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A number of teams of six people are assembled at a TV studio somewhere in Bracknell or Reading I suppose. There is some kind of starting signal, and then they set off (followed by camera crews)
To win, the team has to position its six persons at orthogonal points on the globe. The winning act is to
have a 6-way video-call wherein each person shows the screen of their handheld GPS unit, and the judges verify that indeed all six devices show orthogonal points on the surface of the earth at 90 degrees to each other.
A lot of the interest from the show comes from the mathematicians and geographers who provide live analysis and commentary on fhe different teams's strategies and choices of locations.
Cardinal Pole
https://en.m.wikipe.../wiki/Reginald_Pole
He approves. [pertinax, Jan 23 2018]
Longitude map
http://www.compassd...-lon-coordinate.gif
Standard longitude coordinates on a Mercator map-projection of the world [Vernon, Jan 23 2018]
Couple it with this classic
As_20the_20crow_20walks
for an ultramarathon / iron man to end all etc etc [calum, Jan 24 2018]
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Annotation:
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Can they choose their own orthogonal points, or does it have to be the poles and the 90 degree longitude points? |
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Also, if one team succeeds in drilling to the centre of the earth and they all jump down the hole, would that count? |
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We're gonna need bigger boats. |
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Wasn't Cardinal Points part of the Spanish Inquisition? |
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I’ll sign up, as long as my destination is Hawaii. |
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While the polar points are obvious (associated with Earth's
axis), who decides what 4 points to specify along the
Equator? We may have a tradition of assigning certain
values to various longitude lines, but it was still an arbitrary
designation. |
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Besides, I'm curious to see if as many as 3 of those
equatorial points might align with land masses, if the
contestants were allowed to pick their own equatorial spots. |
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I'm having a slight crisis contemplating this. North, North
pole, easy, I'm good. South, South pole, easy, with it so
far. West and East are also easy, simply find London on
the map (Right in the middle, toward the top at a
pleasing eye level) and move 90 degrees in either
direction along the equator. That gets you somewhere in
the pacific and somewhere in the Indian ocean. Now, the
other two people are going 90 degrees to the east/west
people. How do you describe their position? There's no
N/S component if they're on the equator, and there's no
E/W component. I'm pretty sure you could permanently
damage a sailor by putting them at one of these two
spots. |
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My reading of this is that the winning positions are relative, not
absolute. So, for example, one person could go to Reykjavik
(64.1265° N, 21.8174° W), balanced by another in the Southern
Ocean at 64.1265° S, 158.1826° E. The remaining four would
then have to spread themselves evenly around the great circle
equidistant from those two points, and not around the actual
equator. |
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There are many winning scenarios where one person stays in
Bracknell. |
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//There are many winning scenarios where one person stays in Bracknell.// I find that hard to believe. |
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[bs0u0155], the longitude line south of London intersects
the Equator in the Atlantic Ocean (see linked longitude
map). If that was a formally selected coordinate for
meeting the conditions of this "Cardinal Points" challenge,
then the other three longitude lines are 90 degrees west
of that (a little west of South America in the Pacific), 90
degrees east of that (in the Indian Ocean just west of
Indonesia) and 180 degrees either east or west, kind-of in
the middle of the Pacific (and closely associated with the
International Date Line). |
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But as I mentioned in another anno, the rules of the
challenge might allow selecting other coordinates. Looks
to me like it might be possible to get land points in
Indonesia, Africa, and South America.... |
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There's nothing in the rules to say that the points have to align with the Earth's poles or equator. |
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