Wittgenstein's Rope Around the Earth Animation

May 21, 2019 7:48 AM

Cool philosophy animation showing the fallibility of human intuition. This is a super cool new animation put out by the Center for Public Philosophy at UC Santa Cruz. It talks about a little experiment called "The Rope Around the Earth" and why it shows that human intuition is sometimes overconfidently wrong, and draws conclusions for that about our political and social disagreements.
posted by HiPhiNation (45 comments total)

Great video, but of course there are limits to how much nuance you can convey in a 6-minute video.

In the case of the rope, it's not really true that a mathematical proof is the only way to dispel your faulty intuition. If I was trying to convince someone of the answer to the puzzle without a lot of math, I would tell them to imagine a square rope wrapped around a cubical earth. It's not hard to see that adding a yard to that rope means adding a quarter yard to each side, which means the rope is an eighth of a yard (4.5 inches) off the ground. That makes it plausible that doing the same thing to a circle has a similar-sized effect.

In other words, if we're dealing with something that isn't rigorously provable, and we're being led astray by inaccurate mental "pictures", all isn't lost; maybe we just need a better picture. That is, on an individual level we need to think critically about the mental models we rely on. And on a social level, we need to promote the ones that lead more accurately to true conclusions.

But still, the point that we should strive for humility even when we think we're obviously right is a good one.
posted by teraflop at 8:08 AM on May 21, 2019 [18 favorites]

My answer to the question was a little bit hampered by not knowing how big a yard is.
Though I'm happy enough with my instinctive answer which was, about a sixth of a yard.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 8:11 AM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

What do you do about people who sincerely believe that God wouldn't let the rope get that high if he didn't want to?
posted by OverlappingElvis at 8:15 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Eh, this is drawing a bad conclusion, I think - and in the current atmosphere, a dangerous one as well. The problem with the rope around the equator is that the "picture" is unfounded - that is, we have no reason to believe that the addition of a yard would have no measurable impact, save for some extrapolation that doesn't really work. Thus, once given the actual proof, we should, as open minded individuals, be open to it, and move to a new, founded belief.

But for a lot of things in those spheres mentioned, our beliefs are founded. Let's take raising the minimum wage, since it's the example the video gives. People aren't believing that it's the thing to do just because, but in fact have actual rationales built for the belief - that economies are driven from the bottom up, that raising the minimum wage will more effectively improve the lot both for the impoverished and society as a whole, etc. It's not something that is just (for most adherents) taken on faith.

And no, I think the push to be "humble" with our views is part of why we're at this place today. We need to stand up for what we believe in, especially when we are opposing actual unfounded views. We should always keep the prospect of being wrong in our minds - but that should drive us to do our homework and make sure our beliefs have a foundation.
posted by NoxAeternum at 8:18 AM on May 21, 2019 [12 favorites]

Things not mentioned in the cartoon (at least in the first half):

1) gravity holds things to to the ground
2) ropes have a lot of give to them

A rope around the earth wouldn't rise up off the ground no matter how much you added to its length. And even if it would, ropes stretch so much that a rope could absorb a whole lot of slack. The framing of the problem leads people to the "wrong" answer. If you asked, how much would the radius of a circle the size of the earth increase if you added 1 yard to its circumference, you'd get the 'right' answer a lot more often.
posted by Ansible at 8:20 AM on May 21, 2019 [10 favorites]

For some reason the video won't play for me, saying, "Sorry
Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here." I live in California; my tax dollars *shakey fist*
posted by fleacircus at 8:26 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Really upset, though, that the human intuition doesn't work so well on planet-sized rigid hoops.
posted by fleacircus at 8:27 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

A rope around the earth wouldn't rise up off the ground no matter how much you added to its length.

I mean that was my first thought too, "how is this rope being levitated?", but you can simply assume that someone goes all around the earth and builds a little pile of dirt under it to lift it up without bringing any tensile forces into play.
posted by sfenders at 8:27 AM on May 21, 2019 [5 favorites]

When I review all my reasons for thinking that raising the minimum wage would be a good thing, they seem watertight. But then, that's what I would have said about all my reasons for thinking that the rope wouldn't come much off the ground.

