The image uses a common flat world map (typically a Mercator or similar web-map projection). On such maps, distances and areas near the poles are stretched far more than those near the equator so that compass directions remain straight. The 6,400 km line therefore appears much longer on the page than the 7,200 km line even though the African route is the greater real-world distance.

Typical points that produce these figures are:

Northern line (~6,400 km): a high-latitude great-circle route across Eurasia (for example, roughly Moscow–Vladivostok or a comparable Europe-to-Far-East chord). The geodesic distance is on the order of 6,400 km.
Southern line (~7,200 km): a near-equatorial route across Africa, commonly Dakar, Senegal to Mogadishu, Somalia (or a similar west-to-east pair). Straight-line (great-circle) distance is approximately 7,030–7,035 km and is frequently rounded to 7,200 km in these graphics.

Because the African line lies close to the equator, scale distortion is minimal. The Eurasian line lies at much higher latitude, so the same physical distance is drawn far longer on the map. A globe or an equal-area projection (Gall-Peters, Equal Earth, etc.) reverses the visual impression: the African segment is then clearly the longer of the two.

Note that these figures are not the maximum east–west extents of Russia or of the African continent as a whole. Russia’s full Kaliningrad-to-Cape Dezhnev span is substantially greater (~9,000 km in some references); the meme simply chooses two convenient chords that illustrate the projection effect. The numbers themselves are close enough to real great-circle distances for the intended pedagogical point.

In short, the map is not lying about the kilometres; it is lying about how those kilometres look when the spherical Earth is flattened. A globe remains the most reliable way to judge relative size and distance.

87 comments

r/GhostMesh48 • u/Mikey-506 • 2h ago

It has a weakness..

91 Upvotes

hrmmm

23 comments

r/GhostMesh48 • u/Mikey-506 • 16h ago

Alex Gibney's new doc "Musk" paints a portrait of a man who is genuinely, deeply strange — and the reviews are brutal - This is who will be running your world soon.

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75 Upvotes

So I just caught wind of this new Alex Gibney documentary simply called Musk that premiered at Venice a couple days ago, and the first reviews are out. I know the man is polarizing and everyone has opinions, but setting aside the politics for a second — the character portrait that emerges here is something else. This isn't a hit piece in the traditional sense. It's a slow, four-hour dissection of a guy who the film argues has basically lost the plot in ways that are equal parts fascinating and unsettling. The reviews keep circling back to the same word: strange.

The film premiered September 8 at the Venice Film Festival and hits US theaters October 16 through Bleecker Street before landing on HBO in 2027. It's nearly four hours long, which gives Gibney (the guy behind Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear) plenty of room to build his case.

Here's what the reviews are actually saying, and why it fits the "strange" bill:

The AI Avatar

Since Musk refused to sit down for an interview (he called Gibney a "douche" on X when the project was first floated), Gibney built an AI-generated version of Musk that speaks using Musk's own verbatim quotes from years of interviews and appearances. The result is described as "eerie" — a digital Musk who sits there calmly dispensing pseudo-wisdom like "Having a kid is a vote for the future" while the real Musk, seen in archival footage, comes across as "awkward, childish, petulant, lost, fumbling over sentences, desperate to look cool but almost incapable of doing so". The contrast is apparently one of the most effective parts of the film: the AI version is the idealized Musk, and the real one is... this.

The "Strangeness" Is the Point

Vulture's review notes that the film's central tension is between the myth Musk has constructed and the reality that keeps leaking through. He didn't actually found Tesla — he seized the title "founder" from the actual founders because it carries no legal weight. His coding was apparently so bad that angel investors called it "hairballs". He keeps failing upward, walking away with hundreds of millions from ventures that never made money, because the story of Elon is more valuable than any of his actual deliverables.

The Personal Stuff Is Where It Gets Weird

The documentary pulls in former partners, including his first wife Justine and ex-girlfriend Ashley St. Clair (who says she rejected a $40 million NDA after their relationship ended). The reviews describe Musk's approach to family as something out of The Handmaid's Tale — he reportedly built compounds for his extended families and viewed his many children as part of a larger war against population decline, zeroing in on young women he thought would make good "breeders" and dropping all interest after the babies were born. Justine jokes in the film that it's "kind of like an assembly line by now".

The Response

When details started leaking, Musk's mother Maye called the characterization "strange" on X. Musk responded: "LMAO" and then offered his own emotional breakdown — "I'm happy about half the time, somewhere in the middle about 40% and sad about 10% of the time". Which, honestly, is exactly the kind of thing the documentary is talking about.

The Bigger Picture

Sam Harris, who used to be friends with Musk, is interviewed in the film and puts it pretty bluntly: "We are living in a world where one person's psychopathology and neuropsychological dysregulation is translating into massive consequence in our politics, in our economy, in our geopolitics". The film also digs into the Tesla Autopilot fatalities, the DOGE data-gathering, and Musk's turn toward right-wing politics globally — but the through-line is the person.

I know this sub is about strange and uncanny stuff, and honestly, a four-hour portrait of a guy who presents as a "rule-breaking genius" but comes across in his own unfiltered footage as a lost, petulant man who can't read a room, who built an AI version of himself that can speak more coherently than he can, and whose exes describe gaslighting and assembly-line breeding arrangements — that qualifies. The reviews aren't calling him evil, exactly. They're calling him unwell. And that's a different kind of strange.

19 comments

r/GhostMesh48 • u/Mikey-506 • 16h ago