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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."
What good is that? The only person with a mouth big enough to eat it would be Al Roker.
It doesn't. It uses longitude and latitude, which assume the Earth is a sphere.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/fashion/sundayst yles/18ze.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
Got Mustard?
If I have to read or hear the word 'mashup' or any variation of it, ever again, someone is going to pay with their life.
It isn't a sandwich by the usual standards. The bread wasn't cut. It was just the earth in between two baguettes of bread.
My humor is probably your flamebait
... 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.
"I've got the whoooole world in my sandwich,
I've got the whoooole world in my sandwich!"
The interesting part of the experiment was that the slices always fell the earth-side down...
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Looks like most of the US will need to charter a boat, as the opposite side of the globe is in the ocean. At least I know now not to try to dig that hole to china.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Easy: A meatball hoagie, made of planets!
So if a team from Hawaii and Botswana did this I suppose it would have to have a pineapple ring on it as well. If China and Argentina did it, would would it be garnished with? Dirt?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Which is close enough for government work.
Seriously, at this scale it's not really an issue. Especially if you're willing to consider the
Earth's ellipsoid symmetric across the equator.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Of course, as any Seinfeld fan could tell you, it still won't be a meal...
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Dave Barr has been there, done that,years ago. He placed four marble tetrahedra at points on the globe (New Guinea, South Africa, Greenland and Easter Island) so that they describe a giant tetrahedron inside the earth itself.
Sorry, equator *and* axis. That is, it's an oblate spheroid and not an egg.
Were that I say, pancakes?
So if you drop a piece of buttered bread in this case, will it always fall buttered-side down, since your chances are proportional to the value of the Earth?
Or not, since that would be a good thing in this case?
Or do you need to stand on a carpet to do this?
Must go. My head a-splode.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
...is that there are far too many people with way to much time on their hands.
Including me for reading and posting to this article.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
That's a spicy meatball!
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
He almost got it. If you look at the map in the Wikipedia page, you'll see that some 95% or more of the dry land meets an ocean on the other side (no ground credible indeed). As for the rest, well, you know.
So that is why when I was a kid I couldn't dig a hole to China. Apparently, you have to live in Chile or Argentina to dig a hole to China. At least a straight hole.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Longitude and latitude doesn't necessarily assume that the Earth is a sphere. It does however, assume that the Earth is symmetric about the equator (which is a better assumption). So corresponding lat and long coordinates will still work for a spheroid in that a line connecting the two points will pass through the center of the earth. However, the surfaces at those points won't necessarily be perpendicular to the line.
shit sandwich.
I wonder if we're considered part of the sandwich...maybe we're just the ants ruining this cosmic picnic.
It seems like you could call this a variation of geocaching. Or maybe an international (and IMO cool weirdness) version of the Geological Society of America's earthcaching, where the "unique geoscience feature" is the entire freakin' planet.
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.
I never did see either in the summary or even at his site a quick link to the experiment's results - here it is - although he seems to be slashdotting as we speak...
6 0906.html
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/06/0
It's actually fairly amusing. The edits make it very familiar to 99 percent of the threads around here. Almost makes you wonder what a decent video project involving slashdot exclusively would look like.
Call me when someone manages to make a moebius strip sandwich.
That's dude's pretty funny. I wonder, before turning on that video cam, if he eats espresso beans or if he free-bases them ?
Reminds of the fast talking guy who used to pitch Micro Machines.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
This is Slashdot :)
Glad I could help
Why does the scale of the map change as you drag it around?
Looks like nowhere in North America is there land at the other side of the world (except Hawaii, does that count?)
or should it be Dug?
How long is this hair? Left or right toe? Do you blog about it? Awww comeeon where's the link dude.
would be the doggie bag for leftovers.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Of course, good luck telling the latter locale's locals, "Silly Botswananites, this bread's not for eating!!"
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!
There aren't many sizable landmasses at antipodal points, but NZ has a good overlap with Spain, as shown in this map of NZ superimposed on Spain.
...did it land Australia-up or Austraila-down?
The second antipode is the key antipode. It literally makes or breaks the sandwich.
May the Maths Be with you!
An Earth sandwich is OK, but what would be really good is if you could supersize it! Two pieces of bread on Uranus would be much bigger and therefore better.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I'd have to go through Argentina! I knew my uncle was full of &*^% when he told me he was digging to China!
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
This map shows possible locations for land-based antipodal points, which have large areas of Greenland and some of Siberia overlapping Antarctica, as well as the more reachable Argentina/Chile with China pairings. There are also some northern South America with Phillipines and other island areas possibilities. But it is no surprise that the NZ/Spain pairing was the first realized, as those are both close to reasonable cities that are likely home for people who visit his page.
I remember a story a while ago about a man from northern Spain (Galicia) who went to visit the village antipodal to his, in NZ, but unfortunately he did not have the foresight to construct a sandwich. That could have been with two slices from the same loaf if he had planned ahead.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
In the 70s, I had thought the China Syndrome could really happen. Jack Lemmon spouting off that our nuclear power plant would melt through the earth into the Indian Ocean just does not cut it. I want my 4 bucks back. The Indian Ocean Syndrome. Bah.
PS: First person that corrects me by saying he corrected himself by saying it would only melt to the center gets a slap. It was the name of the freaking movie for fsck sake.
.. we need someone to drop a piece of bread on the dark side of the moon .. and figure out the exact opposite side of the earth from that point at a certain point in time ...
That would really make it a sandwich. It's not a decent sandwich unless you've got at least two things between the bread.
