• admiralrohan an hour ago

Same is true for humans too. About their personality. Constantly changing and you will never meet the same person twice in that sense.

• finghin 9 minutes ago

Dubious given Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem;)

• pella an hour ago

Every geography has a timestamp.

• roywiggins an hour ago

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

• soco an hour ago

I get the latitude, longitude, and they added time. But what was the fourth dimension? Or third rather, because the post assumption is that time was the fourth added.

• incognito124 29 minutes ago

The lat and lon are actually 3d since we live, up to a first approximation, on the surface of a sphere. The correct way to think about it is xyz in a reference frame anchored in the center of the Earth

• finghin 6 minutes ago

If you accepted that nothing exists at the north pole, that’s enough to obtain meaningful 2d coordinates for a location:)

Not workable in practice, though!

• deweller an hour ago

Altitude is the third dimension, but I presume you knew that.

"Geography is three dimensional" doesn't correctly communicate the time dimension.

• marginalia_nu 2 minutes ago

You can model geography as a 2D heightmap to a pretty good approximation.

• ySteeK 15 minutes ago

Even with altitude, you still need time. The Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun around the galactic center, all at hundreds of km/s. Without a timestamp, lat/long/alt just tells you where something was, not where it is. Time was never optional.

• soco an hour ago

Hmm I thought that, but we don't really live in a 3D world (or use the altitude parameter in a very meaningful way in life) so I wondered whether there's something else I was missing.

• notachatbot123 23 minutes ago

I wonder what makes you belittle the altitude dimension? Buildings have storys, humans can sit and stand, birds can fly, your eyes can move up and down your monitor.

• zimpenfish 4 minutes ago

Also the altitude of a given lat/long can change due to geological processes, climate processes, war, etc.