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Author Topic:   RIP Google Earth
dwise1
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Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
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Message 1 of 19 (893980)
04-27-2022 1:46 PM


Apparently Google Earth has reached end of life and is being deleted from our computers. It just completely disappeared from my Win10 box. Bummer!
I used it a lot, including the Time Machine feature (eg, the only way to see where we had lived on base and where the SAGE blockhouse used to be). My friend had spent years on a Google Earth world tour -- as soon as she had finished with South America she moved out into the Pacific, last she had mentioned. And I would also use it to measure distances and dimensions (eg, of that SAGE blockhouse). It will be sorely missed. Google Maps is such a poor substitute.
Google Earth is also the subject of a German miniseries on Netflix, The Billion Dollar Code, about the patent infringement lawsuit by a German company against Google for having stolen from their TerraVision to develop Google Earth. Netflix also has a "The Making of ... " feature which summarizes the case.
So has anybody else been hit by this?

Replies to this message:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 9 of 19 (893993)
04-27-2022 7:11 PM
Reply to: Message 8 by Percy
04-27-2022 5:54 PM


Re: Google Earth Timelapse
The historical imagery feature uses older aerial photographs (obviously) which are usually of much lower resolution.
One example of using that feature was when a friend who used to live here came back for a local dance event (she's a teacher) and I mentioned Lion Country Safari and Frasier the Lion as we drove past where it used to be. She had never heard of it before, so later I tracked down where it was. A lot has changed, including new streets, so it took extensive use of historical imagery to track it down and to tell when what parts went away or got repurposed (eg, the Verizon Amphitheatre). It's now almost all repurposed as housing, except for the amphitheater which has been razed but nothing else.
Another use for Google Earth was to check out the reason for Wallace's Line, the line discovered by Darwin's contemporary, Russell Wallace, which delineates Australian and Southeast Asian fauna -- the islands on either side all have either of two sets of animals, but not ones belonging on the other side. A quick tour with Google Earth shows an underwater trench corresponding with that line, such that during the last ice age there were land bridges between the islands, but that trench was still a water barrier they could not cross.
 
I was able to download it again and it's working for now. A Google search had uncovered many complaints of Google Earth either no longer working or disappearing altogether (as in my case; it wasn't even in the apps settings list of installed applications), so it is definitely a thing and not just me.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 8 by Percy, posted 04-27-2022 5:54 PM Percy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 11 by Percy, posted 04-28-2022 7:09 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 13 of 19 (894010)
04-28-2022 7:36 PM
Reply to: Message 11 by Percy
04-28-2022 7:09 AM


