in reply to Earth as a sphere

May I ask what you want to use this for? I think that'll play a big role in determining the "best" representation for your purposes. Based on your point 9, you might want to look into Geographic information systems. For example, QGIS is an open-source GIS software, I played around with it a while back. It has fairly tight bindings with Python, but I think it should be possible to bind Perl into it as well. There are probably modules in the Geo:: namespace that could help.

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Re^2: Earth as a sphere
by betmatt (Scribe) on May 09, 2019 at 17:59 UTC
    It is not going to be ordinary GIS work. I plan to do some thought experiments with imaginary forms. I will need access to code that creates the spheres. This is not ordinary GIS. By creating theoretical scenarios this will open the way to new statistical methods.
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