Seems a bit of a strained analogy. He has arguments for his view on raising the minimum wage; whereas the point of the rope case is that it's a quick-fire, intuitive verdict, based on a picture that seems obvious.

He says the only thing that breaks our faulty hunch about the rope is that there's a proof to dispel it, and "there are no proofs" in politics – supposedly generating the vast skeptical conclusion about all political beliefs. But the proof about the rope just functions similarly to a good political argument. Sure, there's no deductive certainty about politics, but different species of argument are suited to different fields. There's no deductive certainty about the colour of zebra stripes either, but we're confident of that...
posted by Beardman at 8:30 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I think the point is more that it's easy to extrapolate bad results by using the wrong mental model, and it's easy to pick the wrong mental model without training. Like, if you're used to dealing with a lot of geometry or physics, you might quickly recognize that circumference and volume work very differently, and so pouring a gallon of water into the ocean is a bad model for adding a yard of length to the equator rope. But that's a non-obvious point to a lot of folks.

I'm sympathetic to the point of view of people who argue (for example) that third-parties in US politics will never have a chance if nobody votes for them. And what they say isn't wrong exactly. But if they understood the First Past the Post model, they might see that just voting for a third party will never provide the solution they want without systemic change first. But a lot of people in that position have become dogmatic and don't want to look at a different model.

It's not always easy to tell when we've edged into dogma, especially in politics, but in US politics it's gotten easier and easier to see who is making disingenuous arguments and who is changing their priorities when they get in power.
posted by rikschell at 8:58 AM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]

For some reason the video won't play for me, saying, "Sorry Because of its privacy settings, this video cannot be played here." I live in California; my tax dollars *shakey fist*

That happened to me at first too. It's probably Privacy Badger, if you use that -- which you absolutely should! -- just turn it off for a second(or tweak the settings) to watch the video.
posted by The Bellman at 9:02 AM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Disagreement (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
posted by Panthalassa at 9:04 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

It is kind of funny to me that despite the fact that philosophers have been disagreeing with one another since the inception of philosophy, only just recently has it started to be seriously addressed in the epistemological literature.
posted by Panthalassa at 9:05 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

There's no deductive certainty about the colour of zebra stripes either, but we're confident of that

Define "we," "colour," and "confident."

Blonde/Cream zebras are fairly common, and Chapman's Zebras often maintain their juvenile brown stripes into maturity (their underbellies are also frequently spotted rather than striped).
posted by aspersioncast at 10:39 AM on May 21, 2019

Seems a bit of a strained analogy.

The whole thing's a bit strained. We can't really assert that people's mental models of the physical world and/or how they form them have any bearing on their sociopolitical assumptions about the world; if they did, we wouldn't need a term for engineer's disease.
posted by aspersioncast at 11:21 AM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I agree with the premise of the video, which is "we are all probably wrong on some things, but we don't know what they are because we'd feel like we went through the same processes on the things we are wrong about as the things we are right about."

However, I think his argument is based on an entirely unsound premise. The "proof" that adding a yard to a rope around the Earth would make it hoer 1/(2 pi) yards off the ground is based on highly abstracted reasoning that ignores a lot of features of physical reality. It is correct, as far as its assumptions go... but the assumptions are wrong and terrible in a real world scenario. The exact scenario that human intuition is trained on.

Now the thing is, I'm an actual scientist. I have experience with trying to match theory with reality. Ultimately, you have to simplify a ton of stuff out for the theory part to even be a tractable problem, and then all that messy reality comes creeping in once you have to actually do an experiment. Theory is nice, and it helps guide where you should look with your experiments, but ultimately it is experiment that matters.

Now think what would happen if you actually tried to wrap a band around the Earth in real life. Have you ever tries to measure a distance across a floor or a wall with string? Wasn't it hard to be accurate? The string was stretchy! You get different measurements based on how hard you pulled. And how did you tell when it was slack? You let off too much pressure and the string stopped being quite a straight line, but if you pulled harder, you stretched it. Also, the Earth isn't exactly round - nothing is! How would you make sure your rope conformed perfectly to the surface of the Earth? It wouldn't take that many subtle bends here and there to add or subtract a yard. Now honestly, this is still theoretical conjecture, but anyone is welcome to prove things either way by actually wrapping a rope around the Earth, measuring it, cutting it, adding a yard in, and seeing what happens.

