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Null Island: The Land of Lousy Directional Data (vice.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Null Island is one of the world's most visited places for directional data that doesn't exist in real life. The Wall Street Journal reports (Warning: source may be paywalled): "In the world of geographic information systems, the island is an apparition that serves a practical purpose. It lies at 'zero-zero,' a mapper's shorthand for zero degrees latitude and zero degrees longitude. By a programming quirk introduced by developers, those are the default coordinates where Google maps and other digital Global Positioning System applications are directed to send the millions of users who make mistakes in their searches. [About seven years ago, Mr. Kelso, who had heard the phrase used by other cartographers, encoded Null Island as the default destination for mistakes into a widely used public-domain digital-mapping data set called Natural Earth, which has been downloaded several million times. On a whim, he made the location at zero-zero appear as a tiny outcrop one-meter square. In no time at all, other mappers gave the 'island' its own natural geography, created a website, and designed T-shirts and a national flag.]" If you're feeling cognitively lazy, you can watch the short animated YouTube video explaining Null Island.
I don't want to start a war here, but I heard it has a lot of oil.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
where all the duped stories on /. wind up?
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The YouTube link is sorta broken: it links to the video credits, not the beginning of the video. Correct link is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjvIpI-1w84
Modding this down is discriminatory and supports police killings of unarmed black people.
I believe you're mistaken. Modding a comment down can mean multiple things. The most common of which, on a site like this, would be topicality. The BlackLivesMatter movement isn't relevant to a story about GIS and GPS technology and oddities. Most would agree black lives do matter -- just like anyone's else's -- but find it hard to show support for the movement if it's appearing in places that it's not relevant.
Posting a comment on the Web isn't a demonstration. It takes little effort. In fact you probably copied and pasted that text from somewhere. That's slacktivism. A demonstration would be actively increasing awareness (through more than a few sentences) and using creative and inspiring ways to share facts with the world. For better or worse, cultures react better to things that actively appeal to them and appease their values. They also react more to action over word. Showing evidence/facts, shedding light on policies or laws that allow it to happen, and constructive suggestions on fixing it are proactive measures you can take to share a persuasive message.
Despite over-adjective-ing that last sentence, I hope I've explained why a 10-second comment on a story that has nothing to do with black people is not going to be well-received.
If you type "Null Island" into the search, it takes you to the Library of Congress. I find that humorous.
I did the same and I believe that google maps may be off about 200 meters.
Time to offend someone
The other Swift programmer on the planet wasn't around to see your joke.