h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've also noticed that if you decide to travel in a straight line east or west you just can't do it -- you start to veer to the south in the northern hemisphere and to the north in the southern hemisphere. It doesn't happen with north and south (except of course when you cross the poles.

That'll be the 'great circle' effect... one of the side effects of trying to take a three dimensional surface and spread it out flat in two dimensions.

That's the reason when you see a route map of an aircraft flying from the UK to the USA it always seems to fly along a curved track towards the north pole before coming back down south towards its destination.

Machu Pichu has labels way off the mark. The real place is here: 13 09 50.43 S 72 32 50.04 W

The World Heritage site is about 5 kilometers northwest and there's a geographic feature label about 5 kilometers to the east of the real site.


But it really is a wonderful tool!

There be monsters here:

42 52 54 N 47 39 24 E

Caspian Sea monsters to be exact! (Wikipedia explains what they are, if you don't know - a bit obscure)

Another one can be found a little to the right, along with some pretty neat hovercraft...

And am I very much mistaken, or is this one lost tank!?

48 33 26 61 N 44 29 10 60 E

Oh, and I'm sorry - I like military planes - if anyone else does, check out this - a Russian bomber airbase:

51 29 29 00 N 46 13 30 00 E

Bison, Blinders, Bears and Blackjacks. Beautiful!

That's gotta be something on some sort of barge. Or it's a really big floating tank.


(you need to stick a dot into your seconds number)

Here you go (since you like these things): Canadian Air Base. A bunch of planes, including one with an interesting tail structure. And a baseball diamond.

54 24 22.47 N 110 16 30.86 W

Quite an effective spying tool as well I reckon. Weapons of mass destruction? We don't believe you: Google link please...

This is where I got married!

36 10 1.08 N 115 8 30.89 W

Someone should tell the FBI that someone has stolen the Stratosphere Tower from the Las Vegas strip! (You can see it's shadow but the tower is not there!)

36 8 50.60 N 115 9 18.30 W

Ooh, spooky! There must be something about seeing buildings from the air. Buildings are meant to be seen from the ground, that's why they don't have jet engines. If you start seeing them from the air, then strange things start happening - this building starts to get see-through when seen from the air:
40 45 45.45 N 73 57 54.54 W


Oh, and speaking of things being seen when they're not supposed to be - a F117 Stealth Fighter - supposedly invisible to radar, but seen clearly by a satellite:
36 13 38.00 N 115 03 33.33 W

Do you think that's because the photo was taken with light and not microwaves?

B

Damn! I wonder if Lockheed forgot to take light into account when they designed it? Bit of an oversight, really.

Out of interest, why, in my last post, did F117?thread=Damn! I wonder if Lockheed forgot to take light into account when they designed it? Bit of an oversight, really.

Out of interest, why, in my last post, did F117 become a link to a conversation about boxing, when I didn't do anything other than type normal type?

AAAGGHH!! It's done it again!!! Stop it!!

There are certain shortcuts in h2g2 which will be turned into links automatically.

The letter A followed by certain numbers will become a link to an Entry: A27 is OK, A28 is not. This is because the last digit of an Entry number is a checksum digit - if the checksum is wrong, h2g2 doesn't try and make a link.

The letter F followed by a number points to a conversation. For example, F42?thread="/h2g2/categories/C82" >C82 which is the top level of the Edited Guide.

There are also keywords such as PeerReview which can be made into links by typing special characters around what you type. Put <. /> before the word and </ .> after the word, but don't include any spaces. This works even for <./>words</.> which are not <./>valid links</.>.

The Rockefeller Plaza in Manhatten has fallen over!!!

40 45 30.65 N 73 58 44.86 W

51 28 50.97 N 10 6 16.10 E

Here be no dragons, but my humble home. It's nice, come and visit.

The computers at work are networked, and don't have Google Earth - I thought I might try Multimap to see if I could put those co-ordinates in. I tried. It didn't come up with a match, but managed to make 21 suggestions, most starting with the letters "New...", and ranging from London, to Argyll.

Ahh - just tried Google Maps - that works!

Hmm... maybe I won't be able to pop in - the North Sea might prove a problem. Thanks for the offer though!

And here, my friends, is Fort Boyard:

45°59'58.75"N 1°12'50.13"W


Geggs

Here's an odd one...

Goto Gibraltar

36° 7'34.82"N 5°21'3.46"W

Turn the 3D terrain feature on (should be a little button just under the image)

Change the camera angle until you're at sea level looking to the north

Since when has the ocean run uphill?

56°44'21.67"N 6° 8'12.77"W

Is it just me, or does this look like an ancient meteor strike? I can't see anything on t'internet about this area of Scotland being struck by a meteor, though it is known as a volcanic area. Anyone know what the circular mountainous area could be?