User:Macronencer

58 / m / 50,-1

Macronencer

Real name	Mike
Based in	Bursledon, Southampton, UK
Education	Southampton Uni Maths grad, 1986.
Job	Software developer
True vocation	Media Composer (I'm working on it)
xkcd history	Fan since the first mention on BoingBoing in 2005
Home turf	approximately here

Other information

Mike can close his nose without touching it, which makes him fart-proof. He eats at least forty times his own body weight every century, is a part-time volunteer in the Lynne Truss militia, and loves skunks, his son and longevity research - but not in that order. Give him an inch and he takes a mile. Give him a pinch and he makes a pile. He is a full-time sceptic, part-time father, one-time rock star and all-time champion awful punster.

This is Chuck, my hashscot. Being one of the greatest adventuring scientists who ever lived, rather exhausted after his voyage on the Beagle, family tragedy and the years and years of work on his well-known book, this 200-year-old explorer decided to take it easy, and now travels to random locations with me.

He enjoys looking at the countryside on our travels, and gets rather animated when by chance we spy a finch or lowly earthworm. I often have to remind him to calm down before he punctuates his equilibrium. I am looking forward to the day when my bicycle chain breaks so I can ask him, in jocular fashion, to go and find the missing link.

Local Graticules

Southampton, United Kingdom (home)
Swindon, United Kingdom (convenient alternative)
Brighton, United Kingdom (possible alternative as I work near Fareham)
Weymouth, United Kingdom (occasionally convenient)

Planned Hashes

Retro Hashes and Special Expeditions

• Do a Buccaneer Geohash on Talk Like a Pirate Day 2009 (2009-09-19) - I'm looking for costumes now. Aaarrrrr!
• 2008-05-21 51 -1 Standby retrohash for next year's Mouse Over Day - hash for original geohash day in the Swindon grat.
• Visit the hash point from the original comic: 2005-05-26 37 -122 - it's in the Golden Gate recreational park in San Francisco.

Attempted Hashes

Standard Hashes

All distances in km

Successes (proved)	13	Saturday Meetups	4	Total by car	1219
Successes (unproved)	0	Total by ferry	45	Total on fastfoot	156
Failures	1	Total by rail	276	Total on foot	23

Seq#	ID	Location	Information						First encounters
015	2009-09-13 50 -1	Hilsea recreation ground			43			3	Maoi-taoi
014	2009-09-10 51 -1	Litchfield				136		6
013	2009-09-06 50 -1	Harbridge, New Forest				63	46	2
012	2009-09-02 50 -2	Iwerne Minster				195
011	2009-08-30 51 -1	Barton Farm, Winchester				59			Mapaholic
010	2009-08-15 50 -1	Bierley, Isle of Wight		40		12	68		DavidMiller
009	2009-08-10 50 -1	New Forest, near Hythe		5		19	15
008	2009-08-08 50 -2	Chesil beach, Portland, Weymouth			233		16	1
007	2009-08-07 50 -1	Field near Rockbourne					9
006	2009-08-01 50 -2	Charlton Marshall, Dorset				148		1	04housemat, Mahahahaneapneap
005	2009-07-27 50 -1	Romsey, Hampshire				192		1
004	2009-07-27 51 -0	Flitwick, near Luton				248
003	2009-07-22 50 -0	The Road To Bognor				93	2
002	2009-07-18 50 -1	Hambledon Cricket pilgrimage!				49		9
001	2009-06-28 50 -1	Hedge End recreation ground				5			Sermoa

Retro Hashes and Special Expeditions

Seq#	Date	ID	Location	Information
R001	2009-07-27	1965-05-06 51 0	Origin Geohash achievement In a field next to Hylands Park, Chelmsford

Statistics

Score Card

	-2	-1	-0
52	x	x	x
51	x	2	1
50	3	7	1

Achievements

Ongoing

Macronencer achieved level 4 of the Minesweeper Geohash achievement by visiting coordinates in Swindon, United Kingdom and 4 of the surrounding graticules.

Macronencer earned the xkcd Nullaturion achievement by attending 4 Saturday meetups.

Completed

Macronencer earned the Consecutive geohash achievement by reaching 2 consecutive hash points starting on 2009-08-07.

Macronencer earned the Public transport geohash achievement by reaching the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-08-08 via South West Trains.

Macronencer earned the Ambassador achievement by obtaining permission from Mr. McLeod, son of the land-owner to access the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-08-07.

Macronencer earned the Pub Geohash Achievement by visiting a pub visible from the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-08-01.

Macronencer earned the GeoTrash Geohash Achievement by cleaning up the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-08-01.

Macronencer earned the GeoTrash Geohash Achievement by cleaning up the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-08-07.

Macronencer earned the Multihash Achievement by reaching the 2009-07-27 51 -0 and 2009-07-27 50 -1 geohashes on 2009-07-27.

