Doctroid

Reviewers do not have caches put into their queues until the cache is made active, so your last point does not work. The first is problematic, as well, since publication of many tens of caches per week is not unusual. Maybe it should be.

And will you archive your mystery caches if Groundspeak gives cachers a way to contact one another? Because, you know, if cachers could communicate with each other, they could cheat on mystery caches that way, too. God forbid Groundspeak should set up forums or something.

There's some value in scanning electron microscopy too. But it ain't geocaching.

Well let's see: Don't make completions the same as finds: 5450 votes Include challenges in statistics: 11 votes So you're probably right, they'll probably put them back in the find count...

Um, yes, they do. 38 degrees 43.543 minutes is the same as 38.725717 degrees, and likewise with the longitude. If you want to do it by hand, you take the decimal minutes, divide by 60, and add that to the degrees. Example: 38° 43.543' = (38 + 43.543/60)° = (38 + 0.725717)° = 38.725717°. But that's exactly what Google Maps does when you put N 38° 43.543 W 120° 48.335 in the search box.

So it's been about a month and a half since challenges were introduced. How are they doing? Hard to tell, but I took a look. There are only about 3 or 4 challenges in my area, not enough to draw any conclusions about trends, so I did a search on challenges near New York City. There are currently 44 of them, it says here. Of these, 36 were created "about a month ago". Another 3 were created 3 or more weeks ago, and another 2 more than 2 weeks ago. 3 have been created in the past 2 weeks. So, after the initial interest, looks like New Yorkers are creating about 1–2 challenges a week lately. The highest rated New York City challenge is '10 years after 9/11 ~ GROUND ZERO SITE MEMORIAL', with 40 thumbs up, but it also has 23 thumbs down, so lots of reviews but they're mixed. (74 people have completed it.) In second place is 'Grand Central Whispering Gallery' with 14 thumbs up, 4 thumbs down: a more uniformly positive response. It was created "about a month ago" (challenge pages don't give exact dates for logs) and has 21 completions. I'm thinking, how many cachers per month pass through Grand Central? I'd guess a lot more than 21. This is hardly an exhaustive and rigorous survey, and as one who wasn't impressed with the idea of challenges from the start, I acknowledge it's not unbiased. Nevertheless I get the strong impression challenges are receiving a lack of interest at a level that even I find surprising. Any other interesting data points on this subject? Are challenges going gangbusters in other geographic areas?

dogs!!????!!

Yup. You still need special equipment to get the cache. I find the D/T guidelines less than crystal clear on this point, but as I parse it: If you need special equipment to get to GZ, then it's a T5. If you need special equipment to retrieve the cache once you're at GZ, then it's a D5. By my reading, then, this would be T5 in summer and D5 in winter. But I'm probably wrong.

As someone else said, production of solar cells is not the most environmentally benign thing you can do. Neither is growing, harvesting, and processing peanuts on the scale required to produce significant amounts of biodiesel. (How many gallons of petroleum-based fuels were burned to produce that gallon of peanut oil?) "Green" is not an absolute, yes/no, is/isn't. Some technologies are greener than others — and sometimes the comparison isn't clear.

Source?

The infamous dust-to-dust report is what's bogus. It's been very thoroughly debunked.

I don't know that answer to your question, but I thought I'd point out that Macs can run PC software. The GSAK FAQ says: Sure, as long as you have $170 lying around to buy an operating system solely to run one application.

But I have spent decades trying to convince the local PBS station fund raisers that I do not have a telephone. I can't go calling them now. +1

Me too......I've said often the NM and NA is BS . My experience (in a completely different region from yours, of course) is that NM and NA are underused. If cache contents are soaking wet, it needs a NM. But often I see people logging "log book is soaked" but never posting a NM.

I realize that attended logs go towards your find count but in my opinion, they shouldn't. Attendeds, at least for me, are a record of which events i, well, attended. If i make it to an event, even my own, then i attended it. There's really no gray area here. If you look at this from the other side,,, I for one try to keep my stats correct (at least in my eyes). These stats happen to include the number of events i've attended. These same stats would be totally incorrect if i chose not to log an attended on an event that i actually did attend. Yes. This is the sort of ridiculous discussion that becomes inevitable once you equate a geocaching event with a geocache.

Oops, sorry. I just assumed based on the handle and the way some things were worded. How does "Coldgears" indicate a female? There's probably a story there which I for one am kind of glad I don't know.

Testing in February for black belt in mixed martial arts.

Do you really have that much trouble adding two numbers together?

challenges are like ice cream. geocaches are like steak. I like both. I don't want them mixed. You asked for it. Why the heck is the butcher shop even selling ice cream, anyway?

Then you can say that I'm inconsistent. It still doesn't change the fact that I don't want my challenges (or my virtuals, webcams, etc) lumped in with my geocaches. Just like I don't want my trackables lumped in with my geocaches. It doesn't mean I'm not going to log every cache I find, challenge I complete, virtual I complete, or trackable I find. I find that the model of consistency, I log everything. Nothing inconsistent about that. Nor is it such a bad thing to be inconsistent. "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" — Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" To be a hypocrite, though, is to condemn others for behavior that is the same as or better than one's own, and I have yet to see an excuse for slinging that insult around here as some have done.

