Some people are taking this geohasing thing way seriously. If I weren’t going to Highlands, NC tomorrow, I think I would join these crazies. I may do it some other day. This seems as good a way to meet people I might like as anyway. Course, I’m totally no actually in the Denver graticules, but since my area is also split into 4, it’s also pretty confusing. Just going to theirs (if they pick one for any given day) seems swell. And I have a shirt to wear!
I totally think I’ll do it next weekend
Um, what’s a graticule? And yes, I’m too lazy to look it up. Also, that link didn’t explain what geohashing was/is. I need more information. Please feed my brain.
Feed your lazy brain? Too many romance novels for you! Well, I know you read xkcd, so I’ll also assume you read the geohasing one and assume that you just don’t get it. Basically, the goal is to generate a random (well, pseudo-random) location for each day. It does this by first taking an md5 sum of the date. MD5 takes input of an arbitrary size and outputs a sequence of numbers that change substantially with only the most minor changes to content. It’s primarily purpose is to be able to easily verify if a large amount of data in two places is identical. If I give you a file and an MD5 sum of that file, you can tell that the file is, indeed, the file I was trying to give you and it hasn’t been altered because you can take your own MD5 sum of the file and see if it matches mine. Anyway, the purpose of the MD5 sum in this case is just to generate a “random” number from a specific seed. In this case, we take the MD5 sum of today’s date, and the MD5 sum of the today’s Dow Jones. Since MD5 sums are in hexadecimal, in this case, he first converts it to decimal. Then, he uses the decimal of each of those to specify a point in space. In order to specify a point that’s close to you, you first use the degree of longitude and latitude that you’re already in. That’s a graticule–a rectangle that’s 1 degree x 1 degree. Then, you use the calculated numbers as the decimal places to figure out where in that graticule the place is for that day.
You can play with it here. The short of it is that for any square of the lat/long grid, that link will define a discreet random point for every day. And then you can go meet them.
Ouch.
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