I mean, wall of text there, but I guarantee you, any practical attempt to make a band around the Earth would have a yard variation in circumference being a really small problem in the grand scheme of things of how it actually would work out. Human intuition has probably got a better handle on the problem the Wittgenstein and people who know some basic geometry.

Whereas my views on the minimum wage are based on actual evidence, and not just a thought experiment. I have read papers which studied actual economic data to judge the effect of minimum wage and employment rates. In college, i even downloaded employment rates and historical minimum wage data for every single state in the US, and tried to see if there was any correlation. If raising the minimum wage increased unemployment in as obvious a way as its opponents say it does, I would know. From that evidence, I form my position that minimum wages should be increased until there is clear evidence that is having a detrimental effect on employment and the economy. This is an evidence based position.

I consider that a much more solid belief than any speculation about what would happen if you tied a rope around the Earth, cut it, sewed some rope in, then straightened it by somehow magically making it hover. There is no evidence here besides the fact that no one has done it yet. Any position there is a theory based position.

Now examining the belief that evidence based arguments are more likely to be right than theory based arguments, that might be an interesting philosophical question.
posted by Zalzidrax at 12:13 PM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]

Whenever I see a video like this, I examine pretty carefully the "real world" argument they bring in to "make us all think". You rarely see right wing talking points as the premise which needs to be carefully examined, but you do see a lot of left-wing talking points given as something which we need to be double-super-sure we aren't supporting because our brains are just too darn dumb, you know?
posted by maxwelton at 12:29 PM on May 21, 2019 [6 favorites]

In order to levitate, the rope would have to spin around the Earth at orbital velocity. Good thing it would catch fire and burn up immediately or it would play hell with the weather.
posted by whuppy at 1:09 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Extra credit: Assuming a fireproof rope, could you fling yourself into orbit by grabbing hold? How about if you're on a treadmill?
posted by whuppy at 1:12 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

The "proof" that adding a yard to a rope around the Earth would make it hoer 1/(2 pi) yards off the ground is based on highly abstracted reasoning that ignores a lot of features of physical reality.

This kind of misses the point - this was an argument in philosophy, not in engineering, and its physical plausibility doesn't really have any relevance.
posted by thelonius at 1:17 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

The rope puzzle is just one empirical example. The Wason card inference test is another famous one, as is the baseball bat test, a bat costs 1.00 more than the ball, what's the total price?

These are very simple word problems that have mathematically correct answers (i.e. they aren't lateral thinking trick questions) that people tend to trip up on.

What's funny is then people want closure on the metacognitive implications--people want to know for sure if these results generalize, or not. But that just shows the grown-up approach is to admit we don't really know for sure either way, but people don't want that because uncertainty is uncomfortable.
posted by polymodus at 3:10 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

This kind of misses the point - this was an argument in philosophy, not in engineering, and its physical plausibility doesn't really have any relevance.

No, that's not how the question is posed. It's posed as "Imagine what would happen," not "Imagine the answer to this geometry problem."

And it's very funny and revealing that Wittgenstein and the author of this video, admonishing us of the dangers of choosing the wrong mental model, assume as true that the right model to represent this problem is to assume the Earth is a perfect sphere and that ropes are inelastic and unaffected by gravity.

And I think it's no accident that this same guy is asking us to doubt our intuitions that raising the minimum wage is a good idea. Because typically conservatives will say, "You might think raising the minimum wage would help people but mathematically (that is to say, theoretically, assuming an ideal abstract system) you can demonstrate that raising the minimum wage inevitably means fewer jobs."

