If you take a belt, he asked Viswanatha and his father, and cinch it tight around the earth’s twenty-five-thousand-mile-Iong equator, then let it out just 271″ feet-about two yards-how far off the earth’s surface would it stand? Some tiny fraction of an inch? Nope, one foot.
I can’t parse ’271″ feet’, is this an OCR issue? If you loosen the belt by two yards, it can obviously reach at least a yard above the surface, because you can just go from ____ to __|__. And I recall that the actual answer is considerably more than that.
Given that the symbol ” is the symbol for inches, and ′ is the symbol for feet, I would suspect that there has been a mistyping in the quote.
I think that what was meant to be there was 72“ or 72.1” (inches), which is exactly/one-tenth of an inch over two yards (one yard = three feet). That would produce the desired result of a nearly one-foot increase in the radius of the belt; adding 72 inches to the circumference of the belt would produce an increase of 11.46 inches (72 inches / (2 * pi)) in the radius of the belt, which in this case is the height above the ground.
I can’t parse ’271″ feet’, is this an OCR issue? If you loosen the belt by two yards, it can obviously reach at least a yard above the surface, because you can just go from ____ to __|__. And I recall that the actual answer is considerably more than that.
Given that the symbol ” is the symbol for inches, and ′ is the symbol for feet, I would suspect that there has been a mistyping in the quote.
I think that what was meant to be there was 72“ or 72.1” (inches), which is exactly/one-tenth of an inch over two yards (one yard = three feet). That would produce the desired result of a nearly one-foot increase in the radius of the belt; adding 72 inches to the circumference of the belt would produce an increase of 11.46 inches (72 inches / (2 * pi)) in the radius of the belt, which in this case is the height above the ground.