Airline Geography

The above photos were taken with my iPhone as we flew from Paris to Minneapolis two days ago. Screen quality is poor but enough is shown so that the general idea is obvious. We had a brief discussion about geography at that time, and I claimed that the arc I saw in 2006 as we flew from Minneapolis to London was an artefact – a flat map representation of a curved earth.

This map is the seat-back screen and is current-day technology, still primitive, but showing improvement. I can rotate the screen with my finger to show many angles. The first one above is more accurate, as it shows our route from Paris to Minneapolis as a southwest journey. Paris is at 48.9° north latitude, while Minneapolis is at 45.0° north. The distance between degrees of latitude is usually 69 miles, so that Paris is about 260 miles north of Minneapolis.

The second screen shows the flight as generally a flat line, which I did by rotating the screen image. It is not accurate, but not that far off.

Points to ponder:

• Paris, even though 260 miles north of Minneapolis, is a much warmer climate. Why? It is not, as common wisdom states, the Gulf Stream, though it is easy to confuse this question. The Atlantic Ocean warms during summer, and Paris (and most of Western Europe) is the beneficiary of that heat. If you’ve been in Paris in summer*, and you are put together like me, you would rather be in Minneapolis. It is very hot there, so much so that the 80 miles we walked that May were a sweaty affair, and not in a good way. Why is Minneapolis cooler? It is located in the middle of North America, longitudinally speaking, and the Rocky Mountains form a barrier, so Minneapolis catches north-south weather, including Arctic and Polar Vortex blasts. I would not want to live there in the Winter. It can be brutal.
• Map distortions: The distance between Newfoundland and Greenland is about 1,460 miles, so that the aircraft as represented on the map is that big. They do this so they can show the Delta logo and the aircraft itself. A blue dot would suffice.
• The southern tip of Greenland is on the 60th parallel, while Paris and Minneapolis are between 45° and 49°, so that distance is between 760 and 1,030 miles. Yet on the map we are crossing right over the southern tip. This is the false arc I referred to when I wrote about our 2006 trip. Note that to get from Paris to Minneapolis, we enter North America through Newfoundland/Labrador, crossing the St. Lawrence Seaway and Lakes Huron and Superior in the process. It is still basically an east-west journey. In my mind’s eye, to travel from Paris to Minneapolis, we would have to fly over New York City (40.7°), or 300 miles south of Minneapolis. This is how flat maps distort perceptions, and why Russia seems so much skinnier, north south, than it really is. (Actual area would, I think be comparable, as on a flat map it is elongated.)

Other oddball notes about globes: Miami is on the same latitude as Cairo. Los Angeles lines up with Tokyo. The equator goes right through the heart of Kenya, where we were, and it was very hot in Diani, on the coast and where we spent the last three days. While in Nairobi it was not as hot, as summer temperatures are in the low-mid 80s. The city is about 6,000 feet above sea level, and so is much cooler than other parts of the country.

And, completely unrelated to anything, comedian Demetri Martin says that if we find ourselves running from someone, we’d better not be in Kenya, as the best distance runners in the world come from there. Also, I noted a facial trait among certain Kenyans, and I am not sure of tribal origins, but it is the large gap between front teeth as seen in Jimi Hendrix -Cornell West.

It took some time to discern, and the trip to Kenya helped. Hendrix most often wore a bridge between his front teeth, while West does not. In fact, in a few shots Hendrix is wearing what is obviously a full dental frontispiece, as the gums are lavender. You can see it all on that post, and I feel a bit vindicated, as the teeth were always a sore point on that comparison. It was quite common to see the large gap in front teeth while in Kenya, as shown here by West. The teeth were, however, almost always healthy and white.

On this trip I took over 400 photos, one or two of them quite good. I am going to run a few of them in a couple of days, after I download them from my camera. One of them, my favorite, is an elephant in the foreground with Mount Kilimanjaro (cloud free) behind. It takes immense camera skill to capture an image like that, especially after our driver pulled a U-turn and said to capture that photo. I actually had to stand up in the Land Rover to take the shot, a brutal effort. But successful photography requires what wildlife photographer Bob Landis described as the two keys to getting good shots: F16, and be there. I am sure that Bob would appreciate how I had to stand up in that vehicle to capture that shot.

Regarding future photos: You’ve been warned. T-minus two days.

____________

*During the Paris Olympics last summer, organizers, who are infiltrated with hot-earthers, minimized air conditioning in rooms for the athletes, although I imagine that people flying in on private jets were quite comfortable. It had to be deliberate, as money was not in short supply for that event. Also, they avoided beef and animal protein in meals, going vegetarian. Athletes claimed that this hurt their performances, as they need protein to be on top of their game. Organizers called that an old and discredited saw, as vegetables are an adequate source of everything we need. I tend to think, and correct me if I am wrong, that a vegetarian diet is slow starvation, and that the Paris Olympics organizers were full of shit, a substance not known for its protein content.