Mapquest does longitude
My friend Itai’s sailing the South Pacific right now on a three month sabbatical. He’s been sending occassional updates by email: in the little villages of Fiji, the tentacles of the global Internet reach into local cafes.
The Subject lines of these emails describe his location in time and space: presumably localtime, with map coordinates. I finally got around to Googling for a way to display a map of an area, given coordinates, as opposed to the usual thing where you put in a street address or intersection.
After a few missed attempts and wandering around in K-12 webpages that teach children what a map is, I finall came across this About.com page that linked me over to a MapQuest page that lets you search by coordinate. About.com is more useful than I’ve given it credit for.
Anyway, Itai’s latest location is: 17’06.77S 179’05.57E. There’s a minor conversion for decimal seconds, and you may have to zoom out a few levels on he MapQuest page to get a better view of the area, but the tool works nicely.
I should check to see if he wants his emails posted on his website, perhaps with MapQuest links to illustrate where he’s been. I also came across Confluence.org, which seeks to obtain photographs of every map coordinate in the world. There’s nothing at Fiji right now.