Monday, August 20, 2001

Today's Washington Post has an article about consumer use of GPS. Given the research that the author did it's pretty clear that he didn't write the headline which refers to "Ah, N4851.616 E00217.450 in the Summer!".

I'm not sure how one would calculate 4851 degrees north of the equator... let's see, that'd be 13 times around the earth then almost half way around again, ending up around 8 degrees north of the equator from where you started. Now, 217 degrees east of Greenwich is the same as 143 degrees west of Greenwich. But, since the latitude calculation put us past the North Pole and down the other side, we're really at 37 degrees east longitude, right?

At this point, calculating the exact minutes and seconds is left to the reader, currently stranded somewhere in Ethiopia.

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