Re: Google Earth Timelapse
In other words, I never thought it was just you.
Apologies. Years of marital training/brainwashing must have kicked in. Everything that went wrong was my fault, especially when it involved the computer and was caused completely by her refusal to learn how do it right (eg, "What did your stupid computer do with my Word document?" which she couldn't find because she never named her documents nor gave any thought to where she was saving it).
Back in the day the computers of science fiction were frequently non-deterministic, unlike real-world computers of the time that given the same inputs always delivered the same outputs.
I graduated high school in '69. Around that time the percentage of the US population that had any experience with computers (even just looking at one through a window) was extremely small. When I was a paperboy around 1964 our newspaper "computerized" and we were given a tour of their computer center. Remembering back, I think it was just data processing equipment (which had been around since the 1920's or earlier) without an actual CPU (post-WWII) -- the card sorter was programmed with a patch panel, the first time I had seen that technology (in my active duty shop, our test set was programmed with patch panels).
And in movies and on TV, computers were depicted as magical devices with capabilities far beyond actual computers (as you just pointed out). Around 1970, I encountered my first two YEC claims: the living fresh water mollusks carbon-dated to be thousands of years old (the old reservoir effect issue) and the NASA computer that found Joshua's Lost Day (that link is to an essay about that claim):
quote:
After my grandmother went to be with the Lord in 1996, it fell to several of my cousins and me to sort through her belongings in the apartment where she had spent the last 19 years of her life. Grandmother owned several Bibles, tucked inside which one could often find a little treasured poem, an old note from my grandfather, or perhaps a program from a funeral. This was quite moving for me, so you can imagine my surprise when, in the midst of all that, I found a few pages of lies.
Most of us have seen the story in some form or another. It starts off something like, "Did you know science proves the Bible?" and goes on to tell the story of how NASA astronomers were puzzled to find almost a day "missing" in some "calculations," and how a Christian showed them how it corresponded to the Biblical stories of Joshua and Hezekiah. An inspiring story, except that it is completely false (I mean the NASA part is false, not the Biblical stories themselves). This lie had been made into a tract, and that tract had made its way into my grandmother's Bible.
...
By the way, the story is nonsense on its face. There is no way computer calculations could detect a "missing" day. All they could do is take the current positions and motions of the planets and the laws of physics and calculate backwards to determine where objects were at some time in the past. But this would always give an answer -- the only way one could find a day "missing" would be if the results of the calculations were compared with some precise (and precisely dated) astronomical observations prior to the missing day and the positions did not line up. There are no such recorded observations from the time of Joshua.
Basically, the NASA computer story is that NASA had this lunar orbit prediction program which they decided to test by running it back in time a long, long ways (many thousands of years if not millions of years). Imagine their astonishment when the program abruptly stopped around 23 Oct 4004 BC with the error message: "Nothing existed before this." Then they reran the program forward from there and when it got to the present it was off by one day. A Christian (who had somehow slipped past the "atheist scientists" running the place) opened his Bible and found the answer: that missing day corresponded to when Joshua had commanded the sun to stop.
I didn't earn my BS Computer Science until 1979, but even in 1970 I knew that was nonsense and that that claim imbued computers with magical attributes that they simply cannot possibly possess. That claim alone told me that creationist claims are nothing but bullshit nonsense, which is why, when I learned that creationism was still around in 1981, I was surprised and decided to look into their claims; still bullshit nonsense.
Now, that halt at 4004 BCE would make sense if a programmer had put it in as a joke. As for it being off by one day, I would be extremely surprised that it was off by so little. The problem with using floating point numbers (eg, IEEE 754) is that most floating-point numbers cannot be expressed exactly, but rather you will always have some small amount of round-off error. More round-off error accrues with every floating-point operation, which will accrue even more as you iterate through do-loops.
