Geohashing
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).
May 21st, 2008 at 12:23 am
I look forward to wacky adventures and interesting experiences with fellow #xkcd members :D
May 21st, 2008 at 12:24 am
I doubt I will find anyone in my area =’(
May 21st, 2008 at 12:25 am
No… We’ll find you.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:25 am
And I don’t know how I managed to double-post with a CAPTCHA.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:34 am
I have to leave a response, because the captcha is my name (twice, it’s Tim Timothy), and I’m very creeped out.
Geocaching for people, huh? What do we do? Wear black hats and bring signs for nerd sniping?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:37 am
Tennessee Valley? That’s where my high school ran cross country meets. Too bad I’ll be on a plane home from Boston.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:37 am
I’ll bring Twister.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:40 am
Is there a way to adjust the algorithm so that the meetup point never appears over water?
This algorithm is the reason Osama bin Laden is still alive.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:41 am
> Tennessee Valley? That’s where my high school ran cross country meets. Too bad I’ll be on a plane home from Boston.
There’s one in every region (graticule), so whenever you’re free on a Saturday, check out where it is!
> I’ll bring Twister.
I’ll bring the Crisco.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:42 am
> Is there a way to adjust the algorithm so that the meetup point never appears over water?
Not without making it a lot more complicated. We don’t need a meetup every day, and you can always go to the one nearby if there are problems.
> This algorithm is the reason Osama bin Laden is still alive.
This algorithm also killed Jeeves.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:51 am
Yeah, I can’t seem to make it work. I’m either doing something wrong, or the map’s being weird. Any and all help welcome.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:55 am
It really doesn’t work well for the DC region, since four different graticules seems to be centered right on the city. So, the likelihood is a very long drive from any point in the city, not to mention the population center being split into four different areas.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:04 am
I am in Tokyo right now. By the time 9AM EST hits, it will be 10PM here. basically I will not know the coordinates of where to meet until after the trains slow down. I’d like to think that I am not the only person in the area who reads XKCD and would definitely love to try this out. Any ideas or suggestions?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:05 am
Note: Works amazingly well for the Orlando area.
I’ll be hitting up Saturday meetings.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:17 am
[...] XKCD’s got your number Lester Freamon. [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am
umm, this doesn’t work for cities where folks typically can’t easily travel farther than typical public transit range
eg for NYC, the location chosen SUCKS in terms of percentage of folks who’d find the location feasibly reachable
May 21st, 2008 at 1:25 am
Phoenix is split almost straight down the middle between two graticules, and both are filled almost entirely with desert wilderness. At least it’ll be easy to find the xkcd’ers that way. I look forward to seeing how this turns out. : -)
May 21st, 2008 at 1:26 am
I can already tell it’s going to be a bitch for Seattleites. About half of the spots are going to require a ferry trip, and that’s excluding Puget Sound, which rudely consumes about 25% of the surface area.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:26 am
So when’s everyone planning on meeting up?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:28 am
saturday?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:35 am
For those of us in the regions bordering Lake Michigan, where the defined box contains a tiny slice of coast and a giant swath of lake, it’s going to be a rare day where this particular geo-hash doesn’t require a boat or a plane. Or a seaplane. Which would be awesome.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:35 am
HEADS-UP: In the Degree Minutes Seconds version of the online implementation (third line), the Seconds portion sometimes appears as a large negative number, certainly not between 0 and 59.9999. Might want to check it out. Other than that.. love the concept! Will try to meetup!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:35 am
> I am in Tokyo right now. By the time 9AM EST hits, it will be 10PM here.
> basically I will not know the coordinates of where to meet until after the
> trains slow down. I’d like to think that I am not the only person in the area
> who reads XKCD and would definitely love to try this out. Any ideas or
> suggestions?
Similar problem for Sydney, where it’ll be 11PM.
Of course, it doesn’t affect the Saturday afternoon meetup, ’cause it uses Friday’s opening price. I figure the simple answer is to stick to Saturdays.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:52 am
> For those of us in the regions bordering Lake Michigan, where the defined box contains a tiny slice of coast and a giant swath of lake, it’s going to be a rare day where this particular geo-hash doesn’t require a boat or a plane. Or a seaplane. Which would be awesome.
While I am all about the seaplanes, we’ll see if we can’t figure out a special case for those unfortunately-located cities. One thing you can try is going to the coordinate for the bordering zone.
On the other hand, seaplanes!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:55 am
I started to write down all my ideas to improve this algorithm but I realized that after doing any one of them it became impossible to meet anyone. Guess I just like going random places all by myself.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:55 am
>I can already tell it’s going to be a bitch for Seattleites. About half of the >spots are going to require a ferry trip, and that’s excluding Puget Sound, >which rudely consumes about 25% of the surface area.
And if those two facts weren’t bad enough, the graticule covers very heavily populated area - like today’s location is in some backyard in a residential area. We’ll just have to hope that most Saturdays we’ll get lucky and it will be a park or some public location on the east side!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:59 am
The Boston area meetup looks to be in a grove of trees in West Bumfuck, MA, so if the area remains vaguely the same for Friday, it should be pretty interesting finding parking, at least.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:59 am
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-20&lat=28&long=-81&seed=null&zoom=16&abs=1
Some of these are remarkably interesting.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:07 am
For those of you with your city split by multiple graticules, I suggest coming to consensus about which one you’re going to use on the wiki and then just sticking to it. Set up a page for your city and discuss, plus you could use it for RSVPing meetings the night before!
May 21st, 2008 at 2:11 am
this past weekend, when i entered May 16th in the tool thingy, the meeting spot was a three minute drive from my house in my region. is there any sort of repeating pattern in this algorithm or is that a stupid question?
way not to post this a week sooner, i’d have definitely been there. dammit.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:22 am
The comic probably contains the location for the next XKCD meetup. Better bookmark it.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:23 am
>eg for NYC, the location chosen SUCKS in terms of percentage of folks who’d find the location feasibly reachable
On the other hand, if you venture out onto Long Island (train ride away), pretty much everyone there has at least one car available to them.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:24 am
I would love to know if there are any other Baltimorons who read this. Maybe we can all go out and get coffee. If there are any others, that is.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:26 am
So, the blog (er, blag) says that the time is 4pm, while the Wiki says it’s 3pm. Which one’s official?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:29 am
wait, were those example coordinates where Randall lives?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:30 am
Actually, there is a problem with the algorithm (mentioned above), if you are close to a line it tends to only send you away from the line, it sorts of repels the line.
Since I am just by the sea, this is a bit of a problem, since it tends to put me into the ocean. It’d make more sense, from my point of view to instead say multiply by 2 and subtract 1 from the post-md5 base-10 converted value (I know, that doesn’t give you the true full range, but you can use say the last digit as a sign bit if you prefer).
Of course, for towns with special requirements you could always mandate a signbit or offset to avoid the water/etc.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:38 am
Brendan: No, Randall lives in Cambridge.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:44 am
This is awesome but my idea for the solve the “water” and “farmer’s field” problem is to “march” to the nearest Mcdonald’s, Wendy’s or Tim Hortons (if you are Canadian)…or park if you prefer…the dedicated would probably go where ever for XKCD others…maybe not.
Anyway the main meeting would be at this place while the others would walk…anyway that is my idea…how to organize it simply is impossible.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:48 am
Why not treat a hash over water as a collision? Just re-generate a hash as the addition (or XOR) of the original md5 hash and the previous day’s hash to get a new offset. There could be a “collision detected” button on the page to let the server know if the location looks like it’s over water.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:49 am
So, uh, it requires your starting co-ordinates.
