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A Pictoral Mapping Quiz


currykev

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Tiny Often Empty Park, though I don't think the town Council of Asbury Park would like that name!

 

The vacant lots in the red ellipse were once part of the Casino next door. One was a skating rink and the other is the link to Bruce Springsteen. He used to play in the arena there. Dutch speakers would say that it was a Stepping Stone in his career.

 

I still think Mark Knopfler is a better guitarist though.

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Tiny Often Empty Park, though I don't think the town Council of Asbury Park would like that name!

 

The vacant lots in the red ellipse were once part of the Casino next door. One was a skating rink and the other is the link to Bruce Springsteen. He used to play in the arena there. Dutch speakers would say that it was a Stepping Stone in his career.

 

I still think Mark Knopfler is a better guitarist though.

A DING for the cache - and close enough for the rest...

 

It is actually the former home of Palace Amusements (http://www.palaceamusements.com/). As you say, Asbury Park was also home to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band - and "the Palace" is referred to in the lyrics of "Born to Run". No arena that I know of - only the Convention Hall further North along the Boardwalk. Bruce also played at the Stone Pony - a far smaller venue.

 

I worked at the Palace for 3 months in 1979. Apologies for the self-indulgent nostalgia.

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Panic over. Stoopid Murricane "surveyors" had been using the wrong datum and wondered why their pipe-crossing co-ordinates were more carp than usual.

 

OK, staying with the same continent, here are two pictures of the same marked location, at different scales.

 

I want the name of either one of the two caches in the vicinity which are relevant to this exact spot.

 

IkkjeMjoedStor.jpg

 

and

 

IkkjeMjoedMindre.jpg

 

I think I've already given quite enough clues already.

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Looking at the number of views I think quite a few geocachers will quietly kick themselves when they see the answer to this one. It really is of relevance to all geocachers, not just North American ones.

 

For my next clue, take a look at Google Earth or Flashearth or whatever, imagery for Greenwich. Pay particular attention to how badly wrong the Longitude lines are. Then think about why they appear to be so wrong. The "error" is well over a hundred metres. Ask yourself: Why?

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Milvus gets the Ding.

 

Before GPS came along, most countries used theodolities to measure angles between triangulation points. A Baseline was measured between at least two of those points to give the lattice-like trig framework scale and then the whole thing was pinned to Lat/Long at a single, carefully measured, astro-geodetic point.

 

For Europe in the second half of the 20th century the Origin of the European Datum 1950 was Helmert's Tower in Potsdam.

 

If you delve into the nether pages of your GPSr you'll find a list of about a hundred or so such datums, one of which is NAD27. When the Murricane surveyors who surveyed in the point at Meades Ranch did their thing in 1927 they made a complete arse of the job. Being a very insular nation, nobody noticed or even cared.

 

Once the first artificial satellite was launched, people started noting the Doppler whistle effect and could measure the precise orbital parameters visually. Combining a measurement of the satellite's position with the 4-D spatial point which was identifiable by its Doppler null point gave a single line of position on Earth. Do enough of those measurements (80 well spaced measurements is a practical minimum) and you've got a pretty good measure of your observation point's co-ords on your chosen spheroid.

 

By the late 1950s it became very obvious that the stated co-ords of the Origin of North American Datum 1927, at Meades Ranch, was a load of bolleaux. What any reasonable nation would have done would have been to create a new Datum, let's call it NAD63, to bring that datum point into line geodetically with what the already agreed definition of what zero degrees Longitude (Greenwich Meridian) actually means. We are not talking about a reasonable nation though. The Murricanes simply declared that the entire world was out of step with Murrica, so they sang a hymn and they steadfastly insisted on propagating their error by carrying it over into NAD63 and WGS72 and WGS84. Now we're stuck with it.

 

They did something similar with their absurd claims that an independent and reuinified Vietnam would lead to a Domino Effect and that Iraq was full of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that Afghans were involved in 9/11, but that's political geography, not geodetic geography, so we'll say no more.

 

May their god Bless 'em.

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I'm intrigued by the patchwork effect around this area - are the locals encouraged to do their own lunar landscaping??

 

It's called contour ploughing. It was introduced in the 1930s as a way of reducing the rain-washed "dustbowl". By ploughing along the lines of the contours water runoff is greatly slowed down and percolation is much more effective.

