Hacker News Reader

Comment by wenyuanyu | Hacker News Reader

No, they are not flying non-stop from Himalaya as you assume. I did a rough calculation using [0][1]. Not including the land part, just the sea route, it is 5396 nm [0], roughly 9993 km and that is indeed halfway the globe.

By the way, from Antwerp, Belgium to Boston, MA is 3607 nm, roughly 6680 km, much shorter actually.

- [0] http://ports.com/sea-route/#/?a=4063&b=4693&c=Port%20of%20Ko... - [1] http://ports.com/sea-route/#/?a=3042&b=682&c=Port%20of%20Ant...

View on HN

That is roughly a quarter the way around the globe

Not a native speaker, but this got me thinking: how would you interpret "halfway" in this sentence:

>It’s not halfway across the globe

Equator is 40k km long, so it makes sense getting "halfway" there would be 20k km. But the "half" is of something, and it doesn't sound right that "at the end of the globe" would be the same place you started with. Especially since being "on the other end of the world" means roughly, well, opposite side of the globe.

So I think OP is justified in defining "across the globe" as the "opposite side of the world", and then "halfway across the globe" is "quarter the length of equator away". But maybe I'm overthinking it.

This is a very fair point! Another way they could be given credit is that the radius of the earth (another way to view "halfway across the globe") is 6371km so again the quoted distance would be more than this half.

Thanks for explaining! Yeah.. I was thinking of the maximum direct surface distance when saying "across the globe"... That would be 20k km... and the sea route turns to be about 10K km long from Kolkata to Osaka...

As a native speaker: I think “across” (while understandable from context) is the wrong preposition because to me that would imply a diametric traversal, not circumspect, eg, halfway across would land you in the core of the earth. Half way around is what I would say to describe superficial travel of half the earth’s circumference, landing at the opposite side of the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com