Doesn’t this mean that if people don’t use the same starting location we’ll all end up in different places?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:49 am
For two reasons already mentioned, this is tricky for Chicago. Because the whole-degree lines run through or close to the city, there are four different zones that one might initially consider. The northeast zone is probably 80-90% Lake Michigan, a bit of the north side of the city, the north suburbs, and into Wisconsin. The southeast zone goes fairly far south of the city. The western regions, both north and south, don’t really hit the city so much as the western suburbs, but they both extend well past exurbia into rural Illinois and Wisconsin.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:50 am
Darn. I live on Lake Michigan, and most of the box spreads on the lake.
And I echo Jenny’s question. It says 3 on the wiki, 4 on the blag. Why?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:55 am
Mine is right in the middle of the water.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:57 am
I can’t get the map gizmo to work. When I click on it, it shows a red rectangle (presumably the relevant map region), but as far as I can see there’s nothing inside the rectangle to mark any particular point. Help?
May 21st, 2008 at 3:07 am
Because of the time zone difference, if you use the tool in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, etc, the map tool doesn’t work with today’s date. You have to use the previous day’s date, because most of the time it’s still yesterday in America.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:08 am
Randall: if the location is in water, just append a prime/apostrophe to the end of the original date/stock string, and re-hash. You should be able to just add a button that says “click here if that site was in the water” which fixes the problem that way.
Also, why did you choose 2005-05-26? (I know why *I* might have chosen it, since it was a particularly memorable birthday party for me, but I have no idea why *you’d* have chosen it.)
May 21st, 2008 at 3:11 am
Someone who lives on the coast and and has lat/lon coordinates bordering whole numbers might have to do alot of scuba diving. It turns out somewhere around Santa Cruz (36.99, -122.01) … oh, wait… NOW I get why the map starts out centered on the bay area!
(actually, i’m not totally sure if it’s not just because google maps likes to default to the bay area. i hope not, that always annoyed me a little)
May 21st, 2008 at 3:12 am
>Because of the time zone difference, if you use the tool in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, etc, the map tool doesn’t work with today’s date. You have to use the previous day’s date, because most of the time it’s still yesterday in America.
Yes, but as mentioned earlier, meetups are on Saturdays. Since the market is closed on weekends, the algorithm already uses the previous day’s (Friday’s) numbers to calculate the position.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:21 am
The most recent target for my region is right next to a tiny little beach I went to by accident last time I was on holiday. This is about 60 kilometres out of my city, so it’s surprising that I know the place!
Ross, have you entered a date (and maybe hit Update too)? It should show a little google map marker on the chosen spot for that region, as well as give the lat/long in a box in the bottom right.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:22 am
Aww quit whining about water, and taking the train to Jersey; Boulder and Golden Colorado could put you at the top of a 14,000 mountain. At least in water you can charter the ss minnow for a 3 hour party cruise.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:33 am
Wow this is awesome. This is something I can see doing with friends till I get old a weary.
Great way to create a date.
Awesome idea man.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:34 am
I think maybe there needs to be a concept of local stock market, not just basing it on the DOW, e.g if the box is in the UK, use the FTSE 100, in Japan use the NIKKEI etc
May 21st, 2008 at 3:40 am
Those example coordinates are Google headquarters, actually.
Randall, I saw from the wiki that you were at last weekend’s meeting in the graticule that contains San Francisco. :o Are you going to be in the area this next weekend too? I’m in Sunnyvale, but it’d be worth the extra drive if the location is doable.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:43 am
Whoa, I was only about a mile from the destination coordinates in the comic LAST Saturday. I’m a week off. :(
http://www.twinkleshots.com/index.php?id=813690652
May 21st, 2008 at 3:45 am
grr:
You’re complaining about that?! Today’s (yesterday’s) was right by Mt. Evans! That’s incredible! I mean, it may be entirely inaccessable without rock climbing gear, but at least you can wander the mountainside for a bit! Either way, maybe I’ll see you when the site is somewhere less mountainy (assuming you live here).
Also, I live on Baseline Road in Boulder, so I get to choose which site I go to (West Denver Metro or FoCo). Double awesome!
Though I suppose technically 39.999 < 40. Problems like this made me get a liberal arts degree.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:57 am
I think the algorithm have a small issue.. It looks like that translating into decimal and taking the firse 6 digits will not be random enought. In fact, it chooses south places more often than it should (at my place). That’s becouse many times the number just start with 1: all hex higher than about 9000000000000000 translates to 1 as first decimal digit.
The solution is taking the *last* 6 digit:
9000000000000000 -> decimal -> 10376293541461622784 -> xx.622784
Thanks for your attention :)
May 21st, 2008 at 4:14 am
What’s the statistical likeliness that two generated coordinates will be the same? e.g. how often does your hash collide?
May 21st, 2008 at 4:14 am
Gotta say, this algorithm is spectacularly useless in San Francisco, where 70% of the time the result is in the bay or ocean. Also, one degree by one degree is a pretty huge area…but I guess you _are_ looking for big adventure or enjoy driving more than I.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:01 am
Obviously the best way do this would be with randall’s GPS direction finder. You just download the data, check the map in zoomed out mode to make sure its not water, and then go. The best thing is that you have no idea where you’re going until you get there. So is there a stable and usable version that i can install for this purpose?
As a side note this really brings into perspective how small the UK is, the graticules are the same size no matter where you are so here they take up a large portion of the country. Just shows how bad my geography is really.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:03 am
Nicola: The algorithm doesn’t just convert a big hex number to a big decimal number, and then take the first bunch of digits…
It converts a long hex fraction into a long decimal fraction.
So, say, 0.10000 (hex) would become 0.062500 (decimal), 0.2000 (hex) would become 0.12500 (decimal), etc.
So the chance that the decimal value is (say) <0.5 is the same as the chance that the hex value is <0.8… which is the chance that the first digit of the hash is <8… ie, ideally half.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:06 am
> Randall: if the location is in water, just append a prime/apostrophe to the end of the original date/stock string, and re-hash. You should be able to just add a button that says “click here if that site was in the water” which fixes the problem that way.
Well, there are a number of reasons why the location is unsuitable; I’d prefer to separate the meetup protocol from the coordinate-generating protocol, and not build extra intelligence into the actual hashing part. I think it makes more sense to default to a neighboring block or something.
> Also, why did you choose 2005-05-26? (I know why *I* might have chosen it, since it was a particularly memorable birthday party for me, but I have no idea why *you’d* have chosen it.)
I picked it because it gave a resulting coordinate that, should people misinterpret my example, wouldn’t send a horde of readers into someone’s living room :) If that’s going to happen, I want it to at least be because they *correctly* interpreted the algorithm …
Also, I’m stalking you.
> Gotta say, this algorithm is spectacularly useless in San Francisco, where 70% of the time the result is in the bay or ocean. Also, one degree by one degree is a pretty huge area…but I guess you _are_ looking for big adventure or enjoy driving more than I.
You can use the graticule for the west. But it’s not spectacularly useless — I think it’s about 65% water, but that’s still one day in three there’s a valid coordinate. Dan, who I’ve been working on this with, lives in Santa Clara, and he’s been having fun reaching the coordinates when they’re reachable. In general, not a lot of operations need them to work every day.
