the degree confluence project

January 8, 2001 10:05 AM

the degree confluence project is an attempt to photograph and document some 11,000+ intersections of longitude and latitude and you can help!
posted by centrs (11 comments total)

Cool! If no-one else does it by summer I'm gonna paddle out to 42 N 70 W and take a picture of the water!
posted by nicwolff at 10:33 AM on January 8, 2001

Just because something can be done . . .
posted by grimmelm at 10:52 AM on January 8, 2001

One of my favorite confluence stories is this one - where a 75-year-old farmer learns why his property is cool.
posted by gluechunk at 11:24 AM on January 8, 2001

This looks like almost as much fun as geocaching.

I've got a jeep and a sense of adventure - too bad I don't have a GPS receiver...

-Mars
posted by Mars Saxman at 11:58 AM on January 8, 2001

I thought Geocaching might be fun. A few months ago I found myself reading all I could about geocaching and bought a GPS receiver.

I had a good time looking for these caches. Not long after I found my first cache, and appropriately cached something behind, I decided to take a larger trip. This cache required a long hike to a particular cache, it was 50 miles off road.

It would be the first real test of my gps skills. Trekking to a cache can be a lot different than a hike. There are usually no trails, no signs and no real way to find your way out if your gps were to break.

I had to camp on the way in and out. The first night was quite long. I didn't know if I could handle another night, and hoped that I could get to the cache and back to camp before dark the next day. With excitement and anticipation I hiked onward and found the cache.

The best part of any cache was to see what had been left behind for me. This particular cache was one of the most horrible experiences for me, ever. The cache was under a nice pile of rocks. To my surprise, the cache consisted of a few photographs. They were Polaroid shots.

The pictures were pictures of my camp from the night before! My tent, my extinguished fire and my pack which was hung in a tree, were in one picture. Another shot had a picture of my boots outside my tent.

Needless to say, I bolted out of there faster than you could ever imagine. I ran a marathon in less time than most expert runners. To this day, I don't know who was playing this game with me, but I'll never geocahce again.

...actually, I'm kidding, it sounds like a pretty cool game to me. The geocache that is.
posted by tomplus2 at 1:22 PM on January 8, 2001 [3 favorites]

In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittesville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary searching for a geocache. One year later inside the cache, their footage was found.
posted by palegirl at 1:39 PM on January 8, 2001

Heh. Man, I hope we just saw the spawn of an Urban Legend. Kudos, tomplus2.
posted by cCranium at 1:43 PM on January 8, 2001

hehe.
posted by tiaka at 3:33 PM on January 8, 2001

I love the DCP. I have a couple of points in MI all staked out. Maybe I can get Quonsar to drive. . .

Grimmelm, this is nothing. Try Where's George? for truly inspirational pointlessness.
posted by rodii at 8:25 PM on January 8, 2001

What I like about this site is that it shows that there are older "virtual worlds" than the one connected by TCP/IP. After all, latitude and longitude are just an alternative (and artificial) way of seeing the world, as is a domain name, or the dotted quad of an IP address. And by using GPS to show off these artificially-significant places, technology (that great abstracter) bestows a new reality upon the abstract.
posted by holgate at 9:10 PM on January 8, 2001

Ten Thousand Points (plus two) to tomplus2
posted by Optamystic at 11:24 PM on January 8, 2001