest path on land.”

    Thanks, I really enjoyed reading it, even though I hoped that they would disprove the original claim!

    Edit: here are the gcmap links to the two paths: sea [1], land [2].

    [1]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=25%B017%27N+66%B040%27E-58%B037...

    [2]: http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=24%B033%27N+118%B038%27E-37%B02...

    by ventana

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