Don't see this as hypocritical at all. The person completed those activities, why shouldn't they log them, even if they want them separated from their geocaches? I think it's a tired argument (which I've seen repeated over and over when you don't even know the poster's complete intention for all the different type of virtual activities they've logged) against anyone that wants geocaching in one place, and other activities elsewhere. So I geocache, am I not allowed have an opinion on how things should be set up and recorded if I also do waymarks, challenges, virtuals, etc.? It is arguably inconsistent to say "I refuse to do challenges as long as they count as finds" when one willingly does virtuals which count as finds. But inconsistency is not hypocrisy, and to go around insulting other geocachers with the latter word is more than a little childish and offensive.

And I hope the ones throwing around words like "hypocrite" will, too.

The "find count" is pretty meaningless anyway, challenges or no challenges. And, realistically, it's going to stay that way: Go ahead, try to change the system in such a way as to decrease some people's find total, see what happens. But if you look at the geocaches tab on the profile, you can see separate totals for caches and challenges, and for individual types of caches. What I'd like to see, and isn't there, is a total for physical caches — ones with a container and log: traditionals, multis, letterbox hybrids etc. That would arguably be a meaningless number too, giving equal weight to 1/1 and 5/5 caches, but not as meaningless as the cache total which includes locationless caches, virtuals, and events in the same category as containers-with-logs. Then again, the only find count I care much about is my own, and the only person whose opinion of my find count I care much about is me; and keeping track of that number for myself isn't such a big deal.

So I've been reading the threads about challenge caches and whether they should count toward one's total finds, with the point frequently made that e.g. virtuals count toward finds, and they're not that much different from challenges. And that's true. I'm not particularly happy about challenges counting as finds, but then again, I'm not particularly happy about locationless caches counting as finds either. But no one's about to change the latter and, I suspect, no one's going to change the former either. For one thing, any change that reduces anyone's find count is going to give rise to insurrection. It does seem to me, though, that the find details on the profile pages could better reflect reality. Right now if you go to a public profile, you see prominently displayed three numbers: Caches found, Trackables logged, and Challenges completed. Click through to the Geocaches tab and you find individual numbers for traditional, virtual, multi, etc; you find a number for all event types, with that broken down to CITO and other events; challenge completions are shown there, as are benchmark finds. At the bottom is a total number labelled "Total found/completed*" with the asterisk pointing to a footnote saying this doesn't include benchmarks. So this raises a question: What in fact is your find count? The number shown under "Caches found" on your main profile page, or "Total found/completed" on the caches tab? Well, the latter is the number shown next to your log entries; hover over that with your mouse and it gets broken down to caches and challenges. All this is pretty chaotic, the result of a decade of accumulated changes, but it contains, I think, the pieces of a better way to organize things. We already have a heirarchy — CITO and other events under total events under total caches. Why not just reorganize the heirarchy? One way to do it would be as follows: Caches and challenges: -- Caches ---- Physical caches ------ Traditional ------ Multi ------ Letterbox hybrid ------ Unknown cache ------ Total physical caches ---- Other caches ------ Virtuals ------ Webcams ------ Locationless ------ Earthcache ------ Events -------- CITO -------- Other events -------- Total events ------ Total other caches ---- Total caches -- Challenges -- Total finds/completions Benchmarks Total finds/completions/benchmarks I've used "physical caches" to refer to caches whose goal is a hidden container and log book and "other caches" for, well, other caches; maybe "container caches" and "containerless caches" might be another way to describe them. I've kept challenges separate from caches, though I'm not sure it isn't better to put them under other (containerless) caches instead. Then again, maybe all "other caches" should be reclassified as challenges! I've kept benchmarks separate from everything else, though I personally would rather see them on an equal footing with caches and challenges. All in all, there are a number of plausible ways to make the heirarchy. The important points are that such heirarchies recognize, as the current system does not, the fundamental differences between physical/container caches, of which there are several types but all have in common the search for a hidden container, and other/containerless ones, which do not (usually) require such a search; and that they do not demote anything currently contributing to the find count (the Total finds/completions line; if benchmarks were to be accorded equal footing, then the find counts for some people would increase, but I think only a few would regard that as unfair.) I'd like it if a scheme along the above lines were to replace the current ad hoc jumble on the site.

I suppose most are. And I don't see much point in advocating otherwise, at this point. But if any of the above had been introduced this week, I'd be among those voting up feedbacks to exclude them from the cache finds total. Aside from one virtual, which I'm considering un-logging, I have not logged any of the above and probably won't. Not that I object to any of the above, or would refuse to seek/participate in them, just that they aren't what I regard as a geocache and I'd rather not have them in my find count. Likewise, if I ever encounter a challenge that looks like something I'd like to do, I might do it — but wouldn't log it. Not as long as it affects my find count.