
If You Can’t Follow Directions, You’ll End Up on Null Island - petethomas
http://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-cant-follow-directions-youll-end-up-on-null-island-1468422251
======
AshleyGrant
Interesting how this story shows up just _days_ after Minute Earth and Tom
Scott's YouTube video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjvIpI-1w84](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjvIpI-1w84)

~~~
mc32
Reminds me of this other story
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11466849)

At least this is a fictional island, albeit in a real place, rather than
coordinates in an inhabited place bringing unpleasantness to unwilling
participants.

~~~
elaus
I find it really astonishing that law enforcement is using IP geolocation to
raid homes or investigate. In western Europe this would be unthinkable as
police or state agencies solely rely on requesting customer information from
providers (based on the IP address).

------
kyledrake
There is actually a weather buoy at 0'0
[http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010](http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010)

~~~
msravi
What's the power source for these buoys for transmission and reception? It
doesn't look like there are any solar panels - so are they just running off of
a battery that needs to be replaced periodically?

~~~
chrissnell
It's a battery pack with 84 D-cell alkaline batteries. Source:

[http://tao.ndbc.noaa.gov/proj_overview/pubs/mil96paper.html](http://tao.ndbc.noaa.gov/proj_overview/pubs/mil96paper.html)

> "The board draws approximately 1 mW when in the sleep state, and around 250
> mW when sampling sensors. The entire system averages 10 to 15 mW including
> power for all sensors, sampling, and Argos telemetry. By using switching
> power supplies where possible, the same battery space available in the
> original ATLAS tube will provide a conservative 18-month deployment life
> with a battery pack comprised of 84 D-cell alkaline batteries. The low power
> system allows the use of inexpensive batteries instead of solar cells or
> wind generators. These would attract vandals and add significantly to the
> acquisition and maintenance cost of each mooring."

This bouy is fascinating. It has a sub-surface set of sensors and check out
the description of how those underwater sensors communicate with the main
board of the bouy:

> "The sensors transmit and receive data from the buoy with an inductive
> coupling technique."

[...]

> "The tube drives the cable while the sensor drives the secondary coil on the
> inductive element. An FSK method of modulating the signal onto the cable is
> used with 2 kHz for a logic one, and 4 kHz for a logic zero. With a 2-kbaud
> data transfer rate, a one bit is 1 cycle and a zero bit is 2 cycles. By
> having data frequencies that are exact integers of the baud rate, the bits
> can be phase coherent at their edges, thus eliminating a source of jitter.
> The data uses standard ASCII hex format with one start and one stop bit."

~~~
douche
I'm a little out of my depth, but is there a reason they don't use something
like a sealed lead-acid marine battery, rather than a big pile of D-cells?

~~~
pranjalv123
Lead acid has something like 1/4-1/3 the energy density, higher self-discharge
rates, are more expensive, and are worse for the environment. The advantage is
very high power density (nice for starting cars) and rechargeability, neither
of which would be useful here.

------
tobr
The outline of Null island is taken from Myst. Even the ship is there, but it
has become a peninsula (a stoneship, perhaps).

[https://www.google.com/images?q=Myst+island+map](https://www.google.com/images?q=Myst+island+map)

------
raphman_
Funny, there does not seem to be a Null Island in Google Maps but a whole lot
of subsea supermarkets in close proximity:

[https://www.google.de/maps/@0.0612621,0.4003209,12z](https://www.google.de/maps/@0.0612621,0.4003209,12z)

~~~
smcl
If it was on Google Maps the size of Null Island is defined to be 1 metre
squared - which is too small to appear on GMaps I think

~~~
mseebach
Well, Null Island has whatever size Null Island has (which is hard to
ascertain, given that it doesn't exist) -- but the coordinate (0,0) doesn't
have any area at all, it's a point.

------
douche
> No one seems to know who started routing them by default to the Atlantic
> Ocean

Nobody knows who made sure that a variable was initialized with _something_ ,
rather than random junk that could turn out to be catastrophic?

~~~
yaur
More appropriately no one seems to know who is routing them to null island.

You can't deal with this type of data for very long before you run into the
case where you (or someone who processed the data before you got it) messed up
and you end up with 0,0 coordinates.

~~~
jrkatz
I see a lot of geocoding at work and one of the real mysteries is that null
island is a fair few miles around. 0,0 isn't good enough for some people;
0.00001,0.00002, etc always have to get involved. Reliably catching that
variant of the "Actually, I think your address is wrong" error needs a null
island at least 50 miles across.

If I had to guess, there's a UI somewhere that allows people to drag a pin to
the exact right location when it isn't close enough, and feeds that back into
a geocoding database. They can only drag for so long across the Atlantic
before they give up.

~~~
Symbiote
Converting coordinates between different coordinate systems could give these
figures.

I should probably add a check for this in my work, I think it only checks for
null in WGS84 at present...

------
Pxtl
While null should generally be conisdered harmful, initializing with arbitrary
data is generally worse.

~~~
colejohnson66
I remember hearing stories about how certain bugs would only show up in the
release build, but not the debug build. After lots of debugging, they find out
it's because the compiler initialized variables to 0 ("null") in debug mode,
but not release mode.

~~~
majewsky
Classical
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug)

------
Aelinsaar
So this is where all of the hypotheses live and breed!

------
ars
Searching for null island on google maps brings me to the US Library of
Congress.

~~~
quakeguy
Sounds about right.

------
coldcode
I wonder if there is a Pokemon at that lat lon.

------
lefrancaiz
There is also the city of None.
[https://foursquare.com/v/none/51546ecfe4b08e83463f2f8b](https://foursquare.com/v/none/51546ecfe4b08e83463f2f8b)

------
ISL
Anyone know where to source that blue map t-shirt? It's great!

~~~
fractallyte
Probably Kate Chapman, CTO at the Cadasta Foundation.

~~~
ISL
Found, perhaps, the source: [https://github.com/gnip/null-
island](https://github.com/gnip/null-island)

Will contact the repo owner to learn about the license...

------
jkot
"Null Island" search on Google Maps returns Library of Congress.

------
mgalka
Also used by mapping geeks for 404 pages
[http://metrocosm.com/asdasdasdasdas/](http://metrocosm.com/asdasdasdasdas/)

------
tunesmith
That's where you go (for real) to become a Golden Shellback, isn't it?

------
rbanffy
If only the sea were not so deep there, we could build it.

------
percept
Where your bad data goes.