For example, Simpson's Rule is an iterative method for approximating the area under a curve (AKA a definite integral). The smaller you make the Δx (ie, the more sub-intervals) the more accurate your approximation. However, having more sub-intervals means that many more iterations with each iteration accruing more error. Our numerical methods textbook had a graph of the error in Simpson's Rule (ie, how far off the approximation was from the actual answer) with relation to the number of sub-intervals: as the number of sub-intervals increased, error decreased rapidly, but then so much round-off error had accrued that it completely swamped out any benefit.
The lunar orbit prediction program obviously used iteration, so the effect of so many iterations would have been the accrual of round-off error swamping out those results. And since mathematicians would have very involved with that program and since mathematicians know about error and round-off error, they would have known better than to have agreed to such a stupid test. And if that test had actually been run, then every mathematician there would have immediately realized what had caused that error.
If you Google on that NASA claim, you will find several web pages discussing, most of them on Christian sites and most of them denouncing that claim as false (at least that's what I found a decade or two ago). It also made Answers in Genesis' 2002 article listing "Claims We Wish Creationists Would Not Use" along with "so why are there still monkeys?" and "men have one fewer rib than do women."
Even programs with random number generators would provide the same outputs if initialized with the same seed.
I learned that lesson the hard way in 1978. Our university used an IBM mainframe which had an "interactive" module, Virtual Storage Personal Computing (VSPC). Since it included VS BASIC, I decided to teach myself BASIC, there being no class offered in the subject. I bought the VS BASIC handy-dandy (USAF term for a quick-reference card) as a syntax reference and David Ahl's books, BASIC Computer Games and More BASIC Computer Games, for coding examples.
My first test program was Hamurabi. When I ran it, I noticed something rather odd: plague struck the city every single year. I turned out that the syntax for Microsoft BASIC's RND() function was different than for VS BASIC and that using the MS syntax (RND(1)) resulted in running the VS function with a seed of one. Changing my VS code to RND(0) cleared up that problem.
... , but other times it definitely feels like the program has been routed down a meaningfully different decision path.
Yes, the bane of software debuggers. We would refer to an unexpected result as being due to it "finding a different sneak path", which is why a gorilla is so vitally important during software testing. Remember the classic Samsonite luggage commercial where the suitcase is put in the gorilla cage and it remains intact and closed despite being thrown around and stomped on by the gorilla. A software gorilla plays with the program and tries to break it by doing totally unexpected things to it, things that the programmers would never have considered (and hence would never try to do when testing it themselves).
Talking about sneak paths, on NPR's All Things Considered I listened to an interview with RADM Grace Hopper, I think on the occasion of her retirement from the Navy in 1986. In talking about her work which led to COBOL, she described a feature they had put in the compiler which would trace through all the execution paths in the program in order to ensure that there were no "dead ends", places where the program gets caught in an infinite loop. In my school programs, we always knew when we had an infinite loop because the ABEND message would be that the program used up its entire time allocation. That interview was the only time I ever heard of such a test feature in a compiler and it sounds like a useful feature to have.
Also on the subject of sneak paths was a bug discovered in a piece of medical equipment. The device was used to administer radiation treatment of a cancer. It had been "thoroughly" tested and had been in use for years without a problem. Then one day the technician started punching in the settings, then changed some of the settings that he had done wrong. As a result, the patient received bad radiation burns (it's been decades, so I forget whether that was fatal). Somehow, those settings corrections went through a sneak path that nobody knew about despite all the testing it had gone through and its years of flawless operation. One programmer I worked with absolutely refused to ever take a job working on software for medical equipment for precisely this reason.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 11 by Percy, posted 04-28-2022 7:09 AM Percy has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 14 by jar, posted 04-28-2022 8:14 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 15 of 19 (894027)
04-28-2022 11:27 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by jar
04-28-2022 8:14 PM


