yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Thousands Of Miles Dead Reckoning | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

We're featuring my interview with traditional Polynesian ocean Voyager 9 OA Thompson, and I had to ask him how the ancient Polynesians navigated 2400 miles from Hawaii to Tahiti without being able to calculate longitude. Let's check it out.

Okay, imagine you're standing on the beach at Waikiki. You're looking over the horizon to where Tahiti is, and then imagine you draw one line—like an arc—to the west side of Tahiti and the other line to the east side. That's your target. It's less than a degree, so your destination is not in view because it's far beyond your line of sight.

So, your destination spans an angle from where you're standing in Waikiki, and as long as you navigate inside that angle, nothing else matters, right? Because you're gonna get to your target on the other side. Really, really smart. In fact, it seems to me your angle can be wider than that because you just have to get your destination within your horizon, and then you can just reckon to it—50 miles?

Yeah, yeah, 15 miles. So, you have a 30-mile angle. So, it's really the width of 30 miles at the distance of where you're headed—that's your angle. 2,400 miles away though, is... thirty?

Oh yeah, that's narrow, but still, it's a known problem, right? Yes. So, but there's so many unknowns in the navigation that it's not a GPS; it's not a coordinate system. You don't have longitude. You need instruments, and you need tables, which we don't have. It's a dead reckoning system, so you only know where you are by memorizing where you come from.

If you memorize your complement, you gotta be awake. You know, we stay up 21, 22 hours a day, so it ain't easy. Here's what you do—slip this in your...

So, what's that? That same sex? I see he didn't take it. [Laughter] [Music]

More Articles

View All
WATCH THIS Before Building Multiple Income Streams
It’s been constantly said that in order to get really wealthy, you need to have multiple streams of income. We’ve also mentioned this in past videos. Ideally, you should aim to have around three to seven individual streams of income to be safe. But here’s…
How to Find What Success Looks Like For You
It’s not just like, “Oh, follow your passion.” It’s a little bit more of a complex formula. Like, what are you interested in? What are you passionate about? Also, like your nature. Also, uh, how can you make money? That type of thing. Yes, looked at subli…
Long run and short run Phillips curves
Let’s talk a little bit about the short run and long run Phillips curve. Now, they’re named after the economist Bill Phillips, who saw in the 1950s what looked like an inverse relationship between inflation and the unemployment rate. He was studying decad…
What is risk and return? | Investments and retirement | Financial literacy | Khan Academy
So probably the main thing you will hear when you talk about investing is: What is the return that you got on your investment? Return on investment is often times, people will say ROI, and there’s a lot of different ways of calculating it. But maybe the m…
Lesson Planning with Khanmigo
This is Conmigo, an AI-powered guide designed to help all students learn. Kanmigo is not just for students; teachers can use Conmigo too by toggling from student mode to teacher mode. Once in teacher mode, Conmigo transforms into the teaching assistant yo…
15 Truths about Success You Wish Someone Told You Sooner
The most expensive cost in life is the unseen price that you pay on the information you don’t have. Some people spend decades figuring things out and wishing they would have found the answers sooner, and this video allows you to bypass all of that. Here a…