> I think maybe there needs to be a concept of local stock market, not just basing it on the DOW, e.g if the box is in the UK, use the FTSE 100, in Japan use the NIKKEI etc
See the wiki for discussion of this — we’re still deciding what to do. The DOW is just chosen because it’s a universal source of entropy. I think it’d be better to change things to use, say, yesterday’s DOW opening/closing than switch to another source of randomness entirely. But that’s a decision we’ll make after some more discussion on the wiki forum …
> Randall, I saw from the wiki that you were at last weekend’s meeting in the graticule that contains San Francisco. :o Are you going to be in the area this next weekend too? I’m in Sunnyvale, but it’d be worth the extra drive if the location is doable.
I just got back, actually, hours before this went up. But if it helps, I did get lost in Sunnyvale on that incredibly hot day last week while testing the GPS cyborg implant program. I think I ended up almost climbing a fence in the National Semiconducter office park.
> this past weekend, when i entered May 16th in the tool thingy, the meeting spot was a three minute drive from my house in my region. is there any sort of repeating pattern in this algorithm or is that a stupid question?
They’re random — or at least, as random as md5, which is more than random enough for these purposes :) I think we can safely say that you won’t see any patterns that tell you that it’s any less random than dice rolls would be.
> So, uh, it requires your starting co-ordinates. Doesn’t this mean that if people don’t use the same starting location we’ll all end up in different places?
Everyone in the same lat/long grid gets the same location. Just figure out which square you’re in (-122, 37 for SF) and that’s all you need.
> I would love to know if there are any other Baltimorons who read this. Maybe we can all go out and get coffee. If there are any others, that is.
I can think of one way to find out …
> I think the algorithm have a small issue.. It looks like that translating into decimal and taking the firse 6 digits will not be random enought. In fact, it chooses south places more often than it should (at my place). That’s becouse many times the number just start with 1: all hex higher than about 9000000000000000 translates to 1 as first decimal digit.
No — 0.F in hex is not 0.15, it’s 0.935. We are not treating them as integers, but as floats less than 1. If you’re confused, work through the example given in the comic and see if you get the same answer.
> Whoa, I was only about a mile from the destination coordinates in the comic LAST Saturday. I’m a week off. :(
If you’d just hold still, our satellites could track you better and this wouldn’t happen. Also, you have something in your hair.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:07 am
“>I can already tell it’s going to be a bitch for Seattleites. About half of the >spots are going to require a ferry trip, and that’s excluding Puget Sound, >which rudely consumes about 25% of the surface area.
And if those two facts weren’t bad enough, the graticule covers very heavily populated area - like today’s location is in some backyard in a residential area. We’ll just have to hope that most Saturdays we’ll get lucky and it will be a park or some public location on the east side!”
The West Sound location was literally my best friend’s house, back in grade school. I used to be there every Saturday at 4 PM.
I now live right by the ferry in Bremerton. If anybody needs to be on this side of the water, I can put them up, if they miss the boat home.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:10 am
Anyone near southern Alabama? As in the Dothan area?
May 21st, 2008 at 5:23 am
Creepiness…. Just for kicks I put in my girlfriend’s birthday…
And the resulting location was two houses up from the house she grew up.
That’s just odd.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:32 am
> I think the algorithm have a small issue..
(various reply)
Ahh i see, indeed i didn’t tried the comics coordinates, now i see my error. Sorry :)
The red boxes are a little misleading on the “hex” line since they don’t enclose the “0.”. I mean, they’re misleading if you’re easily mislead, like me :)
May 21st, 2008 at 5:38 am
btw, it looks like all online hex-to-decimal converter only works for integers.. any link to one that handles fractions too ?
May 21st, 2008 at 6:06 am
I’m getting somewhwere over 60 miles away, right on the far side of the little box, right in the middle of nowhere ;_; I don’t drive…. maybe if I start walking now….o.O
May 21st, 2008 at 6:11 am
Nicola: this one handles fractions. And you’re not on your own, I made the same conversion error to start with!
http://www.mathsisfun.com/binary-decimal-hexadecimal-converter.html
May 21st, 2008 at 6:32 am
Steve: great, that works perfectly
May 21st, 2008 at 6:42 am
This game is going to get really fun in the Ottawa area. The city is near the center of its zone, but everything around it is small towns, farmers’ fields and forests.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:47 am
This is awesomely silly.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:53 am
I don’t think anyone is going to be able to beat living at the Lizard, Cornwall, UK:
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-20&lat=49&long=-6&zoom=8&abs=1
Anyone got a boat?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:06 am
Funny, some of today’s coordinates (using yesterday’s DOW, since I’m living in Denmark) turns up not far from where I grew up. Creepy.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:11 am
Also, I’m finally getting the link between the last 3 blag posts, and why there are so many water meeting points. He’s challenging everybody to a game of online underwater chess!
May 21st, 2008 at 7:20 am
>I don’t think anyone is going to be able to beat living at the Lizard, Cornwall, UK:
It’s bad along the whole South coast of the UK, but that takes the biscuit…
May 21st, 2008 at 7:30 am
> They’re random — or at least, as random as md5, which is more than random enough for these purposes :) I think we can safely say that you won’t see any patterns that tell you that it’s any less random than dice rolls would be.
oh! a dice version for table top RPGs?
… oh, and a version for alternate realities?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:33 am
Rochester, NY. 80% of the graticule is in Lake Ontario.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:39 am
Geohashing…
Ok, also Randall Munroe möchte mich an einen zufälligen Ort schicken:
XKCDs Geohashing steht unter BY-NC-2.5-Lizenz, siehe license.
Dieses Geohashing ist ein echter Geek-Sport. Der Koordinaten-Generator liegt hier. Ein Wiki dazu gibt es hier, e…
May 21st, 2008 at 7:41 am
Too bad there aren’t enough xkcd fans around here in Eastern Finland (at least not ones that would really do this). This sure could be great fun if there were.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:45 am
I’ve been looking at the co-ordinates for London and every day it’s outside the M25 orbital
…except for April 30th this year when it was in Dulwich, a short walk for me
May 21st, 2008 at 7:53 am
Finally, all my stock market manipulation has a purpose! Let’s see if I get this in my living room…
May 21st, 2008 at 8:23 am
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t seem like a good idea considering the price of a gallon of gasoline!! My location for yesterday would have been a 45 minute drive (in good traffic)
Great tool for amateur spies!
May 21st, 2008 at 8:33 am
Hi.
This is Paris graticule.
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-20&lat=48&long=2&zoom=8&abs=1
I’ve been reading your blog back then when I was in Thailand and never stopped since then.
If you don’t mind, I’ve added Paris coordinates to the wiki.
I hope their will be people playing the game in Paree!
Doing that around Paris is pretty exciting because outside of Paris there’s a lot of less urban areas, Parks and fields.
I don’t know the city and the country much because I landed here just 6 months ago. This would have been reaaally cool in Thailand.
As far as I’m concerned, I will be there saturday 16:00.
Talking about GPS, I bought a boat GPS with general direction and waypoints 120 euros. It was very useful to bike in the jungle in Thailand.
I’m SO happy to find a way to use it here in Paris :)
Thanks for the cool game
Nico
May 21st, 2008 at 8:42 am
This is awesomely silly.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:44 am
So, am I the only one who’s first thought was that this thing was totally insecure? MD5 has been cryptographically compromised, right? The last thing you want is a man-in-the-middle attack when there’s crisco involved.