Of course it would be a very short-lived sandwich .. unless you kept moving the earth-bread to stay in alignment with the position of the moon as it passed.
ze rules.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
The story is misleading. I feel like the submitter does not know what GeoRSS is. Which reminds me, there has never been any story on slashdot regarding GeoRSS at all, which surprises me (and yes, I did submit some but they all got refused :-)
:-)
The first place to start is on georss.org, but you can also read the buzzy OGC press release. From which you'll learn: "A number of organizations have already implemented GeoRSS in open source and commercial mapping, blogging and other software products. Yahoo and Microsoft have expressed interest. Raj Singh, Director of OGC's Interoperability Programs and one of the original team that created GeoRSS explains why, "We designed GeoRSS to be easily implemented in software. Once GeoRSS is part of an application, it allows just about anyone to point a GeoRSS enabled feed at GeoRSS enabled software and instantly make a map.""
But this doesn't tell you what GeoRSS is and why the story's summary is misleading. You can read this article about GeoRSS and read more about the georss standard woes here.
GeoRSS is geospatially-aware RSS. There is a lot of applications, see the links above, like geotagging news items or sensors or podcasts or... I haven't seen any georss in the links above, only mashups and funny pictures. (maybe I should look harder?
Animoog.org
Mac: Hey Farva, what's the name of the websites you like where they take $hit from other sites to make something new, like geo-caching with Google Maps?
Farva: You mean a mashup?
Mac: *Offers gun to Anonymous Coward*
May 8th show and May 15th show
I couldn't eat a whole one.
God Be Gone
I think that would save a little more than half the trouble.
But bravo, good idea. It's this kind of thinking that's going to be required if America is to remain at the top when it comes to planet sandwich making.
Dammit. So when I was little I really should have been trying to dig to Australia instead of China. I'd need to go to Chile to get to China. Maybe that's why I never got anywhere.
Which is close enough for government work.
Do you know what WGS84 is, who created it, and why?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
When I was young I asked my mother what would happen if I kept digging. She said, "Well, you'd come out in China".
Thanks for 'what if earth were a sandwich' I now know I'd come out in the middle of the ocean, and i'd have to live in Argentina for her to be right.
Why yes, yes I do actually. Do you know what CEfGW is? It's an idiom.
Nobody's going to be using this thing to pinpoint the exact location of a trans-terran tunnel;
particularly given the problem of crossing the core, only chords and not diameters are appropriate.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I'm merely trying to be clear on the facts. Why post CEfGW when you know it to be otherwise in this case?
It really doesn't matter. But for those that don't know.. the government does care about being very very close when it comes to the Earth. Much closer than anyone else.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
That sandwich has everything I like in it!
Is this what you were looking for?
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Because, as I said, "at this scale" (and for this use) it does not matter.
Clearly governments care see: GPS, Gallileo, GLASNOS, etc.
More interesting topics of discussion are:
How smoothly the interface works if you zoom all the way out.
The resizing of the scale bar as you scroll N-S
P.S> The Earth is not, in fact, a sandwich. Though it may soon be demolished
to make way for a hyperpace bypass.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I think you'll find that there are actually several governments on the Earth, and that your use of the singular is incorrect.
I think you'll also find that a vast majority of the Earth's goverments couldn't care less about precision in measurements of the Earth.
But thank you for introducing pedantry into a discussion of Earth sandwiches. Have a nice day.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
This shouldn't really be that hard. Bored Guy at South Pole Research Station gets on sat phone and calls Bored Guy at North Pole Research Station and asks if they have any bread.
The days of the digital watch are numbered.
Why are people such jerks on Slashdot in the past week? What happened in the press that got people so ornery?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
Haven't you seen that episode?
Put it in a pita! IT'S OKAY!
I'm going to be the first Earth sandwich maker in the USA by visiting "French Southern and Antarctic Lands", and Northern Montana. Looking for sponsors for this important trip. Please send money (cash only).
I'd be curious to see just what percentage of time being on land on one side places you in the ocean on the other. It'd seem like 2/3 of the time would be a good estimate, but looking at the distribution of land I think that's probably quite a bit off.
Sorry if that got covered in the article, I didn't get a chance to read it all over yet.
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
y'know, this sandwich would make one big turd.
--- sig moved for great justice.
Too bad I'd have to hire a boat to go to a desolate point in the Pacific thousands miles from any shore in order to make such a sandwich.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
What happened to the old warning on NYTimes links?
I actually clicked on this one, assuming that I would now go to the story.
VLC Remote for iPhone and Android
There, you'll hit land - The French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
Yeah, Marle and Lucca have been doing that for years now.
I'm well aware that there are numerous governments on Earth. The vast majority of which care a great deal to be accurate on the globe we call Earth. If you are a reasonably proficient English speaker or from a nation that has the technical capacity to reach the SlashDot website there is a very high likelihood that your government (singular) is one of the governments (plural) that is very very concerned with being highly precise when placing things on the Earth. If you are from any other nation that buildings road, buildings, or bridges, your government is only very interested in being very precise in placing things on the globe. Only a few governments/nations on this planet could care less... those.. are still in mud huts and probably most citizens do not have access to the Internet.
Still.. there is a chance you are one of rare few that live in one of these countries and are wealthy enough to afford a computer and Internet access and spend your free time on SlashDot. There must be like a total of 3 of you in the world. I apologize for being presumtuous in your case.
Thanks for being pedantic about governemnts of this planet. I thought we were talking about a technical discussion.. and not the merits of how I formed my sentences that as a collective were used as my singular post and point. Thank you much for being the pedantic prick.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
You seem to have misspelled "governments", "Slashdot", and "presumptuous".
Hope this helps, and good luck with your therapy!
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.