Re: Google Earth Timelapse
Not quite sure what your point is.
I did have to chase down info on the cal utility, mainly wanting to look at the source code to figure out that "anomaly".
But that Wikipedia article specifically says: "The Plan 9 from Bell Labs manual states: "Try cal sep 1752." " It's not an anomaly, but rather September 1752 is when the British calendar switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar which had been introduced in October 1582. The reason for the nearly two-century delay (170 years) is because the Gregorian Calendar was a Catholic thing which no self-respecting Protestant country could ever consider adopting ... until the Julian Calendar had drifted far enough from the seasons to make it necessary. Similarly, Orthodox Christian countries ignored that Catholic thing as long as they could: Russia waited until 1918 and Greece until 1923. Most non-western countries adopted it for civil purposes, with the latest one being Saudi Arabia in 2016.
So that sudden jump from 02 Sep 1752 to 14 Sep 1752 was the deletion of 11 days to bring the calendar back in sync with the seasons, the specific problem with the Julian Calendar that the Gregorian Calendar was designed to correct.
 
Or was it your purpose to point out areas in our calendar where days can disappear. But since this application is an astronomical one (a lunar orbit calculation program), it would have handled time as astronomers do in their calculations, as a Julian day number (JDN):
quote:
The Julian day number is based on the Julian Period proposed by Joseph Scaliger, a classical scholar, in 1583 (one year after the Gregorian calendar reform) as it is the product of three calendar cycles used with the Julian calendar:
28 (solar cycle) × 19 (lunar cycle) × 15 (indiction cycle) = 7980 years
Its epoch occurs when all three cycles (if they are continued backward far enough) were in their first year together. Years of the Julian Period are counted from this year, 4713 BC, as year 1, which was chosen to be before any historical record.
BTW, the next epoch will start in 3268 CE, more than a millennium from now.
As I understand, Scaliger named his new system after his father, Julius, a historian. The system's original purpose was to arrive at a standard dating system for historical events. Normally, dates were kept in terms of "this many years into the reign of this king", so there was no easy way to correlate historical records within a single kingdom let alone between different kingdoms.
The usefulness of this system for astronomical and other long-term time calculations is obvious when you consider that it's the number of days since a specific starting point (similar to UNIX time being the number of seconds since its Beginning of Time at the start of 01 Jan 1970). And there are formulae for converting a given calendar date to a JDN and vice versa.
But there are two problems with that. One is that a JDN day was defined as starting at noon, so conversion calculations needed to correct for those 12 hours. Second is that the JDN has gotten really big (eg, the current JDN value as of calendar date if it is October 15, 1582, or later, but a Julian calendar date if it is earlier. JD stands for Julian Date. 0h is 00:00 midnight, 12h is 12:00 noon, UT unless otherwise specified. Current value is as of 21:22, Thursday, April 28, 2022 (UTC) is 2459698.39028.
To make the number more manageable, the Modified Julian Date (MJD) is often used. Basically, its value is JD - 2400000.5, which was the JDN at midnight on 17 Nov 1858; current value is 59697.89028. BTW, when we were using a VAX-11 minicomputer, I read that the system clock was the number of 100-nanosecond intervals since midnight 17 Nov 1858; it wasn't until I researched MJD two decades later that that date finally made sense.
So to reiterate, the "missing day" in the bogus NASA computer story would have been a mismatch of JDNs (or MJDs), not of human-readable calendars.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 14 by jar, posted 04-28-2022 8:14 PM jar has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 16 by jar, posted 04-29-2022 8:42 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 17 of 19 (894046)
04-29-2022 1:29 PM
Reply to: Message 16 by jar
04-29-2022 8:42 AM


Re: Google Earth Timelapse
If I have to explain it then it's not as funny as I thought.
In a skeptics breakfast discussion that had turned to elements of story-telling, a cartoon artist pointed out that the challenge for a cartoonist is to be able to compose that single frame in such a way that you provide all the context needed to tell the story.
My reply was saying that the context was not clear and here are some ways that can be interpreted.
 
Of course, calendars are necessarily arbitrary, so there's a difference between changes in time keep methods (eg, switching from Julian to Gregorian) and actual loss of time (eg, the halting and subsequent resumption of the earth's rotation).
I'm reminded of Juvenissun a couple years ago who was arguing for all kinds of physical effects including massive asteroid bombardments that radically changed the earth's orbit, et al., all in historic times -- jump into the Did the Flood really happen? topic around Message 2346 and then follow the reply threads. He was all over the place with "scientific" claims that were unable to stand up to doing the math (something which Kent Hovind forbids his followers to ever do, nor to listen to anyone who has done the math). I just tracked down that he had registered on 25 Ju1 2022 and last posted on 27 Aug 2022, so he only lasted one month.
In that message link, I referred to an early creationist, creation I think, who had tried to argue that the year used to be 360 days long and then something (eg, the earth getting hit by asteroids, planets, and moons) changed our orbit radically and the length of the year with it.
The basis for his claim (and I seem to recall that Juvenissun also bought into it) was that most ancient calendars were 360 days long, but he kept ignoring the simple fact that those calendars ended with a slightly-less-than-one-week-long festival which made up the difference and brought the calendar back into sync with the seasons. In that Message 2346 I explained (yet again):
DWise1 writes:
Also, you took that from my recalling another clueless creationist having tried to argue that because ancient calendars had years 360 days long, then that meant that the length of the year had changed. Rather, those ancient calendars had breaks of a few days between each calendar, usually involving festivals, that would sync the next calendar up again with the seasons. Here again is what I wrote in Message 2302 and which you have quote-mined:
DWise1 writes:
Do you remember several months ago how somebody (creation?) tried to argue that the year used to literally be 360 days long and then something happened that suddenly changed the earth's orbit? He based it on how so many ancient calendars had 360 days. What he forgot was that those calendars also had intercalary days added at the end of the official year, usually in the form of a festival, to make up the difference and so the seasons would work out right. It turns out that they were really in love with the number 360 for its unique mathematical properties so they chose it for their calendars despite having to tweak it. Then Roman politicians politicized those intercalary days, declaring more of them to keep their people in power longer or fewer to get their opponents out of office sooner. So Julius Caesar established the Julian Calendar in 46 BCE, of which the later Gregorian Calendar is a refinement.
At no point was the actual physical year literally 360 days long, though it will be some time in the future.
That's right, they even have a special term for days that are stuck in between calendars or within calendars: intercalary days.
Why 360? Because ancient peoples loved that special number. It's evenly divisible by so many numbers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, and 180. We still love that number since we use it to divide the circle into 360 degrees. They also loved the number 60, a factor of 360, which is evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30. We still love it such that we use base-60 (sexagesimal) in our system of time and angle measurement -- plus the numbers 12 and 24, factors of 360, are part of our timekeeping system.
So we do know the true story of ancient calendars having 360 days and it has nothing whatsoever to do with any of your made-up bullshit nonsense.
 
