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Earth Sandwich
yourhotneighbor writes "If you haven't seen Ze Frank's hilarious videoblog, it's worth checking out. A few weeks ago he challenged visitors to create an "Earth Sandwich" where two pieces of bread are placed exactly opposite each other on the globe. Google mashups showing what's on the opposite side of the Earth and a live GeoRSS-based bread gallery were provided. A piece on NPR this Saturday details the concept and a team from New Zealand and Spain completed the challenge. Then on Friday he allowed his show to be written by his viewers who battled out 2,000+ script revisions in a Wiki. Sunday's New York Times describes the results."
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fashion/sundayst yles/18ze.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
... which can be (more or less) translated like this:
an elephant steps onto a slice of bread, puts a slice of bread on his back, looks in the mirror and sais:
- gosh, that's one big sandwitch!
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
It uses longitude and latitude, which assume the Earth is a sphere.
Not true: there are actually several types of latitude and longitude. The most common type (used by most maps) is Geodetic latitude and longitude, which does take into account the oblate shape of the Earth. What you are talking about would be geocentric latitude and longitude; in reality pretty much everybody prefers and uses geodetic.
There are a lot of interesting problems in the area of defining coordinate systems for maps and navigation. Reading about WGS84 would be a good place to start learning more.
Firebug. It will make your jaw hit the floor.
What somebody needed here, was a good understanding of antipodes. Could have saved a lot of time, and Google's bandwidth.
May the Maths Be with you!