Jens

I don't support this suggestion. The Regions in Denmark constitute an arbitrary administrative subdivision of the country which is significant only for the national health care system. They were introduced six years ago and they have no cultural heritage. Elevating this system as a subdivision for geocaching purposes would be misleading. It seems to me that the suggestion is motivated only by the idea that there would be special prestige attached to living in a country that has subdivisions in geocaching.com. This idea is seems silly to me.

I am not sure whether this is what you had in mind, but here is the true story of TB Bamse. Bamse was started in southern Sweden with the goal of reaching the northernmost cache in Sweden. Bamse got detoured to Germany on the way. Two Danish TB's (Nalle and Nisse) were sent out with the mission "find Bamse". Bamse went MIA in Germany. Bamse's owner fielded a new TB Bamse with the same mission, and a geocacher near the cache in Germany that disappeared with the original Bamse in it also fielded a new TB (Pauli) with the same mission. In the meantime, a new Danish TB (Blues Bear) was sent out to go search for the old Bamse, who went MIA in Germany. Current status: - original Bamse is MIA - new Bamse is in Abisko, far north in Sweden, but not the goal cache - Nisse is with Bamse - Nalle is in Oslo, Norway, still looking for Bamse - Pauli is in southern Sweden - Blues Bear is on a detour in Finland Nalle and Pauli met in Trollhättan (southern Sweden) one fine summer evening, and then went their separate ways again. Nisse and Bamse have been traveling together for some time, but they almost got separated on the way when a cacher initially took just one of them from the cache where they originally met.

Travel bug soccer was played in 2002 in Sweden. The bug used can be seen here, but most of the useful information is in Swedish. A similar game, inspired by the Swedish one, is currently being played in Denmark on my initiative. The travel bug used is this one. All of the supporting text is in Danish, but you can see by the sheer volume of the movements of the TB that the game has been a greater success than the Swedish and British predecessors. It is immaterial whether you think of the game as soccer or football. The basic idea is that there are two teams, that the game consists of a series of moves from one cache to another, and that there are certain restrictions. The main adjustments that I made for the Danish game was in the restrictions. The result has been that the Danish game has seen three goals scored so far, and the game is still very much active with five moves during the past four days. Few of you will be able to understand the rules(published here in Danish), so let me summarize our version in English: The playing field is about 55 km long. No move may be longer than 8 km. Once the ball is picked up, the move must be complete and logged on the TB page within 12 hours. Once a team has moved the ball, that team must wait 8 hours (14 hours if the night period from midnight to 6 is included) or until the opponents move the ball before moving it again. No single player may make two moves in a row. No single player may repeat his own previous move. New caches on the field are taboo for 72 hours or until touched by the opponents, whichever comes first. Teams were selected at random based on the month in which the player was born. Any geocacher can play. The current score sees Blue leading Red by 2-1. In the latest move, Blue moved the ball to just two steps from scoring, but a few hours ago Red logged the start of a countermove. Both teams have established communication forums on the net and use SMS communications extensively. The game and its rules has created a thread of over 100 entries on the forum at www.geocaching.dk .

quote:Originally posted by Cholo:Remember, the one mile race is still an Olympic event. If we are talking about humans running around a track, you are mistaken. There has never been a race at the Olympic Games over one mile. The rough equivalent, 1500 m, has been run by men at every Olympics starting in 1896. The women joined in 1972. There is not and has never been any Olympic race over one mile for cyclists, canoeists, skaters, skiers or kayakers either. But this tangent should not deduct from your original point. Some geocachers -- especially those outside the U.S. and the U.K. -- think habitually in kilometers, not in miles. Others, possibly the majority of geocachers in the world, think habitually in miles, not in kilometers. Geocaching should not be a crusade to impose systems of measure on others; ideally each of us should be able to identify our preference in our profile, and that woudl be that. I am convinced that this ideal will eventually be achieved. Much the same diversity exists for date formats, by the way; the same issues arise, and the same solutions should (and will undoubtedly eventually) be offered.

All of the activity on the search pages has prompted me to report small bugs that I would earlier just tolerate. But since I get the distinct feeling that quirk reports are appreciated, here goes. The query http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?lat=55.9422&lon=14.15433 results in a report where the cache Watermill III is reported without any direction. It says just "12.4 mi" instead of, say, "12.4 mi S". This is definitely a minor problem that does really impair the use of the report, but it is weird.

quote:Originally posted by Great Scott!: I get basically the same search when using my home coordinates. I've even tried changing the radius to 150 miles and still cannot see the Monterey caches, and other caches down the coastline. This problem began with the new search pages. This cache: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=gc3456 is approx 115 miles due west of me. It does not show on my search. After 114 miles no more caches show up that are west of me. I can see NW and SW, but not west. Monterey is basically west and a north and of me, but not enough north to be considered NW. This looks very similar to the anomaly regarding caches in Denmark that I reported in the predecessor to this thread.

Well, I have an observation. I hope I am not just being stupid here. First the simple facts: When querying nearest caches for GC40F7, the report shows GC64C4 39.9 km away and GCB99F 106.2 km away. But GC64C4 and GCB99F do not appear in each other's list of nearest caches, even though the distance between them must be less than 147 km. Then the elaboration, which may help shed some more light on the phenomenon: Actually there are many such pairs. GC64C4 is one of four caches in the extreme east of Denmark, on or near the island Bornholm. GCB99F is one of maybe 100 caches near Copenhagen, Denmark, well within the 240 km range of the search. It seems that for the purpose of the "nearest cache report" these two classes are miscalculated as being much further apart. In both cases, caches in Sweden and Germany appear in abundance, but caches in "the other part" of Denmark do not appear. I hope someone else will try to reproduce this curious observation before Jeremy and his huge staff of debuggers spend too much time on it.