[nitpick] You mean the Sears Tower. There is no such thing as the “Willis” Tower. Never has been, never will be. [/nitpick]
Sorry for being late to the party, but that’s just an illusion. It’s been known for centuries and definitely proven to be an illusion using photography today. Interestingly, there is no consensus on what causes it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_illusion
Maybe the Flat Earthers can finally solve it for us.
The actual line is “the four wings of the land”, with “wings” being a Hebrew euphemism for the edges or corners of a garment.
It is certainly a convincing illusion!
Now, there is the cute bit where the sun’s angular rate of movement through the sky slows down, right at sunrise and sunset. The atmosphere refracts the image. When you see the sun exactly bisected by the horizon…in “actuality” the sun has already fully set. You’re looking “around the corner” just a bit.
A flat-earther might say that this explains ships sinking behind the horizon…but the fact it that this is exactly opposite of an explanation! Ships don’t sink behind the horizon quite as fast as they would if you were seeing them in a vacuum.
The “apparent distance hypothesis” is the only explanation of the Moon illusion that makes sense to me. Explanations that depend on the perception of other objects in the field of vision (trees, buildings, clouds, etc) can’t explain why the moon illusion still appears when the moon sets over the cloudless ocean, where there’s nothing else in sight.
Me, too.
Once you go irrational on something like the shape of the Earth, people just double down.
E.g., one of the leading (Biblical) Flat Earther’s out there uses the usual round disc model with unusual optics.
The disc, of course, does not have four corners/edges. And the optics would mess with Satan showing Jesus all the nations from the high mountain. And on and on.
Well, we cannot know for sure that it does not have four corners. The edge is the Antarctic Ice Wall that holds in the oceans. No one knows what is beyond the Ice Wall. It could have corners, out there in the misty uncertainty.
Although rumor has that it probably looks something like this.
If you have a couple of hours to spare for entertainment, try this Flat Earth “documentary”:
Mad Mike Hughes finally took off in his rocket to, um, something something.
(The flight was less than 2000’ over the Mojave Desert, and it looks like the rocket had no windows, so I guess he was trying to prove – no, I have no guesses. It was just a publicity stunt.)
Based on posts in this (and other) threads, it’s clear that a good number of dopers believe many Flat Earthers are biblical literalists.
But I met a FEer (quite some loong time ago) who scoffed at this, and held it up as proof of how deluded FE deniers are. He claimed it derived from easily observed “evidence”, to which the Bible has almost nothing to contribute.
So I ask whether it’s true that there’s substantial overlap between biblical literalists and FEers, or not?
This was just pointed out to me (dated last August),
*Australia is not real. It’s a hoax, made for us to believe that Britain moved over their criminals to someplace. In reality, all these criminals were loaded off the ships into the waters, drowning before they could see land ever again. It’s a coverup for one of the greatest mass murders in history, made by one of the most prominent empires.
Australia does not exist. All things you call “proof” are actually well fabricated lies and documents made by the leading governments of the world. Your Australian friends? They’re all actors and computer generated personas, part of the plot to trick the world.
If you think you’ve ever been to Australia, you’re terribly wrong. The plane pilots are all in on this, and have in all actuality only flown you to islands close nearby – or in some cases, parts of South America, where they have cleared space and hired actors to act out as real Australians.
Australia is one of the biggest hoaxes ever created, and you have all been tricked. Join the movement today, and make it known that they have been deceived. Make it known, that this has all just been a cover-up. The things these “Australian” says to be doing, all these swear words and actions based on alcoholism, MDMA and bad decisions, are all ways to distract you from the ugly truth that is one of the greatest genocides in history. 162,000 people was said to have been transported to this imaginary land during a mere 80 years, and they are all long dead by now. They never reached that promised land.
Tell the truth. Stand up for what is right. Make sure to spread the world – Australia is not real. It’s a codeword for the cold blooded murder of more than a hundred thousand people, and it is not okay. We will not, accept this.
Stand up for the ones who died. Let it be known, that Australia does not exist.*
There are some on this board who claim to be antipodeans: what are you guys playing at?
I think most of them are just trolling.
The real question here is why you bother arguing with such time-waters, serious or otherwise.
I think it was Bill Murray who said “It’s hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it’s damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.”
Some people are just suckers for secrets. They cling desperately to those precious idiocies, and find stupid defenses for them. Such people are lost: they cannot be cured.
She said she made the whole thing up as a joke.
He’s just too frivolous. Doesn’t comprehend the gravity of the situation. 
Seriously though, they are nothing but liars or mentally incompetent. There’s nothing to argue.
I really wish places that weren’t the Onion stop writing these fake onion pieces.
Well I haven’t met many flat-earthers, but from what I’ve seen online most of them are not YECs (and I’m just talking the ones that seem sincere in their beliefs, not the obvious trolls).
I think it’s simply this: the earth looks flat, and static.
Intuitively, it looks flat, and it’s kinda weird imagining being on a spinning, moving sphere. Let alone that it’s arbitrary whether you consider your location now to be at the “top” or “bottom” of the sphere.
So it cuts to the heart of how we know things and why and when we should trust authority.
I really think instead of talking about spirit levels and ships on the horizon, the only way to get to flat-eathers is to explain doubt, and skepticism and the scientific method. Why we have confidence in some models, and reject others, and the fact that reality is often counter-intuitive.
Having said that, if I actually met a flat-earther I wouldn’t be able to resist some basic questions like “Is the earth itself falling?” “Does the earth lose any material (e.g. water) from things falling off the edge (or clouds drifting beyond the edge)?”