this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
99 points (95.4% liked)
Asklemmy
43947 readers
751 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because maps for naval navigation are based on degrees latitude and longitude. So if you travel at sixty nautical miles per hour in latitudinal direction on this globe you will end up one degree further away from where you started. Angles are important in naval applications as well as aeronautical because ships and airplanes can and mostly do travel in straight lines.
One nautical mile is equal to 1.852 km good luck using that kind of number and converting it to meaningful information on the fly.
With digital systems it is of course not as important anymore (also they are using the metric definition and converting it to nautical miles internally) but courses are still plotted by hand on maps (eg. as a backup solution if your digital system goes belly up). Having a measuring system where one unit corresponds to something meaningful with little need to pronounce decimals all of the time seems like a good idea to me.
So for example you can travel 111.12km in latitudinal direction or 60 nautical miles which is equal to one degree latitudinal distance.
60 is properly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12 and so on so it makes quick mental calculations easier.
The unit just makes sense for the application it is designed for.
I'm trying to understand what I'm missing.
I might be getting my latitude and longitude confused- but I think that one degree of latitudal (east-west, right?) travel would result in a different distance depending on how far north or south I am? I'm thinking of it like walking around the equator, as opposed to walking in a circle around Santa's house, which is obviously directly on top of the north pole.
But if I travel one degree of longitude, no matter where I am the distance would be the same, right?