Sunday, September 24, 2006 |
12:35 - Profluence
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Something that I discovered while sequestered in you-don't-have-a-server-anymore-land was a bunch of new placemark dots that I noticed in Google Earth, appearing in an eerily regular pattern:
These are part of a (possibly) new layer that popped up in the "Google Earth Community" section: placemarks for Confluence, a global project for mapping out all the integer latitude/longitude points on the globe by visiting them personally. It's a bit like geocaching, in that you have to bring a GPS and take photos of it showing all zeroes for the decimal coordinates.
There are documented confluence points all around the planet; some of them are in really weird and inaccessible places, like fifty miles from the nearest road in Nevada, or out in the middle of a frozen lake in the Northwest Territories. Some of the coverage in other countries is particularly fascinating, like when the placemarks abruptly stop at the border of some country where you don't really expect to find larking techno-geeks tramping through the underbrush more intent on reaching the prescribed coordinates than avoiding armed patrols or whatever. And it's funny how on the equator, the points are hundreds of miles apart, but in places like Iceland you can walk from one to the next.
Apparently the site has been around for a number of years, and every single placemark leads to a page with a fascinating, well-written, and thoroughly photographically documented description of the surroundings of that particular grid point on the planet.
This is the kind of stuff that can really swallow a weekend. At least if you're me.
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