| From: Marisa Price <marisa@value.net>
| On Tue, 11 Jun 1996, Neill Walker wrote:
| 
| > Kenneth DeSoto wrote:
| > 
| > | I hate to correct you, but you can walk from the North pole to
Alaska,
| > while
| > | it's still frozen!  It thaws for only a short period of time, then
it
| > | freezes again.  BTW, it's southwest.....
| > 
| > Sorry, Kenneth, it's south.  If you're standing on the North Pole,
the
| > only direction you can walk is south.  There is no east or west at
the
| > North Pole.
| > 
| > 
| WHAT!! Just because you are at the northernmost point of the earth
does 
| not mean that the cardinal directions disappear. I mean, I see you
pont 
| that no matter which direction you walked on the EARTH that you would
be 
| going south, but east and west still exist. I mean, say you looked out
at 
| the sun--- it would still set to the west. 
| 
| right?
| 
| or is all I learned in trig, geometry, and physics wrong ?

East and West still exist on the rest of the globe, but from your point
of view, everything else is south.  And yes, the sun would appear to be
setting in the south, too, because no matter what direction you face,
you're facing south.  If you take a compass to the (magnetic) north
pole, it will just spin like crazy because east and west really don't
exist at that point.  There is only south, which is all around you
(directly under you, of course).  That's why there are so many plane
crashes in the north... Flying too close to the magnetic pole screws up
navigational instruments, so pilots often become disoriented and fly in
the wrong direction, and eventually run out of fuel.

Try putting your finger on the top of a globe, basketball, whatever kind
of sphere you have.  Call that point the North Pole.  Move your finger
west or east without moving south.  It's impossible.

I've learned that we have trouble believing this because we learn on
flat maps.  This distorts everything and makes it look like the
directions are a perfect grid, when in fact they're all curvy and weird.
:)

I'm not disproving any math theories; if your teacher told you
otherwise, I'll have to send some goons to give him the "gas pedal."

And if you go up to Alaska or the NWT in the summer, you'll find that
for about a week the sun doesn't set.  It just kind of spins around in
the sky.  They say that it can make people go crazy...  ^_^  In
Edmonton, it doesn't really get completely dark in the middle of
summer.
And in the winter, up north, the sun doesn't rise for a week or so. 
Here in Edmonton, the sun starts setting about 3:30.

Just when the world was starting to make sense...