Macronencer earned the Origin geohash achievement by reaching the (51, 0) geohash for 1965-05-06 on 2009-07-27.

Macronencer earned the Land geohash achievement by reaching the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-06-28.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting Sermoa at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-06-28.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting 04housemat at the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-08-01.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting Mahahahaneapneap at the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-08-01.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting DavidMiller at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-08-15.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting Mapaholic at the (51, -1) geohash on 2009-08-30.

Macronencer earned the Meet-up achievement by meeting Maoi-taoi at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-09-13.

Macronencer earned the Drag-along achievement by dragging his friend Paul to the (50, -2) geohash on 2009-09-02.

Macronencer earned the Midnight Geohash achievement by reaching the (51, -1) geohash on 2009-09-10 in the middle of the night.

Macronencer earned the Phonebooth stuffing achievement by helping stuff a phonebooth near the (51, -1) geohash on 2009-09-10.

Macronencer earned the Public transport geohash achievement by reaching the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-09-13 via South West Trains.

Consolation Prizes

Macronencer earned the No trespassing consolation prize by almost reaching the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-09-06.

Gratuitous Ribbons

Macronencer earned the Musician Achievement by playing flute at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-06-28.

Macronencer earned the Rubik's Achievement by solving a Rubik's cube at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-06-28.

Macronencer, Sermoa and DavidMiller earned the Card Game achievement by playing cards at the (50, -1) geohash on 2009-08-15.

Sermoa, Macronencer, Mapaholic and DavidMiller earned the Party geohash by throwing a mad-keen party at the Cubicle achievement (51, -1) geohash on 2009-08-30.

Long-term Intentions

• Earn various Displaced origin geohash achievements (some of these are rather ambitious, I'll admit!)
  • 1965-05-06 51 -3 - actually on a green on the Aberdare golf course near Cardiff in Wales :)
  • 1965-05-06 52 0 - marginally within somebody's front garden, but arguably public as within GPS accuracy of public land :)
  • 1965-05-06 53 -1 - next to a canal and the M62 near Sheffield. Sounds inaccessible, but satellite imagery makes it look relatively easy.
  • 1965-05-06 39 3 - very accessible as it is right next to a road... but it's on Mallorca.
  • 1965-05-06 20 -156 - Maui - therefore expensive to get to. But just a short walk into the hills...
• Leave a variety of unusual xkcd signs
  • One made out of ants (Oh yeah!)
  • One in ASCII binary (probably already been done)
  • One in Morse code (ditto)
• Collar someone with a boat and do a big Water geohash, probably in the Solent, or the river Itchen or Hamble.
• Buy a small boat (kayak?) and do a small Water geohash, probably in a lake or small river.
• Gain the Minesweeper Geohash ribbon because it's shiny! Probably centred on the Swindon graticule.

Completed!

• Earn the Origin geohash achievement by visiting 1965-05-06 51 0 in a field near Chelmsford
• Leave an xkcd sign in Braille
• Leave an xkcd sign that can only be seen from the right angle (like the Channel 4 logos on TV)

VERY long-term intentions

• Complete a hash expedition in all 64,800 graticules. Hey, I'm a life-extensionist and I think big, what can I say? The real question is: centuries from now, will geohashing exist? Come to that, will the Dow Jones exist? I think Gene Roddenberry would probably say "Let's hope not". So there ya go.

Journal

Old journal entries archived here

2009-08-04 Bigness
64,800 graticules... think about that. I just did. Even if you did one every single day, in the biggest Consecutive geohash ever, it would take 177 years. Even if you didn't bother with the ones that are in the sea, you're looking at decades of travel.
And when you remember that it would take most of an entire day to walk non-stop from the North end of a grat to the South end, you begin to understand the size of the Earth.
The Earth, of course, is just a small planet orbiting a star. The best estimate we have for the number of stars in the known universe is a very large number. So large that if you counted 3,000,000,000 stars every second (roughly the current clock speed of a home computer), you would take a whole CENTURY to count them all.

Feel small yet?

I see a distant future, in which latitude and longitude have been replaced by galactic co-ordinates, GPS units by some sub-ether positioning system with tweaks for relativistic issues such as the simultaneity conflict, the DJIA by some other source of stochastic nutrition (who knows what?)... how long would we have to live to hash every planet on every star in every galaxy?

I told you: I think big. I see no reason to think small.

2009-08-05 New GPS
My Garmin eTrex Vista HCx arrived today from eBay. Seems very nice! Robust, and waterproof (IPX7, which I think means up to 1m of water) - however, I'm sure it doesn't float so if I get my boat, I'll also be getting a plastic sealable pouch with attached buoyancy device to prevent anguish. The software is adequate, but could be more exciting. As for the price of the maps...! Bloody hell. The UK TOPO map costs more than the device, aat a nice $299.99 or €230. Won't be buying that in a hurry. I think it would be nice if you could buy small sections of the maps, like with the old OS maps of Britain - they were not cheap, but at least you could go somewhere where you needed to buy maybe three of them, and it wouldn't break the bank. Anyway, it's good enough for hashing, without detailed maps, so I'm still happy. Also just downloaded the Goecaching app for my iPhone. I will try it out this weekend, perhaps.

