Decimal Degrees for Dummies

Latitude and longitude ranges

Sometimes a research staffer will read most of the way through a potential DotD candidate and suddenly snort with derision. It happens when one of them discovers that an eHow.com freelancer has managed to do an almost high-quality job of copying, rewording, and pasting an answer; but tripped him- or her-self up somewhere near the end by making a gigantic mistake. That's pretty much what happened when one of them ran across the Sciencing.com post "How to Convert Latitude Degrees to Decimal," penned by one Charlotte Johnson.

Johnson, who's been here before (nine times) found herself a useful reference and mined it for all it was worth. Her problem? Charlotte apparently didn't understand latitude and longitude. We wondered about that when we read the introduction to her post:

"Latitude measurements are imaginary lines that run around the earth, parallel to the equator. Degrees of latitude are the opposite of degrees of longitude..."

We suspect no cartographer would say that latitude is "the opposite" of longitude, but we suppose in Charlotte's world perhaps it is. But that's not Johnson's problem.

You see, Charlotte did little more than reword an example from her main reference, which converted 122° 45' 45" N to a decimal. Charlotte just changed it to 150° 45' 45" N and reworded the steps a bit (to avoid being nailed for plagiarism). Her example section ends with,

"For instance, if you have a latitude of 150 degrees 45 minutes 35 seconds North, you would convert this to a decimal value of 150.75972."

We'd like to point out the following to whatever liberal arts major wrote the original "help" for Microsoft, to Johnson herself (regardless of her "master's degree in education"), and to whatever J-school grad served as content editor at eHow.com: every one of you is a Dumbass of the Day. You know why? because latitudes range from 0° to 90°; ergo, a latitude of "150 degrees 45 minutes 35 seconds North" is not possible. Dumbass, indeed.

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