Jeff
May 21st, 2008 at 8:50 am
While the Palm Bay area is split into two with most of Palm Bay being on the south side of the split, I’ll probably just have to take the Melbourne side of things. Looks like I may be going to the beach for some of these, though. :D
While it may not be this coming weekend, me and a friend of mine are likely to find a few of the spots. I’ll be wearing a black fedora and he’ll be wearing an XKCD t-shirt.
If you’re in the Palm Bay/Melbourne/Malabar area, I imagine we’ll see you around.
And has anyone considered an XKCD flash mob?…
May 21st, 2008 at 8:52 am
Jeff, geohashing isn’t encrypting information, so md5 as cryptographically insecure shouldn’t matter. It’s just trying to get some sufficiently random numbers.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:55 am
Anyone in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area?
i’ll be there most likley even if i’m the only one.
May 21st, 2008 at 8:58 am
I am playing with the coordinate calculator. I understand that a consecutive Friday, Saturday, and Sunday should all give the same location, but they don’t. Am I mistaken or is there a bug in the implementation? This might lead to some extra meetups…
I would also point out that people near the equator will have to travel farther. Maybe we should use UTMs.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:10 am
Unfortunately this doesn’t work well in the Vancouver BC area, as 90% of the time it is a multiple day hike through mountains to get to it, at which point it’s in a different spot already. So unless we get lucky and have it south of the mountains, or multiple xkcders have personal helicopters they can long-line in from, meet-ups will be very rare.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:14 am
Um, bcg - jeff was joking. He said ‘Crisco’ not ‘Cisco’
May 21st, 2008 at 9:22 am
@self: Nevermind, I get it.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:27 am
Oh noes, I’m in the middle of a swamp!
May 21st, 2008 at 9:27 am
Dumb question, how does one go about posting a graticule? Or is there one for a rural NY area already up? Avoca, Ny if anyone’s interested. Near Rochester or Corning NY.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:33 am
Man, three areas near me (Northeasth Ohio) and I am busy all day Saturday. I hope you have a great time without me Mentor, Kent, and Cleveland. I know it will be hard.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:37 am
When generating the MD5, should I include the dashes, or just the numbers?
May 21st, 2008 at 9:44 am
Hey, I’m a Baltimoron! Someone was asking for them. Although I won’t be a Baltimoron much longer, as it’s off to Boston in the fall… this will be an interesting way to meet random people in my new city.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:50 am
I’m surprised no one has offered to create a simple utility for everyone to plug their major coordinates into. A simple webpage for others to access wouldn’t be hard. If anyone is interested, I’ll do it. :D
May 21st, 2008 at 9:55 am
alright. go ahead and slap me. I shoulda looked at the wiki first.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:57 am
Neat idea, dude. Makes me want to get GPS.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:14 am
According to the geohasher, I should go swimming in Lake Ontario today!
May 21st, 2008 at 10:16 am
I tested it, and the map lookup linked to in the comic includes the dashes in the calculation of the md5. See all NYCers this Saturday! Except those of you living in Manhattan in the area formed surrounded by the Hudson on one side and the line between the intersection of 43rd and 12th and the intersection of Dover St. and FDR on the other.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:16 am
I’m glad you included the reachability requirement, as I am in Vegas and yesterday’s date put the meetup inside the bounds of our local Air Force bombing range. Though it might make for a VERY exciting party.
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-20&lat=36&long=-116&zoom=16&abs=1
May 21st, 2008 at 10:26 am
Cogito: Try turning on debugging info on the geohashing tool and see what you have to do to get the same results.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:28 am
>Anyone near southern Alabama? As in the Dothan area?
Panama City here…Will you be participating???
May 21st, 2008 at 10:36 am
Apparently the map calculator isn’t working.
I wrote a python script though, and looked at the dow jones site…
42.179468°, -71.861536° for boston area I think.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:41 am
How do I get the specific coordinates for today from say, Boston? I click on Boston and I just get a pink box, w/ no coordinates.
Does Randall still intend for us to do the algorithm ourselves? Cause I’m one of the uninitiated and have no clue was md5 is.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
this is amazing. have you noticed that in the square thingy (graticle?) for boston it hasn’t been in the actual city for this whole month? i need to start saving money for a goddamn car now so that i can drive out.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:44 am
I hope I’m home the weekend this lands in my back yard.
Bring snacks.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:58 am
So anyone in bath/corning area of NY? just wondering. it’s in the country so let’s bring sandwiches!!
May 21st, 2008 at 11:07 am
Hello Amerika, here is Switzerland calling.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:08 am
The issues with graticules and hour drives are fairly easily solved with a slightly generalized form of the algorithm. The division into whole degrees is arbitrary, and could as easily be some other size. To wit, if you wanted to make a hash to generate a point from 40.4, -80 to 40.5, -80.1, you just scale the two random [0,1) numbers down a factor of 10. Of course, you have to arrange what the box is beforehand (or rectangle, if you scale one more than the other), but then you can fit it over your city, metro area, or such.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:09 am
“S.B. Says:
Hello Amerika, here is Switzerland calling.”
I think you got the wrong number. Try Germany, Norway or the Czech Republic, plenty to choose from.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:18 am
This is just SCREAMING for an iPhone application. The app would use the “Locate Me” feature that Google Maps uses for its pseudo-GPS (there’s an API for that, I believe), grab the stock data (how does the finance widget obtain that data?…hmmm…), calculate the day’s coordinate, and stick a pin in the Google Maps app with that location (there’s an API for that, too!)
May 21st, 2008 at 11:24 am
Well damn. I live in central Sydney, Australia, and today’s result puts me square in the ocean. A fair way out, too.
… I think I’ll pass, thanks.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:24 am
WOW i might do this on saturday :D tho im in hastings which is coastal so i could just get lame seaward ones…. unless anyone feels like meeting on the ferry, because its route is very near to todays co ord lol
May 21st, 2008 at 11:25 am
I think the hash is wrong in the comic. I get
357e5cac889681628fdd754c1a235919
which agrees with what the website produces.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:32 am
Wow, the only weekend it was anywhere near me was in the beginning of March. Hope the DOW is nice and puts one near me soon :)
May 21st, 2008 at 11:35 am
I’ve made a facebook group for people in the larger NYC graticule. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=19859510038
May 21st, 2008 at 11:44 am
By the way, have you given any thought how insecure this system is? Whatever could happen if raptors get to know about this and they start to stalk xkcd staff and visitors. You guys better watch out with your meetings! ;)
May 21st, 2008 at 11:51 am
Question if you get this Randall
there are a few graticule’s in the Boston area, and being from Boston i checked today’s location. the main Boston location gives you Auburn MA - just outside of worcester - 60 miles away, give or take. If you use the South Shore’s graticule, you end up in Weymouth - 5 miles away. how do you choose?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Randall, this is obviously awesome but is there any way to set it up so the 1 by 1 box can be centered somewhere other than XX^30′ YY^30′ ?
That would solve the ackward-city problem. Each town would have a box generated centered on itself.
Just one decimal place of leeway after the lat/long degree would do it, I think.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:08 pm
> I don’t think anyone is going to be able to beat living at the Lizard, Cornwall, UK:
I’ve found somewhere with even more water…. The island of St Helena (small island in the middle of the south atlantic) is split in two. The southern tip just pokes into a graticule.
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2008-05-20&lat=-17&long=-6&zoom=9&abs=1
May 21st, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Nice job, Randall–you just broke a piece off Manhattan–and joined it with ***New Jersey***…
May 21st, 2008 at 12:13 pm
> So, uh, it requires your starting co-ordinates. Doesn’t this mean that if people don’t use the same starting location we’ll all end up in different places?
