i think it depends on what you mean by “accurately”.

from the perspective of someone living on the sphere, a geodesic looks like a straight line, in the sense that if you walk along a geodesic you’ll always be facing the “same direction”. (e.g., if you walk across the equator you’ll end up where you started, facing the exact same direction.)

but you’re right that from the perspective of euclidean geometry, (i.e. if you’re looking at the earth from a satellite), then it’s not a straight line.

one other thing to note is that you can make the “perspective of someone living on the sphere” thing into a rigorous argument. it’s possible to use some advanced tricks to cook up a definition of something that’s basically like “what someone living on the sphere thinks the derivative is”. and from the perspective of someone on the sphere, the “derivative” of a geodesic is 0. so in this sense, the geodesics do have “constant slope”. but there is a ton of hand waving here since the details are super complicated and messy.

this definition of the “derivative” that i mentioned is something that turns out to be very important in things like the theory of general relativity, so it’s not entirely just an arbitrary construction. the relevant concepts are “affine connection” and “parallel transport”, and they’re discussed a little bit on the wikipedia page for geodesics.

it’s a bit of a “spirit of the law vs letter of the law” kind of thing.

technically speaking, you can’t have a straight line on a sphere. but, a very important property of straight lines is that they serve as the shortest paths between two points. (i.e., the shortest path between A and B is given by the line from A to B.) while it doesn’t make sense to talk about “straight lines” on a sphere, it does make sense to talk about “shortest paths” on a sphere, and that’s the “spirit of the law” approach.

the “shortest paths” are called geodesics, and on the sphere, these correspond to the largest circles that can be drawn on the surface of the sphere. (e.g., the equator is a geodesic.)

i’m not really sure if the line in question is a geodesic, though

the jelly looks more like cranberry sauce than actually jelly

girlboss

as someone who studied both computer science and “higher level” math, i think that the use of “higher level” does kind of loosely match the computer science meaning. “higher level” math is all about abstracting away the details, to focus on the “big picture” of how things work. e.g., measure theory focuses on looking at integration from a very abstract perspective, and this abstract perspective lets you treat summation and Riemannian integration as “the same thing”. you can draw a parallel to how in programming, a higher level perspective lets you treat various operating systems/pieces of hardware as “the same thing”.

another example would be how abstract algebra lets you treat various algebraic structures as “the same thing”, e.g. just about anything is a group, lots of things are modules, etc. and then there’s category theory.

probably the biggest difference is that higher level math tends to be more challenging than lower level math, while lower level computer science tends to be more challenging than higher level computer science. (at least in my experience)

after reading this article, it makes a lot of sense that joe rogan said RFK jr was the “only candidate that makes sense”

“Somebody will send me something and I’ll go ‘Holy cow, did you see this?’,” he said, describing how he credulously forwards fake content to his children, only for them to have to correct him. (Kennedy said that, unlike him, his children can identify fake images “immediately.”)

this reads exactly like something joe rogan would do

even bigger sloths

i wonder what kinds of terrible and awful things are being done in the implementation of explorer.exe. i cant think of any filebrowsing task so performance heavy that it would interrupt a shutdown or cause any kind of noticeable delay when opening a new window.

i wonder what makes those names so rare

this seems like the perfect time to launch a streaming service, those things tend to be very profitable

i swear that in every picture his hairstyle and face look slightly different. are we sure there’s only one elon musk?

an even more effective strategy would be inventing a time machine and then stopping coca cola from ever existing

the reflections on one of the buildings makes it look like the middle finger tower is a rocket that’s taking off

why can’t they just look at their ammo counter on the hud like everyone else

i don’t watch the olympics btw

who’s going to be the brave soul that gives her that bottle

they’re also taller than cars

can you do reddit next please

don’t forget Big Data

cops will only read a book if it means they can put someone in jail