Geohashing Conquers the South Pole 40
New submitter Kjellander writes "Randall, of xkcd fame, and inventor of Geohashing, has commented on the recent successful expedition of a Globalhash less than 1 km from the Amundsen-Scott research station by 5 brave scientists staying there over winter. The last continent has been conquered and many records broken."
Re:Can someone explain it to me? (Score:5, Informative)
geohashing is creating a random lat/long pair based on data that can only be known a little while ahead of time. Take the string "YYYY-MM-DD-#" where # is the opening of the DOW stock exchange, and create a 32bit MD5 checksum of that string. Convert the first 16 bits to decimal 0.XXXXX (convert hex to decimal, prepend 0.####) and the second 16 bits to 0.YYYYY. Now, take your current location, say 37.4215 -122.0855. Well, the location for that day's gathering near you would be at 37.XXXXX by -122.YYYYY. So you can see it isn't really a replacement for latitude and longitude, it's just a way to find a random place to gather.
Globalhashing is nearly the same. Take (180*0.XXXXX)-90 for latitude, (360*0.YYYYY)-180 longitude. Greater than a 70% chance that the day's globalhash will be in the ocean.