Geography is four-dimensional

coder97•about 1 hour ago

I resonate with the first paragraph. Those people raised with beliefs of a time that does not exist anymore happen to be very conservative and refuse to see the change.

admiralrohan•about 2 hours ago

Same is true for humans too. About their personality. Constantly changing and you will never meet the same person twice in that sense.

finghin•about 1 hour ago

Dubious given Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem;)

roywiggins•about 2 hours ago

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

pella•about 2 hours ago

Every geography has a timestamp.

soco•about 2 hours ago

I get the latitude, longitude, and they added time. But what was the fourth dimension? Or third rather, because the post assumption is that time was the fourth added.

deweller•about 2 hours ago

Altitude is the third dimension, but I presume you knew that.

"Geography is three dimensional" doesn't correctly communicate the time dimension.

ySteeK•about 1 hour ago

Even with altitude, you still need time. The Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun around the galactic center, all at hundreds of km/s. Without a timestamp, lat/long/alt just tells you where something was, not where it is. Time was never optional.

marginalia_nu•about 1 hour ago

You can model geography as a 2D heightmap to a pretty good approximation tbh.

dibujaron•23 minutes ago

a heightmap is three-dimensional, where the third dimension is usually represented with color or contour lines.

soco•about 2 hours ago

Hmm I thought that, but we don't really live in a 3D world (or use the altitude parameter in a very meaningful way in life) so I wondered whether there's something else I was missing.

notachatbot123•about 1 hour ago

I wonder what makes you belittle the altitude dimension? Buildings have storys, humans can sit and stand, birds can fly, your eyes can move up and down your monitor.

incognito124•about 1 hour ago

The lat and lon are actually 3d since we live, up to a first approximation, on the surface of a sphere. The correct way to think about it is xyz in a reference frame anchored in the center of the Earth

finghin•about 1 hour ago

If you accepted that nothing exists at the north pole, that’s enough to obtain meaningful 2d coordinates for a location:)

Not workable in practice, though!

JNORLIN•about 1 hour ago

The fourth is altitude. I asked a colleague how he found Vietnam. I was surprised to hear him say it said it was windy, desolate, and cold as hell. It did not match my experience at all. Turns out he had been hanging out at 30 000 feet the whole time!

Geography is four-dimensional

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