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Another Cool GPS Project: Degree Confluence
Omicron writes "Not too long ago, there was an article here on a game called Geocaching. Since that time, I've gotten really involved in the game, and because of that involvement, I found another cool project during a mailing list discussion. It's called The Degree Confluence Project and the goal of the project is to have people visit and photograph almost every integer intersection of latitude and longitude on the face of the planet. I've already found three of them."
hmmm, I wonder what percentage of those 11,650 are dangerous to your health to be at? (e.g. mountain pass in the Andes, back alley in Kuala Lumpur...)
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Because things such as what you mentioned are not nearly as interesting.
You might also ask why people waste^H^H^H^H^H spend time installing linux from source code when they could get a perfectly good distribution from Redhat, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, ect. There's nothing like the satisfaction of knowing that you compiled every single program onto a bare partition and it actually works.
Even though unlike Linux From Scratch, the Degree Confluence project doesn't produce anything useful the point is...um... I'm not sure what the point is, but i'm sure you got it.
360 degrees of longitude, 179 unique degrees of latitude (count 0, and omit 90 N and 90 S).
360 * 179 + 2 (N and S poles) = 64442
Not that many at all. And you can cut that to about 35% or so, given the amount of water thats covering the surface of the earth.
So how about a project to create a clickable
map of the world that would access a photograph
of that place? Then you could sit in front of
a browser and go anywhere in the world by
clicking on the map.
Where's the problem?
I hereby volunteer for all 720 points at 89N and 89S! (Woohoo, look at my stats go up! :-)
To be fair, I also volunteered for most of those points in the blue parts of the planet near the Equator, where longitude points are a long way apart. (What, you wanna prove I wasn't there? Fine! Go there and look for yourself! Bet your pictures look just like mine!)
Sure, but read up on it. It's not as difficult as it would be with say, a sextant, but it's still pretty tough in many cases.
For example, in Manhattan NY NY, find the sidewalk AROUND the building that houses those coordinates. Figure out a way to get access to the rooftop garden for the prize. Oh, but the GPS unit you have has an EPE (estimated positional error) of about fifty feet. Damn, was in that mailbox on the streetcorner or not?
Or, you're in a forest, in a river valley. You've narrowed the position down to a tenth of an acre, but the tree and rock coverage gives you crappy reception. You figure it's right there, but an outcropping means you'll have to trek the long way to find a way to ford the stream.
[
The challenge is to do *all* of them. Look at the one for Eagle Bay, NY. How the heck are you going to get *there*??
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Seeing all the "What's the point?" posts here, I can only gather there aren't very many outdoorsmen (or women) in the slashdot community. Yes, as a matter of fact, going out to some arbitrary point in the middle of nowhere is thrilling. Sort of like mountain climbing -- because it is there. Read some of the reports, and look at the pictures, and you'll see just what sorts of adventures people have. Some beautiful places, friendly people you'd never meet otherwise. It could be argued that there's more point to this than playing EverCrack for hours.
It is possible to see a virgin Slashdot story, with no responses, and resist the temptation to reach for the "Reply" button. I've done it. It's possible.
Just *damn* hard! But so far I've resisted the FP urge...
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Xenu loves you!
from the faq about the resolving the poles problem
"At 89 degrees latitude, one degree from the north or south pole, the line are 1.2 miles apart. This skews the sample sharply to the poles and neglects the equitorial regions ...a solution to the problem is to skip confluences when the distance between them falls below 2/3 of the distance at the equator ... [they] are still valid confluences, and will be posted if visited, but are not part of the official goals of the project."
1.3 How many confluences are there?
There are 64,442 latitude and longitude degree intersections in the world (counting each pole as one intersection). Of these, 47,650 meet the goals of the project after removing many confluences near the poles. Of these, about 12,000 are actually on the land. As you may guess, we're not worried about running out of confluences.
How exactly do longitudal coords get adjusted for contenential drive, I mean, Greenwich is slowly moving away from France. Even the poles move slowly.
And NO, I don't work for Office Depot. Even if I did, I'd never see any of the $$...
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The website has all this info. As other replies have mentioned, the math isn't hard, but there is the Poles Problem. Basically as you approach the poles the longitude lines come close together. Near a pole, it's not worth trying to get to one confluence only a few miles away from another. So, they remove don't count certain intersections.
Overall, another mindless, worthless, but totally interesting reason for geeks to get outside.
Jason
The first photo on his website, showing a monstrous badger sculpture and a log behind it, is located on Hwy 45. It used to be a gas station and tourist-oriented gift-shop at one time, if I recall correctly. Although in the recent past, it's been converted to an gentlemen's club.
*LOL*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
My first thought was that this sounded boring and artificial. It's a quest to visit arbitrary coordinates. Then you get to the last of his anecdotes, where they introduced themselves to a farmer who owned the land they needed to cross and took one of his kids along on the hunt.
Another trek put them a half mile out on a snowmobile trail, on foot.
That counts for something.
How about Mono-liths?
On the south pole. I count 6 photos there, and they should have sixty times more.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In Colorado there are peak climbing goals
such as all peaks above 14,000' (55) or 4000m (98)
or highest peak in each county.
No you can try to find the highest point in each
square degree via GPS.
45N 74W Rockburn, QC, CA (almost on CA,US border)
45N 75W W of Cornwall, ON, CA (across from Massena, NY, US)
46N 74W E of St-Adele, QC, CA (bring Cross-country skis!)