But as Zalzidrax points out, if you actually collect data in the real world it is not clear at all that their abstract mathematical model correctly predicts the actual consequences of raising the minimum wage. No more than it's clear that basic geometric abstractions are actually the best way to predict what would actually happen if you added a yard to a rope circling the Earth.
posted by straight at 3:13 PM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

ropes have a lot of give to them

It's speherical cows all the way down.
posted by RolandOfEld at 3:24 PM on May 21, 2019

Most of the objections along the lines of "But the earth DOES have gravity and mountains and stuff! We can't just pretend it doesn't!" strike me as probable attempts to rationalize away the fact that your intuition failed you on this problem. I mean maybe not, but you've got to admit it's tempting to try; I did, briefly, with my "first thought" as described above. You can do a thought experiment in which we try to put Wittgenstein's Rope to the test by trying it out for real, carving a smooth surface around the planet, bridging the oceans, tunneling through the mountains, and conclude that it wouldn't be possible to be so precise, but that proves very little. If your intuition misled you on this question because like me you foolishly forgot to apply a basic principle of geometry that you did know about, it would very likely have done the same if the question was about putting the rope around something of more practicable size like a blimp or an oval race track.
posted by sfenders at 4:21 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

if you actually collect data in the real world it is not clear at all that their abstract mathematical model correctly predicts the actual consequences of raising the minimum wage.

The usual minimum wage fallacy isn't too different, though it goes in the opposite direction. People are aware that raising the minimum wage does generally mean fewer jobs, but misunderstanding or not thinking about the complexity of the mathematical models involved makes it all to easy to assume that the magnitude of this effect will not only be measurable above the noise, but large enough to practically matter.
posted by sfenders at 4:31 PM on May 21, 2019

rationalize away the fact that your intuition failed you on this problem

It's also just intuition that tells you approximating the problem with geometry on a perfect sphere is close enough to give you a good answer to the question, and maybe that intuition is wrong.
posted by straight at 4:39 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

a perfect sphere is close enough to give you a good answer to the question

What question? The only question is specifically about what would happen if you had a perfect sphere the size of the earth handy to run experiments on.
posted by sfenders at 4:46 PM on May 21, 2019

The question is specifically: "If you tied a rope tight around the Earth’s equator and then added a single yard of slack, would the extra material make any noticeable difference to someone standing on the ground?" Not "What would happen if you imagined a geometric line around a sphere the size of the earth and then imagined it was a yard longer."
posted by straight at 5:00 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

Well, I didn't see any citation to any place where Wittgenstein supposedly discussed this, so I don't think it's very profitable to argue about the details of what he really said. To that extent I agree with you that there is not a clear question, which is itself a Wittgenstenian sort of criticism. But I am perfectly confident that he was not proposing some empirical inquiry where you "run experiments on" a sphere, perfect or otherwise. Here is a brief quote from Wittgenstein's Lectures, ed. Alice Ambrose, which may give some idea of what he took himself to be doing:

I am going to exclude from our discussion questions which are answered by experience. Philosophical problems are not solved by experience, for what we talk about in philosophy are not facts but things for which facts are useful. Philosophical trouble arises through seeing a system of rules and seeing that things do not fit it.
posted by thelonius at 5:15 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Ah, I see where you get that from. I was going by the animation voice-over, which does promptly specify that the rope makes a perfect circle. It doesn't think to mention that the rope is perfectly inelastic and not affected by gravity; that is left to our imagination. I don't know how exactly Wittgenstein put it, but I suspect his target audience would be ready to accept the clear intent of the abstract version of the question he was doubtless asking.
posted by sfenders at 5:15 PM on May 21, 2019

A rope around the earth wouldn't rise up off the ground no matter how much you added to its length.

1) They use turtles all the way around.

2) Certitude: Wrong at the top of your lungs. (Ambrose Bierce)
posted by mule98J at 5:32 PM on May 21, 2019

Honestly, I probably first encountered the rope around the Earth question in high school or early college, decades ago. I honestly do not remember my reaction to it. I'm sure I felt like quite the clever person, though, knowing a question that most people would get wrong.

However, I have had a lot of experience in the intervening years applying abstract math to the real world. I've had to train my intuition to deal with stuff like quantum physics and plasmas and stuff where your gut instinct from the human scale stuff you encounter every day is just plain wrong. Like, I get the point the author is trying to make.

But that's why I think it's even more important to be very clear about how well you know something and why. It is very, very important to know what your assumptions are and state them. And it's important to communicate clearly.

Human intuition works quite well with rope! It's just that what is described in this problem doesn't act like a rope or behave how any physically realizable object people have encountered behaves. So calling it "rope" is being rather deceptive. And it's so abstract a problem that you can't really provide a physical demonstration at all, so there's no way to test it.

