The Geographical Oddity of Null Island | Hacker News Reader

The Geographical Oddity of Null Island

blogs.loc.gov

58 pointsThevet14 comments

What geocoders use (0,0) as an error condition?

Outputting a valid value as an error flag seems like a pretty bad idea - is this actually common?

Extremely.

In part because the usual exceptional value, -1, is also a valid latitude and longitude.

Sure, but why not raise an exception? Or return a separate flag? Or even do something like (999, 999) (clearly not valid, at least for latitude)?

The 999 idea is good, but as for the other ones, oftentimes this data is recorded in, e.g., a spreadsheet, text file, or vanilla SQL table, so there's no way to throw an exception. You could store something like #N/A or NULL in the bad cells, but a lot of bad code and spreadsheet formulas will interpret that as 0 again, and then we're back where we started.

Plenty of natural errors can send you to (0, 0). Any accidental multiplication by 0 will, for example.

The strangest coordinates I've ever seen were from around (118, -183), which also didn't appear to be a hand-selected error case, but the numbers would work for one. Personally, I like to think those are the coordinates of Santa Claus's house.

I expect a visit or two to Null Island every time I do a Google Map that has some layer of sophistication to it.

I used Google Maps embed last week and a 'elementary error' in my code meant that I was getting 'null island' quite consistently. I had a string with the latitude and longitude in, I just needed a bit of code to write out the map marker and center location for the frontend javascript. I was taking a string with 'lat, lon' and parsing it into an array, but doing it wrongly, i.e. with my own special syntax, so, instead of sending the latitude as '53.1234' I was sending the latitude of '5' and the longitude of '3' (having not made the string into an array).

I also had to battle with loading the map under a CSS in-page 'tab' (rather than browser tab) and you have to remember how to get it to load centered and not as a grey rectangle. Therefore getting to Null Island rather than a grey rectangle or a js error is pretty good. I then know I just have some problem like described earlier of mixing the lat/lon somehow.

Consequently for me, 'Null Island' rather than '-999,+999' is a good thing, I can at least load a map.

But you load a map with incorrect data. Wouldn't a good JS error be much more explicit? I do a lot of geospatial data crunching, and the thought of having wrong but valid data injected into my pipelines makes me uneasy.

According to the Stockholm City Bikes app for iPhone, Null Island has been my permanent location since last May.

Unfortunately, there are no bike stations in the vicinity. It's lonely out here.

The DC Bikeshare app always starts me there too before moving me to the correct location.

There was a town in my country that was bragging during the winter a few years ago that you could monitor all the slowplows in real time on the Web.

I checked the page, and sure enough it worked. On a hunch I zoomed out, only to see a couple of them parked on null island

Been there, bought the mug: http://www.nullisland.com

Is it anything like Pen Island?

I'm surprised you survived the smoke monster.

Uber always dropped me there when I started it (before I stopped using Uber for Lyft).

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