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by anamexis 4063 days ago
24k miles is Earth's circumference at the equator, not 85 degrees latitude.
1 comments

Dammit. I thought I had been careful enough to get the correct number.

Alright. Picking the simplest formula off Wikipedia, cosine of 85 degrees is ~0.0871557 times a (6378137m) times pi is ~1746383.9m for the circumference. That's still approximately 500k squares at the exact latitude. My point is one of the sheer magnitude still available.

What I should do is calculate how many decimal points down from 90 degrees 3 meters is and get that circumference, since that's the low bound, but I'm not really feeling up to the number-plugging.

I could be incorrect about what a is; I presumed it is the semi-major axis on WGS84, but I might have picked the wrong thing.

...

Ooh. I forgot there's a Wolfram|Alpha. ... And 10 minutes later I haven't convinced the input parsing to give me what I want. Oh well.