Re: distance from Easter Island to Chile

[Emanuel Berg]

I thought the grossness of the first formula was due to
the Earth not being completely sphere. Instead, it
seems to be due to lack of computing precision. The
implication of that should be that the Earth is
probably more a sphere than a ping-pong ball straight
out of a Chinese factory... scary!

If this theory is correct, it could be interesting to
see if execution on a 64-bit machine would produce a
different result.

On Debian (at least), you can check your hardware with
'lscpu', and the OS (the Linux kernel) with

getconf LONG_BIT

If you have a 32-bit kernel, I say you are safely in
the the "32-bit camp", even though you have 64-bit
capable hardware (but sometimes 32-bit OSs can run
64-bit software in 64-bit mode). I have heard there are
even 128-bit machines among common people these
days... But my school's system (Solaris/SunOS) is
32-bit as well and it produces the same result as on my
32-bit desktop Debian.

-- 
underground experts united:
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573