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[sherpa]

[sea_mink]

fivecentfamily, what I wrote was unclear - we are actually agreeing on most things, but what is your source for the "3300" in your address?

(also, I'm going to erase my earlier post now because I guess it's kind of offtopic to this thread)

[Anxst]

Madison, WI

[Dorkmaster]

[LazarusLong42]

[usernameguy]

Yeah, nice one!

[Xasper]

Address Zip Codes

[Kenko]

All of these are in Boulder, Co.

39.9856 -105.2528

On Table Mesa. It seems to stop right near the Table Mesa shopping center.

40.0200 -105.2528

On Walnut street. Seems to stop just shy of the Crossroads Mall.

39.9657 -105.1845

This one's at the end of Dyer road. Some backwoods road I've never heard of before.

40.0197 -105.2536

30th st. Also close to the crossroads mall on the same side as the Walnut coordinates.

40.0177 -105.2736

Corner of Walnut and 16th. Dunno what's there.


I haven't gone to any of these locations, but I'm going to try to sometime soon.

[danteGA]

Please when you post addresses here, include the time with each coordinate. That is a lot easier to find than hunting through lists of 122.342757 type numbers.

Thanks!

[sfsdfd]

[usernameguy]

What I hope to get

[TuxKamen]

San Diego Addresses:

There are only two, and I need some assistance with the first one. Somebody already plans to visit these locations so maybe they have a better idea than I do, being GPSless. I just took a brief visual survey last night.


16:59: 32.785099 -117.129132

This one is strange. The exact location is in what is recently constructed condos and gated communities. Most of the aerial photo sites will still show undeveloped land at the exact coordinates.

If I'm reading the map correctly, the location of the coord can be found
here at the Portofino apartment homes:

2500 Northside Drive
San Diego, CA 92108

Notable features, I guess, are the pretty Spanish architecture, and a fountain running up the center island which leads to the gate. Other than that, though, it makes little sense. Looking at the marked point in relation to the other streets there suggests the marker is either at the Leasing Office or the fountain--certainly not beyond the gate.

Notable businesses nearby (just going by memory) are a branch of the BBB (across the street to the south), a CostCo in the mall there, a Pacific Bell building on the opposite corner of that intersection, and the whole thing is about a quarter mile from Qualcomm Stadium.



17:51: 32.736089 -117.149150

This one is dead simple. It's the street address of the World-Famous San Diego Zoo. (Well, it's 30 feet from that). Terraserver/fly suggested:

2906 Zoo Drive
San Diego, CA 92101

The Zoo's street address is 2920 Zoo Drive.

I don't remember, visually speaking, what's at that exact point (haven't been at the Zoo in a while). Being in the center of Balboa Park there are many _potential_ candidates, but the Zoo is the clear winner.



-------

Unrelated thought of the day: As someone said, 6-digit precision is very pricey with consumer GPS. In light of that and the crystal radio speculation, I chopped off the last two digits of each coord's latlon.

16:59 - 99.32
17:51 - 89.50

Both of these are radio stations in San Diego. 99.3 is an KOOL, an oldies station run by Clear Channel, and 89.5 is KPBS (which, while it shows Balboa Park often, actually broadcasts from San Diego State). It might be worth nothing as I know many places do not have valid 6-digit precision.

--TuxKamen

[GWing_02]

What I don't understand is - why wouldn't the GPS coordinates have better accuracy if these are indeed place names? Couldn't they point them to an exact building, rather than "ehh... it's about 20 feet away, so this might be it? Heck, couldn't they just use map-o-rama or mapquest in reverse of what we are? I mean, sure, they may just be to confuse us, but I think the PMs would want to give us more of a nudge in that direction if that really is true.

[usernameguy]

As it turns out, GPS doesn't give you the same answer every time.

First off, there's no such thing as a definitive address-to-GPS database. Most databases that do "geocoding" like this only have a database of the GPS coordinates at street corners. They interpolate where an address should be inside a block. That is, they guess.

Second, even though GPS itself gets you within 10ft, it gets you to different parts of the street grid, depending on which survey was used to create the map data. These surveys disagree on where GPS coordinate 0.0, 0.0 is. (!) There are like 5 different "datum" surveys people have used over the years. In the worst case they're off by more than a block.

Third, GPS units themselves are often less accurate than optimal. If data was taken with a handheld unit in a city with big buildings, it can be off by as much as 50 ft.

This is part of the reason I've been sticking to maporama.com for my "definitive" answer. Seems like the Maporama answers are more interesting than the others. But I could be wrong. And, of course, if the PM's didn't realize any of this, we could never quite figure out the spot they really want us to look at -- in which case, we better hope that we're just supposed to show up there.

It would be really nice to know which services the PMs used to generate the data.

[sea_mink]

The first point, 6:07, is in front of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Guess what their Natural History Highlight is this season - "Treetop Opera" - it's all about cicada Brood X and cicadas' "insistent love songs".

Coincidence? Sly but irrelevant joke? To have so many insect noise, aka 'Now the Queen is trying to build a voice' references like this in the Queen's list of road endpoints, well it seems to me like this category is just as likely to be part of a solution as the museums category...