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I'm intrigued by the patchwork effect around this area - are the locals encouraged to do their own lunar landscaping??

 

It's called contour ploughing. It was introduced in the 1930s as a way of reducing the rain-washed "dustbowl". By ploughing along the lines of the contours water runoff is greatly slowed down and percolation is much more effective.

 

And protecting recently seeded land from wind? Or am I mixing that up with something else?

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Before GPS came along, most countries used theodolities to measure angles between triangulation points. A Baseline was measured between at least two of those points to give the lattice-like trig framework scale and then the whole thing was pinned to Lat/Long at a single, carefully measured, astro-geodetic point.

 

For Europe in the second half of the 20th century the Origin of the European Datum 1950 was Helmert's Tower in Potsdam.

 

If you delve into the nether pages of your GPSr you'll find a list of about a hundred or so such datums, one of which is NAD27. When the Murricane surveyors who surveyed in the point at Meades Ranch did their thing in 1927 they made a complete arse of the job. Being a very insular nation, nobody noticed or even cared.

 

Once the first artificial satellite was launched, people started noting the Doppler whistle effect and could measure the precise orbital parameters visually. Combining a measurement of the satellite's position with the 4-D spatial point which was identifiable by its Doppler null point gave a single line of position on Earth. Do enough of those measurements (80 well spaced measurements is a practical minimum) and you've got a pretty good measure of your observation point's co-ords on your chosen spheroid.

 

By the late 1950s it became very obvious that the stated co-ords of the Origin of North American Datum 1927, at Meades Ranch, was a load of bolleaux. What any reasonable nation would have done would have been to create a new Datum, let's call it NAD63, to bring that datum point into line geodetically with what the already agreed definition of what zero degrees Longitude (Greenwich Meridian) actually means. We are not talking about a reasonable nation though. The Murricanes simply declared that the entire world was out of step with Murrica, so they sang a hymn and they steadfastly insisted on propagating their error by carrying it over into NAD63 and WGS72 and WGS84. Now we're stuck with it.

 

And there was I thinking this was a friendly quiz, not the basis for a PhD thesis....

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They did something similar with their absurd claims that an independent and reuinified Vietnam would lead to a Domino Effect and that Iraq was full of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that Afghans were involved in 9/11, but that's political geography, not geodetic geography, so we'll say no more.

Right, since we don't discuss politics in these forums. In the future, let's all leave that out please.

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And protecting recently seeded land from wind? Or am I mixing that up with something else?

 

You're right, but not quite right.

 

The wind-borne "dust bowl" was an effect, not a cause. The underlying cause of the problem was incompetent farming methods which ripped the heart out of the topsoil, thus rendering it extremely vulnerable to being lifted by wind. 1930s farmers often described thew sight of seeing newly sown seeds being ripped out of the land by quite moderate winds. That was because the very structure of the topsoil had been grievously damaged by stupid farming techniques.

 

Contour ploughing, and contour bunding, is basically a variant of terrace farming which had been practiced wisely in the "Old World" for millennia.

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Snip.....When the Murricane surveyors who surveyed in the point at Meades Ranch did their thing in 1927 they made a complete arse of the job. Being a very insular nation, nobody noticed or even cared.

 

Snip.....

 

By the late 1950s it became very obvious that the stated co-ords of the Origin of North American Datum 1927, at Meades Ranch, was a load of bolleaux. What any reasonable nation would have done would have been to create a new Datum, .......Snip..... We are not talking about a reasonable nation though. The Murricanes simply declared that the entire world was out of step with Murrica, so they sang a hymn and they steadfastly insisted on propagating their error by carrying it over into NAD63 and WGS72 and WGS84. Now we're stuck with it.

 

They did something similar with their absurd claims that an independent and reuinified Vietnam would lead to a Domino Effect and that Iraq was full of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that Afghans were involved in 9/11, but that's political geography, not geodetic geography, so we'll say no more.

 

May their god Bless 'em.

Large amount of the gumf deleted to show what I think is a hidden statement of a personal agenda and a solicitation of personal beliefs against a particular nation!! Surely this isn't allowed on the forums? :D

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And protecting recently seeded land from wind? Or am I mixing that up with something else?