I declare the starting co-ordinates to be the ones for City Hall in the nearest town/city/megopolis
May 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
So who wants to create a plot of the past locations to verify the randomness of this algorithm? Also, maybe we can start presenting the value of stocks over time this way.
(Note that you’d have to just plot it within an arbitrary rectangle, but you could make some interesting 3D plots)
Steve
May 21st, 2008 at 12:15 pm
(For me that will be NYC even though I live in a nearby city)
May 21st, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Hey guys, I am also having trouble with the location in my city (Lima, Peru) since it is divided in four sections, and each of them is basically ocean or mountains.
So I came up with an idea, I hope it’s not too complicated.
Instead of using those area squares based on round lat/lon coordinates, there could be a database for the most accurate square for each city and it’s sorroundings. Then the algorithm would use the already created offset to find a proportional offset from the center of the square. If your city is not registered in the database you could be the first to register it and set its center coords, or maybe the coords could be obtained from some geographic website for each city (major cities at least)
May 21st, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Jimmy, good point about the South Shore spot being much closer than the main Boston one. Oddly, both are on a Prospect Street…
May 21st, 2008 at 12:41 pm
Everybody’s huffy about having to drive, hike, and swim too far. I’m pretty sure the point of this isn’t to organize daily and weekly meetings. If it was, it’d be easier just to find a reasonable place than generate one randomly. It’s an algorithm for adventure! If your graticule sucks, go to a nearby one. If you can’t make it to the meet up spot because it’s too far or unreachable, go play frisbee and see if it’s a better spot next week. If the location is in an army base… well I think that’s extra incentive to get everybody to go.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:44 pm
@Alex
Is that Hastings UK? If so im in Brighton and experiencing the same issue, I may go for the graticule above if the one for Saturday ends up in the channel.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The coordinates for today are only three miles from a local biker bar known for nightly brawls and with a spectacular view of the Mississippi river. Who’s comin’ with me?
May 21st, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Hahha clicking on Calgary on May 21, it goes a little north of a place called Morely, a little town on the Indian reservation up here where I used to go when I was little for early morning hockey practices!
Once again, XKCD makes my day!
May 21st, 2008 at 12:52 pm
today’s meetup is easy (if a ways north) for the Hollywood/Los Angeles folks. I don’t have GPS, but if Google Maps is accurate, it’s in the middle of an intersection that’s bound to be busy at 4pm, but I’m sure we could figure out the crosswalks.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Two questions:
1. Why not go to the nearest meetup rather than the one in your graticule? San Diego’s is mostly ocean, so it’s quite likely that the meetups in neighboring graticules would be physically closer to San Diego.
2. Why not include the graticule coordinates in the hash? That way, each graticule’s destination would be in a different relative location.
May 21st, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Yellowstone National Park fits it’s box almost perfectly.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] Y por último, la discusión en el Blag de XKCD. [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
This is pretty awesome, and what a great way to meet people! My box is mostly western Wisconsin, including Eau Claire. Anyone in that general area?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Oooh, spooky! Today’s location in Wiltshire, England is a stone’s throw (ha ha) from Stonehenge :|
May 21st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
“Oooh, spooky! Today’s location in Wiltshire, England is a stone’s throw (ha ha) from Stonehenge :|”
The aliens have comprimised the algorithm, and they’re coming to get you there.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Mine is telling me to meet in the middle of a lake… time to rent a boat!
May 21st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
oooh. Fun. But weird. And because I live so close to the greenwich meridian, the longitudinal coords reflect about my location when i select the two closest map regions. hey somedays I should be able to do two in one go.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
For everyone complaining about awkward graticules, I’ve generalized the algorithm for an arbitrary parallelogram. If A is the south-western corner, B the north-western corner, and C the south-eastern corner, then once you have the two random numbers from the hash (once you’re at the step where you’ve converted the two hex numbers into decimal), then your location is given as follows: latitude of A + (1st random number)(latitude of B - latitude of A) + (2nd random number)(latitude of C - latitude of A), longitude of A + (1st random number)(longitude of B - longitude of A) + (2nd random number)(longitude of C - longitude of A)
For example, if you want to geohash Central Park on May 9, 1990 (my birthday), you’d go to 40.796303, -73.951414, which, ironically enough, is in the middle of one of the lakes in the park.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm
While i like the idea, i unfortunately live in Israel, where this algorithm completely fails. The odds that a point will fall inside Israel, in a safe place, are rather slim.
Any ideas on how to adapt the algorithm to a general shape rather than a cube?
May 21st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I can think of better ways to spend $4 gas… The algorithm should center on urban areas and keep the distance down.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
What is cool about the cell I live in (34, -118, Central Los Angeles), is that it covers four distinct regions: the Basin, the Valley, the mountains, and the Mojave desert.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:04 pm
I should point out that in my algorithm, there are multiple options about when to truncate (in order to keep your coordinates to 6 decimal places). I recommend truncating at the very end, since truncating beforehand could limit possibilities or create a need to truncate again.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“2. Why not include the graticule coordinates in the hash? That way, each graticule’s destination would be in a different relative location.”
A nice feature of the current setup is that, theoretically, there is a meet-up one degree north, one degree south, one degree east, and one degree west of your current meet-up. Including the graticule coordinates would change this.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm
Doesn’t seem very feasible, though, interesting.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:20 pm
It seems the Salt Lake City, Ut coordinates are over the Utah Lake. I think I’ll check again next week.
Are there any other Utahers here?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:41 pm
Too bad for the people living in western gothenburg, about 95% or so of their square is just sea. Thankfully I live about 2 km east of the line.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:46 pm
For smaller towns (Newmarket Ontario for me) would it be recommended to used the coordinates for a closer and larger city, (such as the Toronto/Hamilton coordinates 1 deg south) or stick with a more accurate location with a (most likely) much smaller turnout?
May 21st, 2008 at 2:50 pm
pretty cool, works good for vancouver, sent me to the middle of golden ears provincial park from surrey central mall
going to be fun trying to get there :3 [considering i walk everywear and have school today, plus replacing my motherboard]
May 21st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
We might have a close contender for second-place - have a cry for the poor sods in Lincoln National Park in South Australia:
http://irc.peeron.com/xkcd/map/map.html?date=2007-11-07&lat=-36&long=135&zoom=10&abs=1
May 21st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
If I didn’t have a job, I would be doing this in Lancaster County, PA.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I’m within 4,000 feet of the intersection of 4 regions, so I think I’ll take my choice of the 4 meetup locations. Today, my options are:
1) an empty lot across the street from a golf course (I vote going to the golf course)
2) In a lake, right next to a bridge… let’s start at the bridge before everyone gets themselves wet.
3) Something with green plants… hill? bog? hunting grounds?
4) Someone’s field.
Sounds like a great time wherever I go!
May 21st, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Ugh, My zone is terrible, You quartered up columbus and now Im right in the corner, half the time my coords are in the deepest of boonies 50 miles away
May 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Ugh columbus is quartered up and im right in a corner, now the coords are always 50 miles away in the boonies
May 21st, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Mine is in Slaughter Creek… I think I’ll pass.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hmmm, the one east of Calgary today is right near my freinds cabin. Goddamnit work, I almost had an excuse to go camping.
May 21st, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Hmmm. My co-ordinates for today put me in the northern part of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. Think they’d refrain from shooting me if I took a printout of this blog? ;)
May 21st, 2008 at 3:52 pm
So, for my box, most of the coordinates are about halfway between here and the college I’ll be attending in the fall.