There's a better, more classic example out there - the constant acceleration of gravity. Intuition tells you that a really light thing, like a feather's going to fall slower than a heavy thing like a hammer. But go somewhere where there isn't any air to slow it down, well... that intuition is wrong. And you can test it!

I know it feels like I'm nitpicking here, but I think it's really important to be able to verify your intuition or what you know, otherwise how are you going to know when you are wrong?

And it's also important to understand the difference between ideas and mental models, like the concept of a perfect circle, and reality, which is... a lot messier, and does a lot of things you don't want it to.
posted by Zalzidrax at 5:50 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

But it is effectively testable. We make rope that runs around the Earth, or Moon, and suspend it while checking that the tension everywhere is the same value before and after. If you add this fairness criterion to formulate an empirical version of the question, people will still intuit the wrong answer.
posted by polymodus at 6:17 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

There is a good exercise in developing intuition for these kinds of problems in Mindstorms, by Seymour Papert, pages 135-155.

(I realize that the point of the article is to recognize the limits of your own intuition, but it's also useful to expand those limits.)
posted by Phssthpok at 6:52 PM on May 21, 2019

Human intuition works quite well with rope! It's just that what is described in this problem doesn't act like a rope or behave how any physically realizable object people have encountered behaves. So calling it "rope" is being rather deceptive.

In fact this deception is crucial to the mental slight-of-hand that makes this puzzle trip people up.

Just ask people the question as raw geometry:

If you added one meter to the circumference of a very large circle, how much would the radius increase?

and even people who've never heard of C=2πr will probably guess something within the right order of magnitude.

But the way the question works you first prime people to imagine a scenario with ropes and planets. Then you backtrack and sort of half-admit that you're really just asking a question about geometric abstractions, without actually explicitly saying so.

But they're still thinking about this enormous rope around the world. Then you propose adding an insignificant length to it -- just one meter.

But then you ask, does that significantly increase the separation between the rope and the Earth (you're still calling it the Earth, of course). But this time by significant you mean "measurable at human scale" not significant compared with the full length of the rope.

In fact the change in the rope's radius is exactly as significant or insignificant (however you want to look at it) as the meter you add to its length. But the trick of the problem is to get people to equate the "insignificant" added meter with an "insignificant" immeasurable-at-human-scale increase in radius rather than to the surprisingly "significant" (but perfectly proportional) 16 cm distance off the ground.

And so it's really cheating to then leap out and say, "Aha! You had a faulty intuitive model based on ropes and planets and human-scale vs. planet-scale when you should have used an intuitive model based on the abstract geometry I was really asking you about! Gotcha! Probably better reconsider that minimum wage hike, don't you think?"
posted by straight at 8:19 PM on May 21, 2019 [4 favorites]

I'm not a fan of Wittgenstein or honestly even most stuff in Aeon, so I didn't expect to like this. But I did.

FWIW my intuition was totally wrong. I did picture a bunch of people lined up at the equator next to a rope, and from there of course I pictured one person getting a meter of slack when you lengthened the rope. Then obviously a million people lifting the rope simultaneously would have a millionth the slack . . . only that wasn't right. So the problem with my intuition wasn't like "this isn't acting like a rope."

I did pause the video and work out the math before they gave me the answer and it was a nice aha moment. Math is great! So simple and cut through my mistaken reasoning like that. OTOH if it wasn't clear this was a trick question I don't think I'd have slowed down and worked through the math. And if I didn't know the math to disprove my initial take I'd have been really confident that I'd "proven" the height change was micrometers with my first take.

But: IMHO everyone who is arguing 'well, this wasn't framed properly, of course people would get it if it were framed to make us think about it in terms of abstract mathematics' is missing the point. Real world problems don't get framed in ways to help us reach the wrong conclusion, and there's not an elementary school equation we can use to check our work if we take a wrong step.
posted by mark k at 10:25 PM on May 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

I feel like as a theoretical physicist I have to step in and defend this problem; the failure in intuition isn’t in whether or not it’s a real physical rope around the real earth.

Rather, it is in the distinction between absolute difference and relative difference. The question is actually asking about absolute difference (what is the difference, in meters, between the two radii), whereas the intuition of “it doesn’t change much” applies properly to relative difference; compared to the size of the earth, six inches is indeed “not much change”.

