That's a fair point. And it's less accurate as you get close to such a line, for a given accuracy of bearing.
> You need to work in the apparent height of the Red Moon, or
> there will be no triangulation at all.
And I don't think moon height works for this purpose. At least, not without "illuminated trig", at best...
> But then I'd rather use the the place of sunrise or sunset for the
> absolute direction (which keeps the problem on the surface of a flat
> world). Luckily, with Theya and Rausa, it is possible to get an exact
> bearing on both gates
Which will tell you only which direction is dead east or west, regardless of position on the lozenge, time, date, or season. Won't help at all in triangulation (aside from being one of the better methods to fix the cardinal points).
> line in between is as prone to mistakes as the triangulation to
> determine the distance between RW Earth and Sun based on the measurement
> of the angle of the sun some 800 miles north of Luxor on the day the sun
> would be directly overhead in Luxor, performed by some Alexandrian Greek
> chappy I could look up. He got the angle slightly wrong, and was off by
> two orders of magnitude IIRC.
Eratosthenes is the chap that springs to mind (notorious to mathematicians and functional programmers as "the Greek guy with the sieve"), though I think his day trip was to Syene. His estimate was a good deal more accurate than this, though. (Notice here you're not measuring parallax, you're measuring latitude effects.)
> This is from an excellent - German language - schoolbook "Mathematics of
> the Ancients", which gives all kind of mathematical problems e.g. the
> Pythagoreans were concerned with. A very Brithini pastime... If the
> world of nodes and higher essences can be perceived and controlled this
> way, a necessary ability for wizards, too. Arithmantics, or what?
I think so. I reckon the hard-core types see _all_ of the otherworld(s) in such terms; their native "energy plane" is simply the domain of "theorems": those, we already know how they work. The "foreign" otherworlds are simply those parts in the realm of hypothesis (at best), or idle speculation. In principle, they should all eventually be reducible, given sufficiently Logical thinking.
Powered by hypermail