Something tells me I’ll be making a few extra road trips… XD
Also, Cogito: You and I share the exact same birthday. Which officially makes you awesome.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I don’t think that the graticules should be used,
Instead some common rectangles of land could be agreed upon in the wiki and used for particular cities.
mattender seems to already presented a possible solution for this idea http://blag.xkcd.com/2008/05/21/geohashing/#comment-18498
I would also argue about using the current days DOW open as part of the hash, it has 3 problems, A- it’s only present 5 of 7 days, and B-it’s not appropriate for many people due to the day being mostly over, and C-people have no time to plan and organize meeting up ( or location rejection - due to military base etc)
I might propose something more earthy, like the 7th previous day’s seismic data , that way everyone has a week to prepare for a meetup, really, even something like the a particular airports weather data would work great, and each city could then use their own weather as part of the hash so that each “box’s” people aren’t going to the upper right corner.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Excellent! I’m in the same region as Randall. I’ll go if one’s close to me!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:19 pm
… only xkcd could create such awesome.
Unfortunately, I’m in the UK, so any geohashing will likely be alone…
May 21st, 2008 at 4:23 pm
why did you have to plan the first one on the same day as the free CAKE and English Beat show? hopefully it’s close by so I can do both
May 21st, 2008 at 4:28 pm
What a freakin’ fantastic idea. Well done!
Calgary’s another place that’s divided amongst four “hashpatches”. 51°N passes along 42 or 44 Avenue S., and 114°W is represented by either 24 Street E, Barlow Trail or the creatively-named Meridian Road
Today’s options include:
• The Morley reserve, about ½ mile from Highway 1A (NW)
• A corner lot on Shore Drive, just off Range Road 284 (NE)
• Ranch land west of Stavely, a couple of miles away from SR 527 (SE)
• Fording, BC, about 10 miles north of Elkford (SW). This is probably 250 miles of driving from Calgary, thanks to the mountains. Just a leisurely afternoon stroll, indeed ;)
I see that Washington DC has been mentioned as another location with this problem, and I’m certain there are other cities divided by whole number lat/long lines, thus are positioned across 2 or 4 patches. My proposed solution to this problem is:
When the decimal portion of the latitude is less than .500, the marker will lie in the south half of any given square degree, therefore the north hashpatch is closer. When the decimal is .500 or higher, the converse is true, so you’d head south. Do the same for longitude, and go east or west as appropriate (Cities divided along only one axis obviously only consider one of the above)
If today were Saturday, I and other Calgarians would go north, since the designated latitude is xx.179 ( .500), taking us to the Shore Drive location mentioned above
So you get kind of a Mah-Jongg thing going here, where one tile is placed overlapping 2 or 4 beneath it. You only concern yourself with this one central overlapping tile and the area it covers, which keeps these trips within a more feasible distance and hopefully maximizes the number of people who come out and attend
If I remember when I get home, I’ll clean this up and repost it to the wiki
May 21st, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Heh. Sadly, this doesn’t work for my location.
There’s too much water near where I live, so today’s spot is eight miles off the coast into the bay.
Captcha: Ceremony Evacuated. … Now isn’t THAT forboding.
May 21st, 2008 at 4:32 pm
Hmm. Something went wrong. That’s what I get for using HTML tag brackets as less/greater than signs
That sixth paragraph (If today were Saturday . . .) should read:
. . . xx.179 (lt .500) AND east, since the longitude is yy.682 (gt .500), taking us . . .
Oops ;)
May 21st, 2008 at 4:33 pm
This sounds like great fun. ill have to check where seattle’s ends up this weekend!
May 21st, 2008 at 4:50 pm
To people who are whining about locations being too far or too difficult or not having enought time: thats half the fun. Its an adventure, not a meet organizer. There is a whole subforum for planning meets if you want to plan something and have input into the time and location.
I for one am in Randall’s area and today’s location in Auburn is very close to my parent’s house. :)
May 21st, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Locations being too far away….
is england a bit far?
Don’t think it’ll work with most of you guys.
I’ll have to see if anyone around here is. Being on an island could be a problem even if it is a big one.
Sigh….
May 21st, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Hmm… According to the map, today’s (May 21) destination for everyone in New York City (aside from those in the Lower West Side of Manhattan) is in the Atlantic, a few miles out from the Jersey Shore. And given the proportions of the area, roughly 2/3 to 3/4 of all destinations would end up in water.
I view this as proof that Randall’s Boston bias leads him to want to murder NYC readers.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:13 pm
A mountainside. In Kerry. At least two hours drive away. Well that’s just great.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I think that the scheme, as presented, will only ever produce positive offsets from the integer location. It seems like, to make a more interesting game of it, the decimal portion should be multiplied by two, subtracted by 1, and then added to the full coordinate of the current location.
So, in your example:
(0.857713 * 2 - 1), (0.544544 * 2 - 1) = (0.7154260, 0.0890880)
then adding to the full coordinate of current location:
(37.421542, -122.085589) + (0.7154260, 0.0890880) = (38.1369680, -121.9965010)
Otherwise you’d always be going southwest. :)
May 21st, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Okay, I realize the flaw in my reasoning. If the goal is to produce a single location for people from differing, but nearby, locations to meet - you kinda _have_ to discard the decimal part of the start location. And you want to produce a destination location that’s in the same “bin” as the collection of start locations. So the original algorithm is bueno, and I am totally wrong! I withdraw!!!!
May 21st, 2008 at 5:56 pm
@boazg:
>> While i like the idea, i unfortunately live in Israel, where this algorithm completely fails. The odds that a point will fall inside Israel, in a safe place, are rather slim.
I am working on an Israeli version, will be ready tomorrow (thursday). Stay tuned!
May 21st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Seems to me that, once a day’s Dow data is available and the decimal offsets can be calculated, it’d be trivial to display them *all* on a map, so folks who live near a boundary or near water could easily see where the neighboring points are and pick one that looks safe and legal.
Also, in the case that the point lands in the water, why not just meet on the shore, at the correct latitude but the wrong longitude, in the case of a north-south shoreline, or the correct longitude but the wrong latitude, in the case of an east-west shoreline?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Next weekend day that I’m in town and the meetup point is in the middle of San Francisco Bay, I will be there.
May 21st, 2008 at 7:31 pm
Trying to find the spot for the Columbus, Ohio area but I am not sure how this is supposed to work. Any help for the n00b?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:33 pm
This sucks the tool doesn’t show any date before 1970-01-02
May 21st, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Epoch fail :)
May 21st, 2008 at 8:25 pm
I don’t know if you’ve had time to figure it out for yourself yet or not, Dan, but the reason a different location turns up for Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays is because the date, and not just the DOW figure, are both thrown into the hash.
Due to a bit of avalanche effect, the change of that one number, by just one means an entirely different hash (a significant intention behind MD5) and therefore a completely new “Random” location.
So that raises the question, should the meeting place be based upon Friday or Saturday’s date?
May 21st, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Ahh, this is so excellent! Although, I have the same question as the one above me, should meet-ups be based on Saturday or Friday’s date?
That aside, though, I look forward to many a summertime adventure. Thank you, Randall Munroe. :D
May 21st, 2008 at 9:08 pm
I like the “mah-jongg” idea, Gylbert, and would recommend it for the Chicago area (most of the city is in one graticule, but the metro area as a whole is more or less split into four — plus this would take care of the whole “my meetup location is in the lake” problem.)
