Is Earth a sphere?
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gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
Earth is an oblate spheroid, a flattened sphere. The earth's spin causes the equatorial region to be wider than the distance between the poles.
RangerWickett
Legend
Is it a sphere? Not precisely? Is it round? Certainly. Is it flat? In places.
CAFRedblade
Explorer
It's close enough to being a sphere for me. Yes Gravity and other forces squish/stretch and pull it, but that's fine.
Which is good enough for me to now reply like this:
http://xkcd.com/1248/
Which is good enough for me to now reply like this:
http://xkcd.com/1248/
So did you choose Yes or No?
It's hard to tell if the poll is a test of who believes the earth is round vs. flat, or if it's a test of who's going to quibble that Bullgrit said "Sphere" and not "oblate spheroid" which is more specific and thus more correct.
does each responder KNOW what bullgrit meant, or did we ASSUME?
Did we respond in the negative because we object to his imprecision?
gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
I said no, and answered the same as Umbram with "oblate spheroid", since the moon for example is much less oblate and much closer to a true sphere. Compared to a true sphere, an oblate spheroid is something else...
I follow the old school adage, regarding true or false questions, if any part of the question is false, the answer is false, even if the rest of the question is true.
I follow the old school adage, regarding true or false questions, if any part of the question is false, the answer is false, even if the rest of the question is true.
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Ed_Laprade
Adventurer
Voted no, because its an oblate spheroid, as others have mentioned. But I was expecting more than a yes/no poll, or at least an explanation. So poor Bullgrit ought to have known that this crowd could take it either way without bothering to explain or mention which they'd chosen. One or the other is often the case unless specifics are asked for.
What I saw with the poll is an example of a communication problem.
When a person like Bullgrit makes a statement or asks a question, do we take his general meaning as perfectly round or roundish and most definitely not flat?
In either case, we have to risk making an assumption. We could stop to ask clarifying questions at the risk of further bogging down discussion and being pedantic.
There's no layman's term for oblate spheroid, so how would Bullgrit know the right word to say, let alone be understood by a larger audience if he had used the more precise term.
A few years back, my department had to go to a communications seminar by a company called Teleos. Most of us thought it was going to be a total waste of time. But I actually got something out of it.
One of the most disruptive things we do as listeners is to not give the speaker the benefit of the doubt as to their meaning when speaking. We assume sneaky motives, and ill intent. Communication would go smoother if we gave the speaker Grace when deciding the meaning of their words and how we respond.
Given the brevity of Bullgrit's poll, as I noted before, I'm not really sure if he's trying to find Flat Earth Society members or see how actually knows the earth isn't perfectly round with some word play puzzle.
But the lesson I'm reminded of is how I've seen posters go down into pedantic bickery, team members crater a discussion by deliberating misinterpreting things, even managers hyper-analyzing emails to see if there's some veiled insult in somebody's message.
Give the speaker some grace. Answer the question at face value. He hasn't beaten you with some "oh some clever plan to trick you" any more than the jerk in the party outwitted you when his loner thief betrays the party again.
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