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by extremelearning 2657 days ago
The distance from Angkor Wat to Giza is: 4754 miles. And the distance from Gize to Nazca is: 4754 x φ miles.

By adding these, you get that the distance from Angkor Wat to Nazca is 4754 (1+φ) miles.

But φ is defined such that 1+φ = φ², [Verify for yourself that 1.61803398875² = 2.61803398875]

So thus, the distance from Ankor Wat to Nazca can also be described as 4754 φ² miles.

1 comments

Also were talking spheroid surface distances aka geodesics here. So unless three places lie on a great circle their distances are not cummutative, since they form a geodesic triangle.
Google Earth Engine's geometry constructors build geodesic geometries by default

https://developers.google.com/earth-engine/geometries_planar...

A geodesic is a locally length-minimizing curve. Equivalently, it is a path that a particle which is not accelerating would follow. In the plane, the geodesics are straight lines. On the sphere, the geodesics are great circles (like the equator). The geodesics in a space depend on the Riemannian metric, which affects the notions of distance and acceleration