Today’s Options in Chicagoland are:
Quadrant I — Somebody’s house in Deerfield. Probably wouldn’t appreciate people tromping through their back yard, but there is a park w/a baseball diamond just down the road. Incidentally, this is one of the few times this quadrant won’t produce a “seaplane” result.
Quadrant II — Conveniently located on a road, but so far in the middle of nowhere that the satellites won’t go to maximum zoom. Supposedly near “Irene, IL”, though I’m not sure that’s a real town.
Quadrant III — See Quadrant II
Quadrant IV — What appears to be a farmer’s field just off of I-57, on the northern edge of Bourbonnais.
Under mah-jongg rules if this were Saturday, we’d meet up in Deerfield, which seems reasonable. Though I wouldn’t stop anyone from taking photos out in those fields!
May 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
@FisherJ and @Pandora:
Saturday meetups are calculated using Saturday’s date, as can be confirmed by working through Randall’s 2008-05-17 example.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:54 pm
> Finally, all my stock market manipulation has a purpose! Let’s see if I get this in my living room…
I thought of that - but you need to break MD5 as well. By tomorrow.
May 21st, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Unsurprisingly, my quadrant includes a full 98% of the state of Rhode Island. It would suck for anyone in Montauk who wanted to meet up, though.
May 21st, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Oh No! I drowned!
Perth Australia ends up off the coast of Yanchep
May 21st, 2008 at 11:09 pm
This reminds me of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, like when they got the coordinates to go to Devil’s Tower…It’d be funny if that became one of the meeting places…
May 21st, 2008 at 11:27 pm
[...] [] [3] Main Page - Geo Hashing [wiki.XKCD] [4] Melbourne, Australia - Geo Hashing [wiki.XKCD] [5] Geohashing (2008-May-21) [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 11:33 pm
The Newark graticule is pretty good. That’s the one to the west of the NYC graticule, that picks up Battery Park, Red Hook and Staten Island, and the triangle of Pennsylvania that sticks in near Trenton. Mostly, though, it’s north Jersey. Almost all landmass, except for Raritan Bay. In fact, I speculated on the wiki that this one could very well be the most densely populated graticule in the United States.
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:31 am
Hmm… I’m stuck with Lake Ontario in the middle of my region. About 60% of the time, the location is out in the middle of the lake. If only the algorithm could be set to avoid water… Maybe by using a coordinate system only defined on dry land?
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:38 am
Hey anyone in the Oregon-esque area thinking about going? My lil bro and I are thinking of doing it, either the portland one or near Salem
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:39 am
[...] Munroe proposed the awesomely geeky idea of geohashing via the xkcd comic and blag recently. The idea basically involves using the MD5 hash of a date combined with the opening value [...]
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:25 am
I have a whole different problem than most people here….being Jewish, I can’t really travel on Saturday, which is our holy day. I’d love to go out adventuring, and wind up in some place I didn’t know existed, filled with fellow xkcdians - but I can’t do it on Saturdays. >_<
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:38 am
Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!Wibble!
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:52 am
Tamir, not that I’m an expert on Jewish Law, but doesn’t the Sabbath end at Sunset? This would allow you to turn up several hours late and find the pub that they all wandered off to…
May 22nd, 2008 at 9:58 am
[...] ????? ????? ????? ????? ??????? ?????? ??? xkcd ???????? ????? ????? ?????? ?????? ???? ???????? ????. ????????? ???? ?? ?????? ???? ?????? ?? ???? ?’??? ????? ???? ?????? ??-???? ???-???? ??????? ?????? ?????? ??????? ????? ?????? ??? ???. ??? ?? ????????? ???? ????? ???. [...]
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Shouldn’t the opening quote for thursday be available by now? It says “Market data is not available for 2008-05-22″ on mine at 16:23 CET, but by now DOW should have been available for an hour.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:47 am
Hmm - now it has appeared, but only after 10.30 EDT - isn’t that an hour late?
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:01 am
It occurs to me that there is a simple modification to the game that both somewhat reduces the expected amount of driving required, solves all of the issues with the locations of the boundaries and individual locations being unreachable, and even makes the meetup groups non-constant: given that the algorithm lays a regular grid of location points around the globe, rather than going to the one in the same box as you are in, go to the closest reachable meetup to your current location.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:14 am
I find a problem with geohashing because i live in Denmark, the meeting places is often at sea :-)
For instance on the 2007-05-02 (55.226641°, 12.686399°) is at sea.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:18 am
> Nice job, Randall–you just broke a piece off Manhattan–and joined it with ***New Jersey***…
Finally Jersey get’s its claim on the statue of liberty!
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:23 pm
A friend of mine suggested geocaching, and I thought “eh, maybe” but I like this idea: just pick a random spot, and go see what’s there. Yesterday it was an apartment complex, but with a massive State Park taking up a quarter of the graticule (Anchorage, Alaska), we should be in for some fun times. Darn you Munroe, getting me all curious about stuff. Now I gotta buy a GPS receiver…
Kim H: San Diego, California has that same problem; a significant majority of their area is either in Mexico or out at sea. One suggestion offered on the wiki was to “correct” the meeting point by moving it 0.5 degrees inland. It’s important to clearly define /when/ the correction should be applied, though; if the uncorrected location is already on land, people might get confused and arrive at two different places. Others (like jonored right before you) have suggested going to the nearest accessible point, regardless of whether it’s in the same graticule as your home town.
May 22nd, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Mikhail, you’re entirely correct. And, in fact, that might be what I end up doing. ^_^
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:07 pm
oh my, i ended way away from my home
this geohashing RULES!!
anyone near Mexico city, see you there (i hope so)
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:44 pm
@CID
XKCD fans near mexico city! Email me santiago1717 at gmail!!! I live in mexico city we could play this next saturday or something
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:53 pm
@DFectuoso
Why should they email you? Just show up, and they will too. Part of the fun is not knowing who will be there, and meeting new people, not just people out of your inbox…
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:51 pm
I have to agree that for San Francisco if you don’t have a car or can’t afford to drive almost to Santa Cruz and back it’s not really very feasible. Not to mention the problems with water.
Cutting the graticles in half or smaller would at least help with this somewhat. Not to mention the many ideas to have more effective divisions created for each area.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Man, about 3/4 of my Graticule is in Lake Michigan.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:28 pm
You don’t have to go to the location within your graticule. If you’re closer to the location in a different graticule (or it’s easier to get to), just go there instead.
May 22nd, 2008 at 8:38 pm
Why not multiply the resulting fractions by 10 (or 16, whichever) and make geohashing chains?
This would place the location in a different graticule and you could have a road trip whenever you want.
It would also be cool to see when this formed loops.
May 22nd, 2008 at 10:28 pm
What do you think would be the best way to get geohashing coordinates for a city like Sydney which straddles four coordinate points? Take the coordinate which falls in the centre of the city? Or the one which has the most amount of land?
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Rats. 41, -88 was just a few miles from my house today. But I didn’t read xkcd this week until now. It looks like it was a nice open (private?) field.
I would have brought my Great Dane and German Shepherd (and maybe even my wife - but she just turned her nose up at the idea.) We will see what the weekend brings for 41, -88 or 41, -87.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:59 pm
Twin Cities nerd right here, anyone willing to meet up?
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:40 am
I believe there is a bug in the default implementation at http://xkcd.com/geohashing, caused by bad data. There are a bunch of Dow opening values with carriage returns on the end. The carriage return is affecting the hash. I’m pretty sure that it’s not stripping out whitespace before hashing. I’d know for sure, but either the website died, or my IP got blocked for poking around in your bad data. :)
Also, 1970-3-19 is missing
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:38 am
Actually, I believe there is a bug in my pants. And by bug, I don’t mean insect ;-)
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:42 am
The host irc.peeron.com is down.