2009-08-23 Missed it!
Bah! I was ferrying my son back his mum's place today, and in doing so I had about 4 graticules potentially accessible from the journey - two of which were unexplored by me. You would have thought that, with two days' notice, I'd have managed one hash! But no. They were all either too far from the route or clearly in inaccessible land (e.g. slap bang in a field with a farm building very close by). Curses! This will surely delight my evil twin brother, Thaddeus...

2009-08-27 Folding Huge Tracts o' Land
A thought experiment: Iterate through all the graticules that cover your country. Take the average hue, saturation and luminance values of the the various graticules for each pixel, according to a map of your choice (e.g. Google satellite). What you've done is kind of fold the country on top of itself by treating all graticules as geographically equivalent, and the result might be interesting. For a given day's co-ordinates, for example, if it lands in a grey area it's probably going to indicate that there is a variety of terrain represented around the country. If it is blue, there's a good chance that many of them are on water - etc. I thought of this today when I was clicking around on peeron's hash tool. I noticed that two of the points were quite close to golf courses... now, we just need a map showing just the regions that are in golf courses (black) or within a certain distance of one (fading to white). Or the same for pubs, parks, etc. This would enable an instant analysis on a given day - showing, for a given set of graticules, what kind of probability sum results from adding the individual distance functions. If the point is in a very dark region, something wonderful has happened (for example, every hash in your country is near a pub) - if it's white, there's nothing of interest near any of the graticule points.
Wow, that was quite a stream of consciousness. Sorry, I'm feeling creative.

2009-08-29 WORLD'S FIRST CUBICLE GEOHASH?!
Not mine though :) Incredible events this weekend. On Friday afternoon I looked at Sat Sun and Mon to scout the local graticules for possible trips (Monday being a holiday here in the UK). Everything was either clearly on private land or too far away. Bit of a downer. Then Sermoa contacted me to say that Sunday's Swindon grat location is actually next to the wall of the building where she works! This is AWESOME! It's as if she's won the lottery :) So, although I am at work tomorrow, I will definitely be away early and get up there for 4pm to celebrate with her. Literally a chance in millions - incredible.

2009-09-11 Some Random Thoughts
It's been an interesting couple of weeks. The first cubicle geohash was followed by my first drag-along, my first Consolation prize (and associated pulled abdominal from cycling) and then my first midnight geohash with Sermoa and Mapaholic. Just yesterday I realized that Mouse Over Day is the same day as my parents' wedding anniversary - and next year it is their 50th one. Well, with any luck the party will be on the Saturday the next day, so I'll be able to do my obligatory hash on the Friday, the actual day. If not, I'll visit one on the way to see them in Norfolk.
Geohashing serves one fundamental purpose - it provides an objective. We do the rest.

2009-09-15 Globalhash mirrors
The Globalhash concept is like having the same lottery numbers every week, in one sense: it is so unlikely that your neighbourhood will come up, that you feel you have to check it every single day, for fear of kicking yourself later that you missed one you could have done. This got me thinking today. Every graticule must have a special region in it, which I will call the "Globalhash mirror". If a standard daily hash point falls within this region, then it also means that the Globalhash for that day has fallen in that graticule. This is true East of W30, but West of W30 one would have to remember that the Globalhash will be a day behind the standard hash because Globalhashes always use W30 co-ordinates.

Anyway, the Globalhash mirror region can be calculated easily from your latitude and longitude. It is a "trigonometric rectangle" (i.e. bounded by latitudes and meridians) with two opposite corners defined thus:

GMLAT1 = ( 181 * HOMELAT + 90 ) / 180
GMLON1 = ( 361 * HOMELON + 180 ) / 360

GMLAT2 = ( 181 * HOMELAT + 91 ) / 180
GMLON2 = ( 361 * HOMELON + 181 ) / 360

...where HOMELAT and HOMELON are the absolute values of your graticule's integer co-ordinates. After calculating, you have to re-apply the correct sign. This makes the floor/round issue go away :)

For my graticule (50 -1) these work out to:

GM1 = ( 50.77777778, -1.50277778 )
GM2 = ( 50.78333333, -1.50555556 )

By plotting these on Google Maps (GM1 and GM2), I can find out the "rectangle" of land to watch. If a hash point lands in there, I know that the Global hash for that day will also be in my graticule :) If you look at those two points on Google Maps and compare them, you'll see that it's an extremely small strip of land. This just goes to show how unlikely it is that the Globalhash will fall in your graticule: in fact, in a given year, the odds would be around 1 in 178, so if you're waiting for it, better be prepared to die first! To Globalhash, one has to travel :)