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."

Comments

Re:The math

[RollingThunder]

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.

ancient GPS

[influensa]

What I think would be cool is seeing people using ancient technologies (like compasses and sextants) to play the GPS games. That would certainly earn them my complete admiration.

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 ;)

This would be better if...

[lmake]

we had erect a huge piramid at each point so that future civilisations can marvel at how accuratly we managed to spread these structures out, and wonder why we did it. Only we will know that we did it to waste time because we had nothing better to do.

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!

panorama

[Sebastopol]

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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Next month...

[PD]

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.