On the topic of the floating point mechanics, I'll readily defer to you. I'll be honest: I was grasping for an explanation of why the result was simply a solit

On the topic of the floating point mechanics, I'll readily defer to you. I'll be honest: I was grasping for an explanation of why the result was simply a solitary "1", and there's likely a much smarter explanation (like "After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn." - false, but useful typically). As for the counterargument: I don't think that works. And that's taking into account the harrowing liberties I'm willing to assume for the sake of a physics argument. In the inertial reference frame of the Earth, the Earth is rotating - as in, there's rotational inertia in that frame. This has measureable effects on stuff, from time dilation from velocity (very small) to time dilation from gravity warping spacetime (noticeably larger, but still small). Put another way, here's a thought experiment. The mantel of the planet is molten rock, and can be treated as a viscous fluid. If the planet were spinning, the fluid would bulge out at the latitudes where the planet is spinning fastest (centrifugal force stuff). Otherwise the planet would be a sphere. This is directly measurable, and - in fact - the planet's a sphere. Mostly. It bulges out a bit at the equator [0]. So if you're careful, you'll note it's never fair to say you're in a non-rotating inertial frame on earth. But in practice it almost never matters. Unless you're doing something crazy like measuring femtillionths of a second with one of the most sensitive devices we can build - then we start being a bit wrong. Or you're just trying to be accurate with your GPS satellites (which are way higher and faster than a mountain top). I rant a bit about this, as this sort of counterargument comes up a lot. I think it's due to the completely unreasonable mismatch of scales people are used to. Feynman ranted a bit on it about QM, and we're running into it here with relativity [1]. Here we're trying to talk about something reasonably, and the levels of precision are completely unreasonable: we're talking about a couple mile's difference over the span of thousands of miles to have an effect on the order of a few (bi|tri)llionths of a second; how do you keep such a scale in mind? It's like the silly analogies of hitting a baseball in NYC and nailing a bumble bee in San Fransico for precision. By the same token, we're hurtling through space, whipping around the sun and being wobbled so hard by the moon the ocean sloshes over our beachfronts. And that seems perfectly normal, even though it directly implies enormous forces at work. /rant (and sorry for that - I find this sort of thing facinating) TL;DR: I think that counterargument is simply wrong. But completely understandably so. [0] http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11818.html http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11818.html [1] http://bouman.chem.georgetown.edu/general/feynman.html http://bouman.chem.georgetown.edu/general/feynman.html