id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
work_y4mi6sxfknbutp2kngfjx3zaxy	James Alexander	Loxodromes: A Rhumb Way to Go	2004	8	.pdf	application/pdf	3711	429	75	A rhumb is a course on the Earth of constant bearing. Figure 2 A detail of Mercator's 1569 map, showing a portion of South America, including latitude lines for 20 through 60 degrees South. the 1500s, Mercator figured how to space the latitudes so that a loxodrome appears as a a spherical Earth, the parallel of latitude L (in degrees north or south of the equator) is shrunk by the factor cos L compared to the equator. latitude L , distances on the Earth are stretched by the reciprocal sec L on the Mercator Thus, if λ denotes longitude, the east-west coordinate, a straight line on a Mercator map has the form rhumb line between two points of longitudes λ1 and λ2 and latitudes L 1 and L 2 has Figure 4 A modern Mercator map, vertically centered at the equator, with 10◦ latitude TABLE 1: Great circle and rhumb distances between New York	./cache/work_y4mi6sxfknbutp2kngfjx3zaxy.pdf	./txt/work_y4mi6sxfknbutp2kngfjx3zaxy.txt