A Brief History of Null Island

http://seagor.tumblr.com/post/59492652116/a-brief-history-of-null-island

by shawndumas • 11 years ago

27 7 11 years ago

seagor.tumblr.com

Important but missing context:

---snip---

Null Island is a fictional island in the Gulf of Guinea added to the Natural Earth public domain map dataset,[1] located where the equator crosses the prime meridian, at coordinates 0°N 0°E.[2][3] Natural Earth describes the entity as a "1 meter square island" with "scale rank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping."[1] Although intended humorously, the fiction has a serious purpose and is used by mapping systems to trap errors.

---snip---

(Wikipedia.)

crystalmeph• 11 years ago

For anyone who's curious about what it means to "trap errors" in a mapping system, I found this on http://www.naturalearthdata.com/blog/natural-earth-version-1...:

Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services.

mmphosis• 11 years ago

https://www.google.ca/maps/@0,0,10z/data=!3m1!1e3

banku_brougham2• 11 years ago

Whar ken a git one o them blue t shirts depicted in the photo?

ccvannorman• 11 years ago

http://www.customink.com/designs/nullisland/jmd0-00ae-ag03/t...

banku_brougham2• 11 years ago

aha - thank you very much.

tonylxc• 11 years ago

I suppose the NullPointerException is totally legal on this island.

A Brief History of Null Island

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