
The Geographical Oddity of Null Island - Thevet
https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2016/04/the-geographical-oddity-of-null-island/
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ovis
What geocoders use (0,0) as an error condition?

Outputting a valid value as an error flag seems like a pretty bad idea - is
this actually common?

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raldi
Extremely.

In part because the usual exceptional value, -1, is also a valid latitude and
longitude.

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ovis
Sure, but why not raise an exception? Or return a separate flag? Or even do
something like (999, 999) (clearly not valid, at least for latitude)?

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raldi
The 999 idea is good, but as for the other ones, oftentimes this data is
recorded in, e.g., a spreadsheet, text file, or vanilla SQL table, so there's
no way to throw an exception. You could store something like #N/A or NULL in
the bad cells, but a lot of bad code and spreadsheet formulas will interpret
that as 0 again, and then we're back where we started.

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mbrock
According to the Stockholm City Bikes app for iPhone, Null Island has been my
permanent location since last May.

Unfortunately, there are no bike stations in the vicinity. It's lonely out
here.

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ilogik
There was a town in my country that was bragging during the winter a few years
ago that you could monitor all the slowplows in real time on the Web.

I checked the page, and sure enough it worked. On a hunch I zoomed out, only
to see a couple of them parked on null island

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nod
Been there, bought the mug:
[http://www.nullisland.com](http://www.nullisland.com)

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rev_null
I'm surprised you survived the smoke monster.

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fapjacks
Uber always dropped me there when I started it (before I stopped using Uber
for Lyft).

