The blag of the webcomic
Geohashing has been great fun so far. There are hundreds of users on the wiki, and I’ve gotten to wander places like this: There’s been a small change to the algorithm to deal with time zones. This change does not affect anyone in North/South America (excluding Greenland), does not affect Saturday meetup times anywhere, and …
Continue reading “Geohashing Followup + change to algorithm for Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia”
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. …
Last week, I wrote a short Python script that uses a USB GPS device under Linux to help with navigation. It doesn’t have maps or anything — it just gives distances and, while you’re moving, the direction to the destination (as in “two o’clock”). It prints this info on the terminal and speaks it using …
So there I was at the stroke of midnight, contemplating the four-knights opening by the dim glow of a flashlight, ears popping under the extra five pounds per square inch of pressure. On Friday night, Dan (who you may remember as the Robot9000 bot author), Finn and I invented midnight underwater speed chess. A nice feature …
What’s the world’s center of population? The center of population for a region is, roughly, the center of mass of the inhabitants. The Census bureau defines the center of population of the US (currently in Missouri) as the point at which an imaginary, flat, weightless, and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly …
xkcd 