Picking up old side project number 527, and immediately ending up at papers on ellipsoidal geometry. Ah yes, I'm remembering why I put this down now.
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Picking up old side project number 527, and immediately ending up at papers on ellipsoidal geometry. Ah yes, I'm remembering why I put this down now.
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> This paper has had a rather elephantine gestation.
To say nothing of how well me digesting it will go
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This does also remind me that GIS is the ultimate "it is impossible to know and a sin to ask" discipline. Where am I? How far away is this? Do these numbers mean anything? All these questions and more are sins in GIS, and if you ask them you will be condemned to an eternity of screaming "WHAT'S THE DATUM" at an uncaring universe.
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On the plus side, this paper is giving me blessed relief: the math problem I was trying to first-principles has no known solution, and the best you can do is some inelegant iterative yolo, which thankfully turns out to work reasonably well most of the time.
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@danderson I explained something similar earlier this week on the topic of measuring positions in space with millimeters of error, and someone told me:
> There is a literal, autistic sense in which you are correct. But there is a practical, pragmatic distinction between measurements that we call absolute versus those we call relative, and pedantic correctness misses the point.
I think I feel… proud?
