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Nobody familiar with navigation would say "go east in a straight line" because it's a paradox. That's why they say "maintain an easterly heading", or, for short
by happytoexplain 2y ago
Nobody familiar with navigation would say "go east in a straight line" because it's a paradox. That's why they say "maintain an easterly heading", or, for shorter distances (e.g. car directions), "head straight east", as in "exactly east", and not "east in a perfectly straight line", which would be less relevant for shorter distances.
It's also why the question is (paraphrased) "start facing east and go in a straight line", and not "go east in a straight line".
- davidw 2y agoOf course it's not a perfectly straight line, because the earth is a curved object. Perfectly straight puts you in outer space.
- mynameisvlad 2y agoThe article quite clearly says “in a straight line along the Earth’s surface.” Emphasis mine.
- happytoexplain 2y agoNow that is, in fact, a silly gotcha. It's a third abstraction, irrelevant to the topic of two dimensional navigation. It is abstracted away for both cartesian and global concepts, and nobody is realistically confused by its absence.