Almost certainly an exercise in lateral thinking, I expect ;-). Sounds like
the sort of spurious signpost they put up at tourist attractions etc. to
emphasize their remoteness - I'm sure I remember seeing one in the middle of
the 4077th MASH every Wednesday night at 9pm. Shows my age, eh?
Still, all the ingenious solutions have enlivened my week considerably so
far - keep 'em coming! If it wasn't for Mapinfo-L I'd probably be out there
going "postal" with some of my more "esteemed" helpdesk customers by now.
---------------------------------------------
David Booth
Senior GIS Officer
Merseyside Information Service
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: 25 April 2001 09:26
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: RE: MI-L A Mapping Puzzle for Savants
>
> This message is in MIME format. Since your mail reader does not understand
> this format, some or all of this message may not be legible.
>
>
> So did you use Paris, Texas or Paris, France and Sydney, Canada or Sydney,
> Australia.
>
> I think its not so much a question, as a cautionary tale about not
> recording
> meta data :)
>
> Andrew Young
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bill Huber [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: 24 April 2001 18:53
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: MI-L A Mapping Puzzle for Savants
>
>
> At 09:15 AM 4/24/01 -0600, Bill Thoen wrote:
> >Say you come upon a sign that says the following:
> > Paris 4658 miles
> > <snip four lines>
> > Johannesburg 9092 miles
> >How would you determine where the sign is located?
>
> ...
>
> >But I'm surprised that with all the GIS mapping power held by this group
> >that few have tried the obvious: map the cities, and draw circular
> >buffers around them at the specified distances.
>
> Maybe we're all too familiar with the limitations of our GIS software :-)
>
> OK, I broke down and solved the problem with Excel using a spherical model
>
> of the earth. One good solution I can find (there are many good
> solutions,
> but they are all close to each other) is near Elk City, Kansas, USA, at
> longitude -95.833, latitude 37.350. This solution is likely within 20
> miles of the truth (that's an approximate 95% confidence limit), is within
>
> 14 miles of agreeing with all the given distances, and errs in the
> distances up to +-0.22%. This is as good as one would expect given that
> the locations of the reference cities cannot be pinned down more precisely
>
> than 10-20 miles (e.g., is the sign measuring from their centers or to
> their borders?) and given the almost 1/300 flattening of the earth
> relative
> to the spherical model.
>
> Evidently using calipers (my earlier solution suggesting Salt Lake City)
> or
> string (another poster's solution suggesting Wisconsin) on a small globe
> are not very accurate methods. Kudos to Flavio who suggested the
> "geographic center of the world:" Lebanon, KS, longitude -95.560, latitude
>
> 39.779, about 30 miles away.
>
> Given Vos Savant's record (see the "Marilyn is Wrong!" site at
> http://www.wiskit.com/marilyn/marilyn.html), it is possible the published
> solution will devolve into some inane chestnut like "just ask the nearest
> native," its techno equivalent, "pull a reading off your GPS unit" or the
> full-time consultant's variant, "check your calendar: that will tell you
> where you are today."
>
> --Bill Huber
> Consultant and sometime GIS aficionado
>
>
>
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