46N 75W SE of Duhamel, QC, CA (no roads within 20 km!)
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I seem to remember that a few years ago, someone found four equidistant points on land and erected a small but carefully aligned 3-sided pyramid at each one, thereby constructing a giant imaginary tetrahedron as large as the earth.
I love the idea of a planetary sampling effort like this, it go great on a CD to ship with the next Voyager-style craft.
See! Lovely Earth Real Estate!
Thrill! To thousands of pictures of little electronic devices with 00's on them!
Marvel! At GPS enthusiasts treading water in the open ocean or trekking across Antarctica!
;-)
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
If I had a GPS, I would have gotten into the geocaching thing. I was tempted to put some sort of prize in a bucket and drop it down an one of the many abandoned mine ventilation shafts in my area. :) You could be within five feet of the location, and never find it. :) I guess it sounds stupid when I tell other people.
The anti-salmon
Pre-GPS technology can theroretically be just as accurate, can it not? I guess it depends on the person. I for one have such a horrible sense of direction (hitchhiked across Canada with a friend this summer, and took us on a wrong direction "short-cut"... almost, good thing my friend is smarter than me ;)
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
Great goal, go visit nowhere! Try visiting places where people intersect instead.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
i find this "sport" quite amusing. it entails looking at a hand-held computer and walking/swimming/driving in whatever direction it points.
"back in my day" (at my grand old age of 21) we used top-maps, markers, compasses and natural land masses to calculate where we were and where we needed to go on hikes and camping trips.
this just seems to take all the fun out of it. kind of like hunting in those special fenced in ranges with animals that spent their entire lives raised by men (so there is no fear). you can just walk up and shoot them in the head with your BFG.
http://kered.org
It amazes me how many of the confluences in the US are out in rural areas. Sometimes, the terrain makes it very hard to get there.. It will be interesting when they complete the project (or when they at least finish the US). We'll probably notice that there's a lot more space out there than we think..
And then someone will decide the next logical step is to start founding new towns at the unpopulated confluences....
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Letterboxing is a hobby that's been around for I guess forever. It's kinda like geocaching, but typically uses just compass and your feet. You follow 'clues', basically instructions, containing bearings and number paces to your turns until you find the goal.
Take a look at the Letterboxing website.
Have fun,
Jason
Offtopic: What is with these sad bastards who have nothing better to do than reload slashdot every 10 sec just so they can post an inane message about how they were first to post. To those people, Get a Life!
You do realize it is possible to be the first person to post to an article without constantly reloading the page, right? And at such a time, you do realize it is nearly impossible to deny your primal urge to post a quick, stupid message saying so.
You do know this, right?
"And like that
And you can cut that to about 35% or so, given the amount of water thats covering the surface of the earth.
Oh, so they're going to half-ass this project then, eh?
"And like that
45N 76W N of Smith Falls, ON, CA 46N 76W N of Kazabazua, QC, CA
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Anybody remember the old Dr Doolittle books, where the Doctor would open up an atlas (or was it a globe?), close his eyes, point a finger at the page, and go wherever his finger pointed? That's what this reminds me of.
Of course, the Doctor always happened to choose somewhere remote and tropical, yet fantastically interesting...
I had been putting off a trip to a waypoint in eastern NC for a while now, but now that this story's out, I fully expect to arrive there only to find seventy-five geeks milling about with their Magellan sets waiting patiently to stand at a Slashdotted geographical location to get their picture taken. Crud!
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This is not my sandwich.
41'N, 119'W is not too far from Black Rock City, NV. Maybe Spencer Tunick could do a photo there next year?
sulli
RTFJ.
How many of these points are there? How long would it take to get all of them?
Offtopic: What is with these sad bastards who have nothing better to do than reload slashdot every 10 sec just so they can post an inane message about how they were first to post. To those people, Get a Life!
Has someone done the math? How many images that would be? How much should each image weight (in kbytes) so that it would be worth the effort?
I'm thinking about how nice it would be for a web server hosting all these images to exist? But how expensive would such effort would be? I understand that MS's Terraserver has several terabytes of images but it seems that this project wouldn't need such a massive storage available. It would be so incredible to see such a thing, though.
"All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams". Elias Canetti
That's how the future investigators would date the project.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Carousel is a lie!
You can time things by observing Jupiter's moons, or any other well-known astronomic event. Clocks were developed for seaborne use due to the difficulty of using a telescope on board, but the astronomical method is still useful on land. Basically if you know that everyone in the world is looking at the same event at the same time, you can compare measurements at that instant, say between Greenwich and your location, and get the longitude difference from that.
---- "If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved" - Erwin Schrodinger
too bad they aren't taking panoramic shots, then you could do node-based virtual tours of the planet's topography (topology?).
But the distance between degree longitude at the equator is fairly huge (looking at my globe) compared with the poles. Either way, its a step in the right direction.
I just hope people don't leave too many geocaches of garbage lying around in the woods.
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https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Various combinations of mathematical constants!
Let's all go photograph pi-N x e-W
Or how about the combinations of the intersections of the prime numbers 180?
Quick, somebody figure out what 6.02E23 mod 180 is and let's have a party where it intersects the prime meridian.
We could do it Dungeons and Dragons style: anyone have a 180 sided die? The dungeon master will allow you to reroll anything that's in the ocean, unless you have a yacht.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.