Geohashing

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Summer seems to have arrived, at last.

As you may have noticed, today’s comic contains an algorithm for converting dates into local coordinates. For a given day, you can calculate what that day’s coordinate is for your region. Dan has put together a tool for calculating a day’s coordinates and show it using Google Maps. Note that you can’t calculate a day’s coordinates before the stock market opens on that day (about 9:00 EST) — except for weekends and holidays, when it uses the most recent opening price.

We’ve been having fun trying to reach these coordinates for some time now, when the coordinate is reachable — that is, when it’s not over water, in a military base, or in the middle of Bill Gates’s house.

If you happen to be looking for somewhere to go, driving to the coordinates can be an adventure. If you do, please take pictures and drop them on the geohashing wiki (feel free to help fill it out).  I’m gonna get some rest and then, at 10 AM tomorrow, see if I can get to the Boston coordinates (I have no way of knowing where they’ll be until then, of course).

And finally, when the coordinates are reachable, meetups are Saturday afternoon at 4:00.

Edit: I answered a bunch of questions in a comment below.  Further discussion is also happening on the wiki. I’m going to get some sleep and then head out to today’s coordinates (or as close as I can get).

416 thoughts on “Geohashing”

  13. Just because people didn’t have tea didn’t mean they weren’t drinking boiled drinks– tisanes and infusions of camomile, linden blossom, and so on. This is a better example of how hard it is to pin down cause and effect in social science research than it is a scholarly argument.

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