An activity dubbed “Geohashing” officially launched on May 21, 2008. This came courtesy of an algorithm published in xkcd webcomic #426. Additionally the author further refined it on the xkcd blog. The algorithm generates random coordinates around the world each day for people to explore on their own or to gather together as a group. It’s perhaps the world’s first Spontaneous Adventure Generator.
Fortunately xkcd allows image embedding via a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. That allows me to reproduce the image, above.
How It Works
I’m not sure if I can even attempt to explain the algorithm. However, feel free to check it out on your own. It involves the concatenation of the current date and the daily opening price of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (of all things). Then it’s fed through a cryptographic hash function to create a string of 32 hexadecimal digits. Next, split it in half, and convert it back into base-10. That becomes the decimal portion of a latitude and longitude coordinate. Or something like that. It’s seriously twisted and devilishly clever. I love it.
People actually do meet up as a result of these random coordinates. The website even includes a number of photographs of those happenings. I found out about this in a Slashdot article. Apparently a Geohashing encounter came across an armed and angry rancher who apparently didn’t appreciate that his property popped-up as the random coordinate for the San Francisco area that day. The Geohashing website explains that this was a “bit overblown” though.
Conclusions
Will I be participating? Probably not. Like geocaching, it’s a little too organized for my taste. On the other hand, as an aficionado of odd activities that interlace with geographic coordinates (remember when I dragged the family to a cornfield in central Wisconsin to the 45X90 Spot?), I do have a healthy respect for this new activity and I wish them well. If any of you happen to participate in these activities, do please post a comment and let me know how it went.
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