 

You're right, but not quite right.

 

The wind-borne "dust bowl" was an effect, not a cause. The underlying cause of the problem was incompetent farming methods which ripped the heart out of the topsoil, thus rendering it extremely vulnerable to being lifted by wind. 1930s farmers often described thew sight of seeing newly sown seeds being ripped out of the land by quite moderate winds. That was because the very structure of the topsoil had been grievously damaged by stupid farming techniques.

 

Contour ploughing, and contour bunding, is basically a variant of terrace farming which had been practiced wisely in the "Old World" for millennia.

Although the basis of this statement may be true, we all know what nation of farmers the Forester is referring to, so this to me is a continuation of his solicitation of beliefs!

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The corrective measure which were taken to combat the dust bowl certainly have worked. Old lessons were relearned, such as the need for crop rotation. Government instigated practices, such as contour ploughing, are still in use to this day, as has been shown in the satellite/aerial photographs above.

 

I don't know whether such measures could be mandated by government today. There would be a great deal of resistance to the nanny state getting involved in private enterprise such as farming.

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They came from countries which didn't have mechanical aids such as tractors.

 

They came from countries which didn't have any untouched prairies to rip up with plough and harrow, so they had no way of knowing what the effect would be on the physical structure of the virgin soil and the resultant climate changes.

 

Many of them came from NorthWestern European countries which have a temperate maritime climate, so they didn't understand that places like the Texas panhandle and Kansas have a completely different type of climate with vastly greater extremes.

 

They came from tiny peasant owned farms, where they tilled the soil symapthetically with oxen and fed the land with the manure of farm animals. They passed the land down through generations and they cared for the land. They emigrated to a land where they could only be tenants or "sharecroppers". It was/is a land where "greed is good" and where the pursuit of the fast Buck is not only a way of life, it's almost a religion. They stopped thinking 10, 30 or a 100 years ahead. In fact, they stopped thinking at all. They blindly and stupidly chased a fast buck here and now, instead of thinking strategically about what was good for the land and what was good for the future.

 

Now their descendants are doing the same thing to the globe's atmosphere as the stupid ones did to a hundred million acres of topsoil in the 1920s.

 

This is not a political matter at all. It's human geography and human geography is inseparable from any other other kind of geography. Geography is what we see all around us when geocaching and when surfing websites such as Google Earth et al.

 

I should also point out that the sharecroppers of 1920s America certainly don't have a monopoly on stupidity. Nor is it limited to the New World. Indonesian and Brazilian strip-logging of primary rainforest are prime examples of the moral equivalence of New World and Third World stupidity.

 

It doesn't have to be like that though. For many years, almost a decade, I lobbied the Noggie Parliament to have Wangari Maathai nominated for a Nobel Prize. Currently my hero is Willie Smits. He's an Indonesian who is intelligently repairing the damage done to the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra. He's quietly and effectively showing the difference between stupidity and intelligent husbandry of the land. If you have 20 minutes to spare and can listen to an audio track of a streamed video, then I would urge you to listen to his TED Talk on how he is rebuilding a rainforest from scratch].

Edited by The Forester
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The nearest cache is GC11PX5 - Peace BE With You Two.

 

The pic is Sellafield nuclear power station, the world first being it was the first commercial nuclear station. Knew it was some sort of power station by the high voltage power lines. With regards to what went bang, I would think, judging by the pic, demolishing of the cooling towers.

 

Passed the posting of a pic over last time, but, will have a think and post one soon. Assuming it is a ding!

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Technically, it is Calder Hall power station. Sellafield is the reprocessing facility mostly on the other side of the river, whilst Windscale is the old 'research' reactors.

It WAS the cooling towers that went bang. Quite impressive.

You're right with the cache of course, though!

 

Wish I had the faintest Idea where your picture is.

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Another clue........

 

The building is the headquarters of a manufacturing company that makes plastic products.

 

Also just north of here is a....... (so called) Theme Park!!

 

Well that's going to be the Tupperware HQ in Orlando, Florida.

 

Nearest cache is probably Platitudinous #28 Caching is Very Satisfying

Darn. I should have know that. I remember driving past it a few years ago.

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