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125 Years of Longitude 0 0' 00" At Greenwich
An anonymous reader writes "This week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference, which determined that the prime meridian (i.e., longitude 0 0' 00") would travel through Greenwich, UK. One of the reasons that Greenwich was agreed upon 'was that 72% of the world's shipping already depended on sea charts that used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian.' Sandford Fleming's proposal of a single 24-hour clock for the entire world, located at the center of the Earth and not linked to any surface meridian, was rejected / not voted on, as it was felt to be outside the purview of the conference."
And don't forget the 180th meridian that came with it. When you cross the 180th meridian, you have to set your watch back/forward 23 hours !
Quite a few people are unaware of it ;-))
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1919PA.....27..416F
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Your link says nothing at all about WGS84. Here is one that does: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Geodetic_System
While a longsword's reach is about 5', that includes the arm that wields it. Longswords are about 4' in overall length, with around 3' of blade. That rope would be 7-1/2 longswords, or 10 longsword-blades. :)
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
That's because of the George M. Cohan song "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy" which includes the line "... born on the 4th of July."
The tablet that the Statue of Liberty is holding says, "July IV, MDCCLXXVI". I've always known it as Independence Day or July [the] 4th.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
- Video. The PAL standard is better quality than NTSC (Never The Same Color), so why did the Americas adopt an inferior option?
That's sort of like asking why we adopted the clearly inferior analog STDV standard instead of digital HDTV. NTSC was standardized in 1953, PAL was not standardized until 1963. Naturally, PAL was the superior standard...it was based around technology that was ten years more advanced.
French is a useful and underrated language. It's the most predominant language on the European continent in areas without good English speakers. In my experience, native Italians are ok at English, the Spanish and Portuguese are great, but the French are very poor (I'm less sure about Eastern Europe). German is practically English already.
It's also an official language of international diplomacy (it comes *before* Spanish translations on US Passports), and is spoken in a lot of North African and Caribbean nations, so you have more places available to comfortably vacation =)