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[Cortana]

38.9033 -77.0326

[peccable]

UPDATE on 39.9528 -75.1582 (Center City, Philadelphia)

I did a search and didn't find anything posted about this particular set of coordinates. Please forgive me if this is trout.

In any case, I headed up there right after work and...well, my memory's not as good as I'd hoped. It turns out I'd misread the coordinates. The corner I was thinking of was one block north.

The corner indicated by the coordinates (NW corner of Philbert and 11th Streets) is...well, empty. There's literally an empty "store space for rent" there. There *was* a public phone a little bit north, but it's been ripped out of its housing. There's a public phone across the street on the North-*EAST* corner, but I'm thinking if they meant that corner, they would have marked that corner.

The only thing of note I saw was that Filbert Street has a different name, indicated by a streetsign on that corner: HARRY OCHS WAY. I'd never heard of the name before, really.

Has anyone else noticed interesting street sign names? My thinking is that (a) it's the only interesting thing there and (b) such a thing would be very difficult to find out on the Internet (as I said, I had never heard of Harry Ochs Way before...).

There's *definitely* nothing even remotely approaching a WiFi point there.

-peccable

[peccable]

*blink*

UPDATE to the UPDATE.

I just noticed on the Wiki that the GPS coordinates in Philly are listed as "Philadelphia, PA: 11th and Filbert St.; Middle of Gallery East Mall".

The Gallery is an underground mall. I didn't occur to me at all that the coordinates don't indicate *elevation*. The coordinates could, very well, be inside the mall. For the life of me I can't remember if it runs that far north...

-- peccable, wondering how he's going to find the point inside the mall without a GPS unit. :/

[gohoos]

MAP by state

[Andy]

Bear with me while I think out loud for a moment.


It seems to me that the fact that these coordinates all seem to fall at particular locations in the US is too much of a coincidence not to be intentional. It's possible the Chine connection is more than just a coincidence, but I'll wait for more evidence on that.

Scouting these locations has turned up little of significance.

Now, let's assume the PMs haven't actually been to all these locations. They must have been picked for a reason (obviously, I know). I think it's a safe assumption that for the links puzzle, the PMs entered the phrases they wanted to use into a search engine to get the urls. I imagine something similar is going on here.

The question is, how were these points chosen? Perhaps by the actual location, but so far we have not found any common threads. Perhaps there is some numerical significance. The fact that Dana links to a distance calculator in here newest blog entry seems like too much of a coincidence to me. Perhaps these pairs need to be sorted by distance?

Anyway, I know this doesn't really further a solution, but sometimes it helps me to talk these things through.

[xTopGunx]

Re: 38.9033 -77.0326

[BoonIsha]

ive not exactly been up to date on the coordinates argument, so maybe this has been pointed out, but all of these points are near bodies of water on the map you just posted. and by bodies of water, i mean rivers as well.


boon

[Anton P. Nym]

[SPEC] Brainwave... growing a voice? Cell towers?

[sherpa]

Several people have given good reasons for the China thing being only a coincidence, most notably that China is the other side of the world from the US and so naturally the co-ordinates would be there when reversed (isn't the fact it's so far away the reason Dana's gone there in the first place? Rather circular, don't you think?) -- and of course that plotting the points in China doesn't lead to anything half as consistent as plotting them in the US (the correlation between population centres, and being all within country borders - where they aren't all in China if you reverse them).

I think they're all in the US. If they are GPS coordinates of course. Why would they take the negative of one half of the co-ords (except to provide a handy red herring)? Mind you, I suppose that works vice versa too

Distance was hinted at heavily by Dana, has been brought up several times in this thread alone, and is easy for us to calculate using an in-game hint. Is this flashing red over nobody else's head? Distance would also explain one thing: why such seemingly random locations have been chosen. Choose a starting point, choose the distance you are looking for, and bingo, a random field in Missouri. (Or wherever). Fairly easy to calculate for the designers; some of the theories postulated so far would require them to be literally superhuman, zooming around the country in a matter of hours for gods know what purpose.

At any rate, the reason so many of them could be defined areas (roads, buildings) is that they are start points for distances, or end points that have been "snapped to" (i.e. nearest actual thing to the distance end point). Kinda hard to explain, but if you were designing a puzzle based on that premise, you'd probably choose discrete start and finish points, not random fields, hm? First of all it takes longer to solve (because people go and actually visit the places), second it's easier to work with.

I think there's probably more significance to the fact they're all in the US than we've seen, too. Maybe that's just part of the elaborate China red herring, maybe an attempt to isolate the rest of us around the world (hmph).

Finally a side note. I realise my approach is something along the lines of "thinking outside the box", or rather "thinking behind the curtain". That's just how I work; I design these things, too, and have even taken part in some pretty scary stuff like the Microsoft Intern Game mentioned earlier (in this thread, I believe?). I realise in true This Is Not A Game fashion we should not think "how would they create this" but "what does it mean", but I'm backwards and cock-eyed and totally askew, and have just got into the habit now. timeo Danaos ut dona ferentes.

[gohoos]

Significance of 220 points?

[peeveen1]

[sherpa]

[jegger]

[themill]

Re: Report from Madison, WI

[Clipped_Wings]

IMHO