Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Null Island, the most real of fictional places [pdf]

arxiv.org

70 pointsHard_Space37 comments

I’m just glad (0,0) doesn’t map to a “real” location with people, or even just an actual landmass. Imagine if it mapped to Times Square…

I'm sure I've heard of a similar story, of a default value or default IP address resolving to an otherwise quiet village in America. I remember hearing they get a lot of visitors, especially from people investigating a crime or something. I can't for the life of me work out what to google to find it though.

Maybe the hive mind can help?

You might be thinking about the geographical center of U.S. in rural Kansas which is the default geolocation for U.S. IPs.

There was a widespread story about it summarised here. Apparently the lawsuit was settled.

https://www.cracked.com/article_31344_the-maddening-story-of...

(Edited for premature send)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MaxMind

https://gizmodo.com/fnord-1830758394 might be what you want.

I like how you replaced the title with `fnord`.

I'm not young but I found out about the meaning of fnord just an hour ago by randomly clicking through to its Wikipedia article from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Undoubtedly I'm about to experience more Baader-Meinhof related to this soon.

beyond having one of the best extended fight scenes in a movie, I think that "they live" is as close to Hollywood acknowledging fnords as you're bound to get.

Now you made me wonder whether any logfile analysis SEOware is ever going to acknowledge the fnords I use to shorten overlong links.

they probably don't see them ...

A favourite hobby of mine in the last has been watching They Live with a friend without telling them the plot.

that's genius.

I'm going to have to give that a try - I think the hard part is finding someone who hasn't seen the movie.

I haven't seen it. What pitch would you give me as a possibly-interested viewer?

I don't have an answer, but I do have an anecdote.

some friends and I had been having spurious movie nights over the years, and decided to give Vampire's Kiss a go. we scoured the horror section of blockbuster and were unable to find it, so we asked. "oh, that's in the comedy section."

Buffeted by this knowledge, we told the movie night host that we found it, and were ready to go, and left it at that. Later, the host, perplexed, stopped the movie and said, "either this is the stupidest vampire movie I've ever seen, or it's supposed to be a comedy." once our laughter stopped, we explained, and continued the movie in peace.

so, I'm not sure I have a pitch, but drop all expectations and just enjoy a classic John Carpenter movie.

Just putting the links for other fellow HN users and spare them a few seconds while searching for the terms :-)

fnord, a word to indicate irony/humor - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fnord

Baader–Meinhof phenomenon or frequency illusion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

Uhm, that's not what it indicates. The fnords aren't funny or anything at all, they little things that go unnoticed. They're around you but you never see them, even though they (may) have meaning or effect on you.

Like parts of links that you click on but don't really see.

Seems legit, since when I read that article I thought to myself – weird, I have spent a lot of time on the internet and I don't think I ever encountered this word.

Its heyday was before the web. The book is from the seventies. I expect many, perhaps most people who were on usenet in the late eighties knew the word.

Or any Robert Anton Wilson fans (there are dozens of us, etc).

I recently watched this Half as Interesting video about the property you're talking about [1]. It happened because the property is at the lat/lon of the center of America, rounded to the nearest integers.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh6zanS_epw - The Glitch That Kept Sending The FBI To A Tiny Kansas Farm

I think the noise can be easily distinguished from real data.

Just remove EXACT 0.000000, 0.000000 pairs and allow anything else and it'll be fine.

In the paper, a lot of locations around the exact null island occur. One reason given is another coordinate system mapping to distance meters from null position.

Right, and if the habit of ignoring within N km of (0,0) becomes widespread then we've effectively created a GPS black hole.

> created a GPS black hole

Many navigation systems exist beside GPS...... which is itself one of four Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).

These systems are all still capable of returning a position of (0,0) though. My point was that if it becomes commonplace for software to filter points around “null island” then that would gradually permeate various libraries and create a little blind spot

Of course....

....and my point was that positioning solutions should not solely assume GPS, otherwise some nasty surprises can lie in wait.

If the (0, 0) GPS coordinate became a "black hole" it would not affect anyone with the exception of the Navy, maybe. What's so bad about this idea?

Read the thread, it's not just (0,0) but (0,0) plus an unspecified radius of some kilometres. That might be ok if you're a Software Developer in San Francisco, but if you're a fisherman or crew on a merchant vessel off East Africa you may feel differently.

Greenwich (London) would be a more likely populated place to have had the origin point.

Jerusalem during the Middle Ages.

"Jerusalem was generally represented in the center of the map." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T_and_O_map

"In the center of the world lies Jerusalem, sacred to both Christianity and Judaism." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatus_map

These maps were also oriented with east at the top (the "orient" in "oriented".)

That would place the zeroth parallel on something else than the equator (the only great circle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_circle) that continuously gets mapped to itself as the earth rotates).

I don’t think that was ever on the table, if only because it would make time reckoning difficult, and one of the goals of the International Meridian Conference was to create a “standard of time reckoning throughout the world” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Meridian_Confere...))

Four visits to the actual (0,0):

https://confluence.org/confluence.php?lat=0&lon=0

Most recent (known) visit is from 2019 by the Russian missile cruiser "Marshal Ustinov" http://web.archive.org/web/20191107152059/https://eng.mil.ru...

Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21854780 - Dec 2019 (56 comments)

Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552176 - Nov 2019 (1 comment)

Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19329101 - March 2019 (1 comment)

If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12090980 - July 2016 (54 comments)

The Republic of NULL Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11734180 - May 2016 (15 comments)

The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11600396 - April 2016 (14 comments)

The Republic of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10952593 - Jan 2016 (2 comments)

A Brief History of Null Island - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10949292 - Jan 2016 (7 comments)

This paper is remarkably thoughtful and detailed. I'm friends with some of the folks who promoted Null Island early on and it's nice to see someone look seriously at the implications of what started out mostly as a sort of joke.

I have a Null Island buoy sticker on my laptop: https://www.nsgic.org/null-island

Null island is like the opposite of the Bermuda triangle. In fact, maybe they form a portal...

Well there is at least a weather buoy there https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010

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