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:28 am
When i zoom in and out, the meetup location changes (only happened once the host was running again…)
May 23rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
It might just be me, but when I zoomed in to see where it had labelled, it moved. not sure it’s supposed to be doing that. I can even keep on the same box on the map, no zooming, and click update on the date entered again and the site moved. :(
Anyone else having this problem? If it helps, I’m in the UK so scrolling over from the US and then zooming to see it.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
Seems there is a bug in the irc.peeron.com implementation. Here’s some debug, same input, two different tries:
Graticule: (32, -111) - (33, -110)
Market open on 2008-05-23 = 12620.90000000000000000000
MD5(2008-05-23-12620.900000000000000000000): a8ade96b116b198d2e520ce6dad4f4b6
Graticule: (32, -111) - (33, -110)
Market open on 2008-05-23 = 12620.9000000000000000000000
MD5(2008-05-23-12620.90000000000000000000000): 9085f58a1180363acc0d76ceb8ad9dd7
Different number of decimal places in the Market Open value is causing the problem.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:51 am
I’m having the same problem. Every time I click update the location changes. If there’s a fix by Saturday I’d love to try to get to the Clovis, NM. meet.
Awesome idea Ryan!!
May 23rd, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Although the official tool is not working, the one at http://geohashing.electronicwar.net/ seems to be fine.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:20 pm
Official tool works fine for me. Does anybody know if that reservoir beach near Clinton for the Boston-area meetup is public?
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:25 pm
And the electronicwar one seems to be buggy. Not only does it give me different results than the official one, it gives me results over water telling me they aren’t over water and they’re accessible.
May 23rd, 2008 at 2:36 pm
If you trust Wikipedia’s NYC co-ords (40,-74), the NYC meetup is at http://maps.google.com/maps?q=40.126648+-74.5475331&t=p&z=13, by a creek outside of Trenton, NJ.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Seems to be an Internet Explorer only bug
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Ah yes, Firefox seems to use two decimal places for the Market Open, so gets a consistent result.
May 23rd, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Geocaching has the advantage that you get to swap treasure. So what if everyone brings some old tat to their geohash meet? It could be like a 21st century Saturday Swap Shop (British 80’s TV programme) - “John is offering a python script to calculate geohashing co-ordinates (used twice). He would like a Star Wars figurine. Or a girlfriend…”
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:08 pm
For reference: I’m in the 44/-93 graticle.
Fun comic! I’ve got a couple problems with the Saturday 4 p.m. meetup:
1. It’s Bass Angling Opener this weekend in Minnesota. I actually WANT the coordinates to be in the middle of a lake! Alas, they appear to be along the side of a road in rural S. Minn., which leads to…
2. 135-mile round trip this Sat. -> $27.43 gas plus 3 hr. driving time -> pass. Cost, alas, is a factor.
Your comic does generate some interesting alternative ideas. One I like is the following:
1. Choose a city, town, burg… enter the name in a map site (let’s say Google). Google will return a consistent point for that town: Chicago’s is just by City Hall near Lasalle and Randolph. This works for small towns, too (Hesston, KS — never been there, but telecommuted in for a contract I.T. gig — gets its Googlecenter on Ridge Road between Randall and Smith). Every town APPEARS to get a consistent Googlecenter.
2. Do the MD5 dance on the following:
yyyy-mm-dd–
3. Agree on the following:
distance units
meetup time
4. Use agreed portions of the MD5 to determine:
distance from Googlecenter
compass direction (normalize part of MD5 to degrees or 2pi-radians)
I may have missed something, but the bones are there… adjustments can be made for coastal towns.
Enjoy the comic: thanks for all the fish…
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Step 3 above should read: yyyy-mm-dd-[town name]-[postal code]
treating the tokens like… well… tokens (don’t put in the square brackets, that is).
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Is it just me or is the tool on xkcd.com/geohashing broken? Every time I click Update, it appends an extra 0 to the end of the market open value, thus changing the location.
Also, Vancouver is cut off about half way, so only about half of the Lower Mainland is included depending which region you are in. Can the map be modified to have a different region size so that I could maybe get rid of all the mountainous area and make it so the geohashes are more accessible?
May 23rd, 2008 at 8:03 pm
This vaguely reminds me of a CS project I did a while ago, which was a fractal landscape generator. It used the standard triangle-subdividing midpoint-displacement thing, but computed the amount to displace the midpoints based on a hash of the endpoints. So given a starting triangle, you could zoom into part of it, without computing the whole thing, and fly around. In practice, though, I ended up with lots of skinny little triangles when one zoomed in and the other didn’t. It was fun though.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:14 pm
Too bad I’m not in Santa Barbara anymore. This weekend’s coordinates there seem very accessible.
May 25th, 2008 at 6:45 am
For those of you in Chicago and Washington DC who are complaining about bad divvying up of your cities, I might recommend the Israeli solution to this one - make up your own granicule that’s more convenient and/or modify the algorithm so it gives you useful results more often (http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/Israel) If you have someone with access to a webhost, have someone set up their own implementation of the algorithm that is aware of your modifications.
May 26th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
This is cool. Unfortunately I’m currently in (12,77), South Bangalore (India), with no transport, and it’s hard to get around *anywhere*, let along trek miles out of the city… so unless it happens to fall on a nearby spot, I’m unlikely to make it… But it’s still cool!
May 26th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
This all reminds me of a thing called The Random Geographical survey done here in New Zealand a while ago.
The fellow generated a set of random coordinates by using map indexes for maps in NZ and then the random points within that. He then attempted to visit every place identified and take a picture or two there. That was the art work.
Some of the places required major three day hikes to reach etc..
http://halo.gen.nz/rgs/moss.htm
.. what with NZ having a lot of inaccessible wilderness country you get that.
May 28th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Yes, in fact, New Zealand has bountiful fields from which one can graze on the grass of yore for hours. This too, reminds me of a little story I wrote back in ye old yonder years, entitled “The story of New Zealand and how I came to become Cheif Rambletasm.” Oh dear boy, what what and all that. Crumpets and vegimite?
May 30th, 2008 at 9:32 am
It may be a better idea to get the co-ordinates of where you want to go and check dates and stock prices to decide when to travel there.
A cheaper alternative strategy, given the cost of travel and the state of the world, would be to get the co-ordinates to where you already live and calculate the cost of living and how long you can afford to keep your house.
Just a thought ;¬)
May 31st, 2008 at 11:21 pm
My region ( in washington state) cuts my small ( 3-square mile) town in half, I seriously live 3 blocks away from the boundry line.
June 12th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
Thanks..
June 30th, 2008 at 1:31 am
soma…
soma institute…
July 1st, 2008 at 8:52 pm
thanks
July 5th, 2008 at 1:12 pm
new jersey fun places…
You must put a lot of work into blogging this much!…
July 6th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
dude!!!
please help I’m from natal in south Africa
is there a way to get this to work for South Africa?
July 7th, 2008 at 11:41 am
[...] I (finally) looked into geohashing, because Randy has been posting about it exclusively on the blag (sic) and I have been marginally curious yet not all that driven to find [...]
July 9th, 2008 at 3:34 am
I am the first person on google to say:
GEOHASHING IS SO RANDOM!
July 11th, 2008 at 7:45 am