If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island

That MinuteEarth video from 7 July was after Atlas Obscura covered it in May (http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/null-island-is-one-of-t... ), which got mentioned on Fark (http://www.fark.com/comments/9138647/Null-Island-is-one-of-m... ) and 99% Invisible's tumblr (http://99percentinvisible.tumblr.com/post/144266916879/null-... ).

The piece at AO was in turn a repost of an article Tim St. Onge wrote in April for the Library of Congress blog, at https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2016/04/the-geographical-oddity-o... . The article was further covered by ScienceAlert (http://www.sciencealert.com/welcome-to-null-island-the-most-... ) .

The WSJ journal is strongly based on the St. Onge's article, including re-use of the depiction of Null Island and quoting St. Onge. It does not contain anything which comes from the MinuteEarth video. It's as if the WSJ and MinuteEarth were independent works based on ideas that were floating around a few months ago, where both sites thought it was worth more coverage.

Interesting how these things move around and become part of the zeitgeist, yes? I see no need to cast aspersions upon the WSJ.

EDIT: the comments in the LoC article point to a 2009 tweet about Null Island, at https://twitter.com/chriscurrie/status/1546199025 and that nullisland.com was registered in 2008.

That is a lot of activity on Hacker News. But I wouldn't put those other sites in the same category as the WSJ. Doesn't look like any of them are even news sites.

It's the same issue, except that you know some geographical area.

And that reminds me of this gem: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/53-in-the-desert/

I find it really astonishing that law enforcement is using IP geolocation to raid homes or investigate. In western Europe this would be unthinkable as police or state agencies solely rely on requesting customer information from providers (based on the IP address).

It's a battery pack with 84 D-cell alkaline batteries. Source:

http://tao.ndbc.noaa.gov/proj_overview/pubs/mil96paper.html

> "The board draws approximately 1 mW when in the sleep state, and around 250 mW when sampling sensors. The entire system averages 10 to 15 mW including power for all sensors, sampling, and Argos telemetry. By using switching power supplies where possible, the same battery space available in the original ATLAS tube will provide a conservative 18-month deployment life with a battery pack comprised of 84 D-cell alkaline batteries. The low power system allows the use of inexpensive batteries instead of solar cells or wind generators. These would attract vandals and add significantly to the acquisition and maintenance cost of each mooring."

This bouy is fascinating. It has a sub-surface set of sensors and check out the description of how those underwater sensors communicate with the main board of the bouy:

> "The sensors transmit and receive data from the buoy with an inductive coupling technique."

[...]

> "The tube drives the cable while the sensor drives the secondary coil on the inductive element. An FSK method of modulating the signal onto the cable is used with 2 kHz for a logic one, and 4 kHz for a logic zero. With a 2-kbaud data transfer rate, a one bit is 1 cycle and a zero bit is 2 cycles. By having data frequencies that are exact integers of the baud rate, the bits can be phase coherent at their edges, thus eliminating a source of jitter. The data uses standard ASCII hex format with one start and one stop bit."

An interesting sidenote - Russians used to use RTGs for their buoys and lighthouses in remote places of the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta-M

Well, Null Island has whatever size Null Island has (which is hard to ascertain, given that it doesn't exist) -- but the coordinate (0,0) doesn't have any area at all, it's a point.

I see a lot of geocoding at work and one of the real mysteries is that null island is a fair few miles around. 0,0 isn't good enough for some people; 0.00001,0.00002, etc always have to get involved. Reliably catching that variant of the "Actually, I think your address is wrong" error needs a null island at least 50 miles across.

If I had to guess, there's a UI somewhere that allows people to drag a pin to the exact right location when it isn't close enough, and feeds that back into a geocoding database. They can only drag for so long across the Atlantic before they give up.

> Null isn't zero ;)

Actually, there were some systems where NULL /wasn't/ zero! On those systems, IIRC, your result could be different depending on how you interpret the bits:

    // compares to NULL
    // (not the macro, but the compiler constant; i.e. resigning NULL does nothing)
    // (even if NULL isn't 0)
    if (ptr == 0)

    // compares to 0
    if (reinterpret_cast<int>(ptr) == 0)

On x86 and ARM, those would both compare to 0 (don't get pedantic; NULL is 0 here), but on those old systems, the first one could be true, but not the second. Pretty weird.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2597142/when-was-the-null...

In Oracle, the empty string is null.

Classical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug

Yes, that is quite common in embedded systems. In practice you often end up either:

1) Shipping the debug build, because it's been tested and it's fast enough anyway.

2) Always building the release build, because the debug build doesn't work. All those DEBUG_ASSERT's sit unused.

Found, perhaps, the source: https://github.com/gnip/null-island

Will contact the repo owner to learn about the license...