But the Earth is much bigger and spins much faster than a record. This is why people from the tropics are so much younger than Eskimos. 
And if you spin a long skinny thing like a propeller so fast that the far end starts going through the sound barrier, bad ju ju starts to happen. Much excitement soon ensues. 
Wait, what? Tides aren’t caused by angular velocity differential.
Coriolis force is, though.
Get together a bunch of drag queens (optional). Now have them do a kick line, with the guy on the left end as the “hub.” Have the others circulate around him like a pinwheel, with the guy on the right as the whip. All “Lefty” has to do is make tiny steps while standing still. “Righty” has to haul ass.
Didn’t we have some nutter here once who argued that the two hemispheres of the earth rotate in opposite directions?
If we didn’t we should get one, because he sounds like a hoot.
Yes they are. If all parts of the fluid oceans rotated at all times with exactly the same angular velocity with the continents as an unvarying constant, there would be no tides.
Not what NOAA have to say, nor HowStuffWorks, nor Wikipedia, each of which attribute tides to the gravitational effects of the moon and the sun.
The hemispheres do rotate in opposite directions. You can see for yourself. Stand on the South pole you’ll see that it rotates clockwise. Stand on the North pole and you’ll see that it rotates counterclockwise. Logically you have to derive that at the Equator it doesn’t rotate at all. The really hard part is figuring out the rotation at the East and West poles.
“Clockwise from the north” and “counterclockwise from the south” are the same direction.
And tides are caused by the gravitational influence of other bodies, mostly the Sun and Moon. They, in turn, like all motions on the surface, result in slightly different angular velocities at different points.
Great username/post/thread combo!
Whoosh.
Note that I did not say that the angular velocity causes tides. I said the tides, when observed, reflect a differential in angular velocity. Angular velocity is an observed metric of a phenomenon, not a cause of the phenomenon that is observed.
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Wait, what? Tides aren’t caused by angular velocity differential.
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I’m struggling both to understand what you’ve most recently said, and how it squares with the two previous quotes, where you seem to have said that the difference in angular velocity causes tides.
Nope. This is not what causes plate tectonics (“Continental drift” is a very outdated term for the concept)
Strange eons, mate. On the great plains of Tindalos, in the folds of time, are triangular spheres and straight curves, all points of which rotate at the same relative speed. Iah ! Iah !
Yeah, im pretty sure this guy thought crossing the equator was like jumping off a train onto one going the other way.
I could have gone that way, but it seemed too ridiculous. Anyone convinced of that explanation is even nuttier than I am or just joking.
I think the OP may have seen an inaccurate description that did say rotation at different rates and came here for an explanation.
As Cronos pointed out, rotation direction is relative to the observer. Consider counter rotating objects on the same axis, they only seem to counter rotate based on a fixed position apart from the object. With either of the objects as the only reference the other one only seems to be rotating at a different rate, not a different direction. Or I suppose you could assume any object rotating at a different rate is counter rotating in that circumstance.