Geolocation for Dummies

Road distance vs map distance

It's odd, isn't it, how often our candidates for the Dumbass of the Day award trip themselves up through small errors. We don't have a particular problem with inconsequential errors such as typos or rounding errors. Have you ever seen us bitch-slap some freelancer for saying that pi is 3.14 instead of carrying it out to seven decimal places (which, for some reason, seems to be the eHow.com standard)? No, you haven't. But when someone makes a substantive error, it's "Katie bar the door!" Today's candidate (a repeater, by the way) is an arrogant twit who calls himself a "thinker"; though what he actually is seems to be a "reworder." He claims his name is Serm Murmson, and today he's getting the facts wrong about "What Does 'Geographic Location' Mean?" for Sciencing.com, one of the Demand Media (now Leaf Group) satellite niches.

Good ol' Serm knew how to reword someone else's verbiage, which we are sure made him a highly successful eHowian. His problem, of course, is that he didn't really know what he was talking about. Take, for instance, his introduction:

"Geographic location refers to a position on the Earth. Your absolute geographic location is defined by two coordinates, longitude and latitude."

That's what's known in the answer business as "half an answer." In actuality, geographic location (aka "geolocation") refers to any coordinate system, including but not limited to latitude and longitude. There are dozens (if not hundreds) of projected coordinate systems that use X and Y locations measured in feet or meters -- we've even seen one measured in varas! -- but Murmson apparently didn't know that. As a consequence, he only provided half an answer. While providing that half, Serm also got some pretty substantive facts wrong. Take, for instance, his "definitions" of latitude and longitude: "Longitude denotes the east/west position of a geographic location. Longitude lines run north and south across the Earth, between the two poles...[all] longitude lines are parallel to the prime meridian." ...for longitude, and

"Latitude denotes the north/south position of a geographic location. Latitude lines run across the Earth, perpendicular to longitude."

...for latitude. See anything wrong? Well, we did: longitude lines are not parallel, Serm! They can't be parallel because all lines of longitude converge at the poles! And while it seems petty to point this out, lines of latitude do not "run across the Earth"! Flat-Earthers notwithstanding, the planet is spherical (okay, it's an oblate spheroid) so lines of latitude run around the earth.

We found ourselves laughing at several things Murmson had to say, not least of which is that 

"Because longitude and latitude lines form a grid on the Earth, you can pinpoint precise locations with just two coordinates..."

Later he cited the latitude and longitude of Colorado Springs as 39N, 105W, which is actually a point in the Pike National Forest roughly three miles east of Woodland Park, Colorado. Not particularly "precise," Serm. Oh, and by the way? Just misinforming your readers that Colorado Springs is "roughly 72.4 kilometers (45 miles) north of Pueblo" is plenty to make you the Dumbass of the Day. The distance is "roughly" 43.6 road miles or 41.7 miles as the crow flies. Learn to use a map, Serm...

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