Your Centre of Geogravity

This is an idea for a website, which prompts users to enter the postcode or zip code for their current home. They then enter their previous addresses in a similar manner. (If you can't remember the exact address for one or more of your previous addresses, the town, state and country will do.)

You then select 'objective mode' or 'subjective mode'. If you select 'objective mode', you are prompted to enter the length of time you lived at each address. In subjective mode, you enter the emotional importance of that place to you (you can type in any number you want, positive or negative). Subjective mode can also be used for other purposes: for example, you could rate the locations by how much your ferret-legging skills improved while living there.

The website then finds latitude and longitude for all the locations you entered. It converts these into Cartesian coordinates (or maybe it can do it more directly with polar coordinates, radians and the like). It assumes there is a point mass at that location of mass X (X being the score you assigned to that place). It's then a simple matter to calculate the centre of gravity of these points.

This centre of gravity will often be somewhere within the earth. The website extends a radius from the centre of the earth through the centre of gravity to the surface. The surface location is converted back into latitude and longitude, and this is your centre of geogravity.

The website then gives you those coordinates, and tells you that your centre of geogravity is 221b Baker Street, London, or somewhere in a field in Hampshire, or wherever.

What you do with your centre of geogravity is up to you. Possibilities include:

- Pay a spiritual homage to your centre of geogravity, with which you now feel a deep connection
- Find out your and your partner's centres of geogravity to discover your combined centre of geogravity and ponder its implications for your relationship
- Find what your centres of geogravity would have been at different times of your life, draw lines on a map to show how your centre of geogravity has moved around over the years, and then go for a walk along the route your centre of geogravity has traced out
- Do various Google-Earthy things with your newfound knowledge
- Move to a different country in an attempt to shift your objective centre of geogravity away from Milton Keynes.