Additionally I really think the intuition failure here has nothing to do with practical experimental questions , except that the phrasing in terms of the size of earth makes us think of relative differences. Intuition fails us often within theoretical models too; it isn’t just needing a better model, it’s picking the right model for a given situation, and also understanding what the implications of the model actually are (and how far they can be trusted).

And everyone makes these errors, just on different subjects in different ways; I don’t make the error in this video because I have been studying physics for more than half my life now. But I make others— ask me about the two hours I spent trying to prove a certain quantity was positive today. (I had some intuition that said it should be— but oops, I found a counterexample).

So, we should be wary of our errors, and make sure the intuition we are using is actually applicable to the question at hand; when we can’t be sure, or when people’s lives are at stake, then we’d better test it out carefully.

But with political questions we do test them; just many people make their political choices not based on data but in how they feel something is going to work, and frankly his reasons for supporting a minimum wage are crap unless there’s data to back them up. Does it work at its stated goal? Ok, good then.
posted by nat at 10:34 PM on May 21, 2019 [3 favorites]

SMBC Comics put it a little more bluntly: THIS IS THE WORST THING ABOUT BEING HUMAN
posted by BiggerJ at 11:04 PM on May 21, 2019 [2 favorites]

My intuition was completely wrong, so that was a bother, specially when I realized there is an everyday practice that tests this: when you are wrapping parcels or gifts with string. When I remembered that, I could literally feel how adding an extra length of string works in my hands, and I was even more bothered. I do think the whole imagining the rope and the globe distracts, even as one tries to not mentally engage with it.
posted by mumimor at 11:45 PM on May 21, 2019

imagine a square rope wrapped around a cubical earth. It's not hard to see that adding a yard to that rope means adding a quarter yard to each side, which means the rope is an eighth of a yard (4.5 inches) off the ground.

Thank you for that - intuition works here where it doesn't with the geometric equation.

As for the 'politics has no proofs', that's why we have history. It's not part of a mathematical framework, and it's not falsifiable in the scientific way, but it's good evidence. When people take power with promises, and every time that particular set of promises is given power they fail to produce the wished-for results, then that politics is a failing politics. So some might intuit that trickle-down economics is correct while others intuit the opposite - but it's been tried a few times and the results do not match the promise.

Who writes hte histories? Who collects the data? Who publishes the analyses? These become the touchstones of the quality of politics, because political intuition is vulnerable to evidence.

"I'd rather be happy than right" didn't work for Slartibartfast...
posted by Devonian at 9:08 AM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

Related: "Thinking, fast and slow" by Daniel Kahneman is (among other things) a state-of-the-art but practical guide to how to better understand when to trust your brain how much and how to get the best out of it, filled with lots of fun examples that just while reading the text demonstrate different ways our brain isn't working the way we assume it does.

Our cognitive processes are weaponized against us by experts, so it pays to know what they know...
posted by anonymisc at 11:37 AM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

I wanted to get on board with this but I think it draws entirely the wrong conclusion. Your intuition about maths and geometry is probably bad but I don't know that you can correlate that with political positions, etc.

For example, there's a great talk by the mathematician Matt Parker about drawing "ley lines" between monolithic sites that shows brilliantly why it sounds unlikely to be an accident, but is entirely false, and depends on cherry-picking data.

Politics isn't maths. Political positions aren't always rational. A better conclusion would be that you should be aware of common misconceptions and fallacies within the realm of maths, statistics, probabilities and so on.
posted by Acey at 1:08 PM on May 22, 2019 [1 favorite]

On the positive side, this means that when I had to move from pants with a 33 inch waist to pants with a 34 inch waist, I had only added a ring of blubber 0.16 inches thick. That's not so bad!
posted by TheShadowKnows at 3:46 PM on May 22, 2019 [4 favorites]

A rope around the earth wouldn't rise up off the ground no matter how much you added to its length.
No, see, the part they forgot to tell you is that the rope is also SPINNING very fast, so that centrifugal force keeps it taut :)
posted by crazy_yeti at 11:40 AM on May 23, 2019

America Is Facing an Intellectual Humility Crisis
posted by homunculus at 12:55 PM on June 9, 2019 [1 favorite]