But the point is that what is describe in the Josh story would have left physical evidence regardless of any calendar and that evidence is simply missing.
A quick "back of the realtor's complimentary note pad" calculation has a point on the earth in Israel travelling at 850 mph at that latitude due to the earth's rotation (circumference at that latitude divided by 24 hours).
I could be wrong in my calculations, but stopping the earth's rotation in one second's time would have exerted g-forces on everything on the earth's surface of 39 g's. If it happened in 10 seconds, then it would still be 4 g's. Then of course you'd have the same g-forces when the earth's rotation started up again.
That would have had to have left a mark!
Edited by dwise1, : added first part of reply

This message is a reply to:
 Message 16 by jar, posted 04-29-2022 8:42 AM jar has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 18 by Percy, posted 04-30-2022 10:30 AM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 6076
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 7.3


Message 19 of 19 (894086)
04-30-2022 11:16 AM
Reply to: Message 18 by Percy
04-30-2022 10:30 AM


Re: Google Earth Timelapse
Effects of latitude accounted for (I used a latitude of 35°), though I was too lazy to model the earth's cross section as being like an ellipse instead of a circle (the polar radius is less than the equatorial radius).
Another factor in calculating the g's of deceleration would be how long it would take to go from normal velocity to zero -- let's call that "braking time". According to my rough calculations, if "braking time" took a minute instead of a second, then the g-forces would have been 0.65, and if it took an hour, then it would have been 0.0108.
Those don't sound as significant, so I looked up peak ground acceleration (PGA) that is experienced during earthquakes -- that link is to the section, Comparison of instrumental and felt intensity which notes:
quote:
Generally speaking,
  • 0.001 g (0.01 m/s2) – perceptible by people
  • 0.02 g (0.2 m/s2) – people lose their balance
  • 0.50 g (5 m/s2) – very high; well-designed buildings can survive if the duration is short.

A bit further down the page is a table, Notable earthquakes, whose preceding section states: "In India, areas with expected PGA values higher than 0.36 g are classed as "Zone 5", or "Very High Damage Risk Zone"."
A few PGA from notable earthquakes:
  • 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami -- 2.7 g
  • 1994 Northridge earthquake -- 1.82 g
  • December 2011 Christchurch earthquake -- 1.0 g
  • June 2011 Christchurch earthquake -- 0.78 g
  • 2010 Haiti earthquake -- 0.5 g
  • 2016 Christchurch earthquake -- 0.4 g
  • 1964 Alaska earthquake -- 0.18 g
So "low g-forces" can still pack a helluva wallop. And even if God "went easy on the brakes", the effects would have still been devastating.
 
In a similar vein, it's common to have discussions of Star Trek technology and how they just came up with some tech in an ad hoc manner in order to get around problems (eg, the transporter to avoid the massive special effects costs of having that huge ship land on a planet every single episode) -- OK, it depends on the crowd you hang out with.
One incredible technology that hardly anybody notices, little more than a throw-away term in TOS, was inertial dampeners (though their lack was very definitely noticed by LaForge when they failed in his turbo-lift). Without inertial dampener tech, those ships wouldn't dare move at such speeds without killing the crew ("Without inertial dampeners, the crew would end up being chunky salsa."). The recent show, The Expanse, dealt with the problem more directly without having to resort to exotic tech.
From a Stargate: SG-1 episode when O'Neill and Carter are going through the pre-flight checklist in a new fighter based on Goa'uld tech:
Carter: Inertial dampeners.
O'Neill: Cool! And check! Phasers?
Carter: Sorry, sir.
O'Neill: Darn!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 18 by Percy, posted 04-30-2022 10:30 AM Percy has not replied

  
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