
A Secret Code on Madrid Security Bollards - YeGoblynQueenne
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/secret-code-on-madrid-security-bollards
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flafla2
What a cool little mystery, and article! I'm glad that the answer is actually
quite satisfying and poetic (and not, for example, some mundane artifact in
manufacturing the bollards).

> Still, a question does remain, one that might never be answered. “There’s
> actually only one bollard that correctly points to those cities,” Muñoz
> Sainz says. The rest were installed without regard to the direction in which
> the pattern was positioned. At the time, no one cared too much. The
> bollard’s creator never told anyone the logic behind his design, until now.
> “And today even I don’t know where the correct one is… It’s been a long
> time.”

This is a totally solvable problem. Given n bollards with coordinates, and m
cities with coordinates, it should be quite fast to calculate which is the
prototypical bollard. I'd explore this question if I had more time this
weekend -- many upvotes if anyone else wants to tackle that!

This article also introduced me to the online encyclopedia of integer
sequences ( oeis.org ). As a computer scientist with a limited math research
background I had no idea that this tool existed. The laundry list of
applications it offers for the fibonacci numbers [1] is remarkable!
Interesting to think of the sheer human achievement that was required to build
that list.

[1]
[https://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C1%2C2%2C3%2C5%2C8%2C13&languag...](https://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C1%2C2%2C3%2C5%2C8%2C13&language=english&go=Search)

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bognition
So the lines on top of the bollard point to other cities. Also only the
original bollard was correctly installed while all the others were installed
without being properly aligned.

It turns out the original artist never told anyone what the lines meant meant,
but the design was interesting enough that they kept it around.

Super cool.

~~~
RyJones
Even when you tell people it doesn't help.

The compass rose in the floor of the Spokane airport is rotated incorrectly.
If you visit, it's down at the end of the rental car area by the last sets of
doors.

~~~
soneil
Things like that always irrationally annoy me.

In Bratislava, Slovakia, there's a similar rose set into the floor (under the
tower at Michael's Gate). One of the type that indicates the direction and
distance to various international cities. And it's wrong.

It shows the distance to the north pole as 4667km. And the distance to the
south pole as 4667km. Slovakia is nowhere near as equatorial as the maker
would seem to wish.

~~~
RyJones
I feel like - you had one job? Try harder? I don't know. I understand your
annoyance completely.

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userbinator
Interesting to see that it was artistic instead of something more mundane,
because my hypothesis would be a casting batch/date code --- something like
this:

[http://mmcdetroit.com/Date_Codes/date_codes_17_l.html](http://mmcdetroit.com/Date_Codes/date_codes_17_l.html)

