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Making Minecraft Spherical

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899 points iamwil | 2 comments | 28 Aug 25 18:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.455s | source
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harvie ◴[02 Sep 25 10:05 UTC] No.45101020[source]▶
I was recently thinking about this... We've been building houses and other structures using plum lines and water levels all the time before afordable optics came in play. This kinda means most of our buildings are actualy polar rather than cartesian. Surely enough given the size of earth the error is quite tiny. But it's funny thinking about how the room i am sitting in right now is shaped like frustum with spherical floor and ceiling, rather than block. Despite what architecture drawing says...
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1. brokensegue ◴[02 Sep 25 11:10 UTC] No.45101464[source]▶
i imagine imperfections in construction dominate this effect
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2. jameshart ◴[02 Sep 25 12:40 UTC] No.45102342[source]▶
If you have two buildings 4km apart (about the length of Central Park), that’s about 1/10,000 of an earth circumference so 0.036° change in ‘up’. If the buildings are 300m tall, 300*sin(0.036°) = 0.188m

That’s less than those buildings are probably expected to sway in a strong wind, but probably outside the tolerances for modern construction so theoretically measurable as an average deviation.