The Opposite of Important
December 31st, 2008Jerusalem’s Antipode
I always like to annoy people by pointing out that Israel is pretty much the center of the world.
Want proof? Enter these coordinates into Google Earth and see where you go: 31°46’41.11″S, 144°45’52.00″W.
That is the antipode of the Temple Mount. If you stuck a pin in the world at the Dome of the Rock and ran it through the center of the earth, it would come out at that location. It is as desolate a place as you can imagine; the closest land mass is Rapa Iti, in French Polynesia. This watery non-location is more remote than Pitcairn Island, which is saying something. Not only is it way out in the center of the Pacific; it even manages to be centered when the S shape of the Pacific is taken into account. Rapa Iti itself is 880 miles south of Tahiti.
Interesting bit of trivia.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:38 AM
For anyone trying this (the Google Earth Flyout), remove the ‘.’ after the “…11?S” or Google Earth will get confused.
e.g. :
.
31°46?41.11?S 144°45?52.00?W
.
On a semi-related story, I had one GPS Company (using our GPS parts in their system) that insisted that they needed to initialize our part with a “start location” because that was what was in their product spec (regardless of whether the part needed it or not). The problem was their engineer initialized the location to a Lat/Lon of 0’/0′ (off the west coast of Africa); since the unit was only sold in the US, Kansas would have been better! It took forever for THAT GPS to start.
December 31st, 2008 at 12:44 AM
Opps. The single and double quotes turned into question marks (UNICODE translation problem maybe? I copied from Steve’s post).
.
It should be:
.
31°46’41.11″S 144°45’52.00″W