Category: Geekery

Being a chronically over-educated and pedantic curmudgeon I sometimes find myself getting extremely annoyed about things of little consequence at all. Currently causing my blood to, if not boil certainly simmer, is an article in that renowned organ the Worcester Telegram and Gazette News, which has served the people of central Massachusetts since 1986.

The article is actually pretty good news – a woman (allegedly) abducted her granddaughter and was tracked down with the help of cell phone co-ordinates and Google Maps. What’s annoying me is the apparent complete ignorance of the authors regarding something as simple as reading co-ordinates off a map.

I quote…

“It then became a back and forth effort between the cell phone company, the police officer and Deputy Chief Lozier, who received latitude and longitude coordinates and triangulated them to learn where the two missing people were.”

So Deputy Chief Lozier “triangulated” the latitude and longitude? I find this hard to believe.

Triangulation is the process of taking bearings from two or more known locations towards an unknown location, and plotting said bearings to determine the position of said unknown location (where the bearings cross). A deceptively simple process, it was absolutely crucial to the making of accurate maps before the development of aerial and satellite photography, and remains important in cartography, navigation and the tracking of radio signals.

It is not used however in reading latitude and longitude off a map, which is a simple process of finding the appropriate markings on the margins and tracing them to where they cross, something even a child can do with minimal instruction.

To the authors of the article however reading co-ordinates off a map (not that you even have to do this if you’re using Google Maps) is apparently a strange and arcane science, involving high level mathematics and possibly the sacrifice of a goat – as opposed to simply “looking” and “reading”. Such a complicated process needs a suitably grand title, and “triangulation” fits the bill because it has something to do with maps and no-one (or at least no one who reads or works at the Telegram and Gazette) really knows what it means anyway.

This frankly is sloppy journalism. Sure, I understand the need to simplify concepts for publication and that a newspaper is no place for a detailed exploration of cartographic techniques, but a certain level of accuracy in terminology is surely not too much to aspire to? To refer to reading co-ordinates off a map as “triangulation” is akin to referring to a horse as a mule – sure they’re related, but no editor would let such a slip get through to print.

So yeah, that’s what’s annoying me at the moment – the general ignorance of the population in relation to basic cartographic and geometric terminology. Honestly, it’s like they’re not even trying. 🙂

Back to work tomorrow. Urgh.

It’s 2:43 in the afternoon and I’m sitting in the office unable to do any work because the co-location facility that hosts our severs has been down for the the last 90 or so minutes.

This is not much fun. Yes, on the one hand I’m being paid to sit around and do nothing, but there is a whole lot of work that needs to get done before Christmas, and every minute the servers are down is one minute we’ll have to find elsewhere to fit it all in. On top of that there are dozens of our clients who wouldn’t know a hosting facility from a hat rack, and naturally jump to the conclusion that their site is down because of us, and having to tell them (when they ring up in a huff) that we have no idea how long it’ll take for the server to get back up (because the guys down at the server racks aren’t answering the phones) doesn’t help matters.

So I’m passing the time actually writing a semi-decent blog entry – something I haven’t had the time to do for quite some time. Writing it into a text editor that is, since Wyrmworld is hosted on the same server that is currently causing us all these problems.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came here to talk ’bout contrails.

I saw a contrail on the way to work today. I mention this because they’re fairly rare here in Perth. Something to do with our weather conditions – and the fact that Perth is not one of the most trafficked airports in the world – makes them comparatively rare. So rare in fact that the overwhelming number of contrails lacing the sky is one of the things I really remember from my trip to the UK in 2004. In any case, a long, fluffy contrail was decorating the sky as I walked to the railway station, and that got me thinking about sky-shock.

Sky-shock is what it’s called when someone who hasn’t really looked at the sky since they were a kid happens to look at the sky and is shocked and horrified that it doesn’t look quite like what they’ve been imagining all these years. The stars are too bright, the moon is too small (or too big) or the clouds (or contrails) are the wrong shape and colour. They immediately jump to the conclusion that something is very wrong and ascribe this to a number of sinister factors including (although in no way limited to) shadow governments, terrorists, aliens or the Rand Corporation.

This is how you end up with reams and reams of web pages about “chemtrails” (those contrails don’t look like what I imagine contrails should look like! It’s a conspiracy!). This is why people see the planet Venus, or Jupiter, or even the moon and think the aliens are coming to get them (it’s big and bright and it’s following me!). This is what happens when the general public are poorly educated in astronomy and meteorology and don’t bother to look above the horizon for 99% of their lives.

And this brings me to an idea I had about ten years back when I was in TAFE. And idea that I shall have to elaborate on later, as the server has just come back online… 🙂

OK, rather than blog I’ve lately been spending a lot of my time uploading photos to my Flickr account. This is awful I know, but since most of them are vaguely Urban Exploration related I figure it sort of counts as work towards Abandoned in Perth, which has been sitting around abandoned for quite some time. I’ve got about two thirds of the photos up that I want, so I’m over half way to having time to blog again.

Had the guys around to my place yesterday and we did a block more playtesting on Plyin’ the Black. It’s still a work in progress, but we seem to have figured out most of the numeric issues regarding difficulties and bonuses, and come up with a way to make Reavers scary as hell without totally unbalancing the game. We’ve also (finally) figured out some ways that a player can actually win – which when you think about it is something that a game actually needs to be a game. Stay tuned for more (eventual) updates.

(Oh, did I mention that I got Jewel Staite to autograph a copy of the rules at Supanova? Well I did. Yey! 🙂

We also dug out my old INWO cards and played a rather shambolic game with completely random decks. It’s actually more fun that I remembered. Fabes has run off with them all to ‘learn the rules’, which is code for ‘analyse every single card and construct a deck that will destroy all the other players in the second round’ – but hey, it’ll be fun to see how he does it 🙂

My lunch break is over now, so I guess I’d better get back to work. *sigh*.

Spent much of the weekend uploading images to my previously dormant Flickr account. A lot of it’s urban exploration stuff, although various other things have slipped through as well. Organisation is a bit of nightmare on a free account (which only gives you two sets) – I may have to pay for a ‘pro’ account at some point (pay for a web service? pshaw!).

Anyway, if you enjoy looking at pictures of trashed buildings, here you go 🙂