Latitude and longitude hide and seek

Fall term recommended moving the solstice presentation to Friday of week seven, but the vernal equinox is not until Saturday 21 March 2026, at 1:46 AM local time. The solstice presentation will only make sense on Friday 20 March at the end of week ten, not the end of week seven. There is always this asymmetry in the term, first experienced when the ethnobotany class used the equinoxes to clean the Haruki cemetery.  That date moved between different weeks of the term, causing the ethnobotany schedule to have to be revised every term.


Monday focused on latitude and longitude only, followed by a slide deck on the use of GPSTest, and open source Android app which is ad-free. The app has none of the downsides of GPS Essentials. GPS Essentials attempts to be the default app for PDFs and other formats. GPSTest is GPS and only GPS, but in doing only one thing, the app does that one thing extremely well. 


The only quibble is that the Longitude wraps but the labels do not move down to reflect the wrap. This can be confusing for students. The subsequent entries are misaligned by one row with their label. 

This will be the only term the student union will be a viable hide location.

A rainy day with heavy rain bands constrained decisions, coupled with a desire to use the student union the one term that the union will be a functional hide.

Overheard a stylized roof line provides smoke shelter on the leeward side facing the ocean.

Lunch was in the private dining room. 

At high noon the following message went out via Gmail and Moodle messages. The email was prestaged in Drafts with approximate coordinates, edited in the field, and then scheduled to send at noon. The text was copied into a Moodle messages which also went out at noon 

Android: GPSTest
Degrees and decimal minutes format:
Latitude: N 06° 54.493
Longitude: E 158° 09.538

In GPSTest the Longitude is wrapped:
E 158°
09.538

Apple iOS Compass app
Degrees, minutes, and seconds:
Latitude: N 06° 54' 29 "
Longitude: E 158° 09' 32"

Degrees and decimal degrees format:
Latitude: N 06.9082601°
Longitude: E 158.1589865°

GPSTest instructions for Android users:

Note that Compass does not display fractional seconds. One second is equivalent to 0.017 arcminutes. As a result, the iPhone cannot put you closer to me than 0.017 arcminutes. GPSTest on Android can put one within 0.001 arcminutes of my location, seventeen times closer. 


Alisha and Meraia arrived from the north at 12:13. Their process was somewhat vague. 

Alisha and Maraia

Their description was that they were only trying to match the N number. 


By 12:15 Moira and McGievens arrived from the south.

Unica and Emensio arrived by 12:22

The newer iPhones were only displaying the compass bearing in Compass.

By default the Compass app in newer iPhones does not enable display of latitude and longitude. Even when enabled, only degrees-minutes-seconds format can be displayed. No decimal seconds are shown. As one arcsecond is 17 milliarcminutes, and Android apps routinely display milliarcminutes, the iPhone cannot be used in the arc minutes to meters laboratory. The iPhone just doesn't display enough digits.

Jaysleen and Darla at 12:27

Eytriann, Leona, Jemira, Mor-Jacinta 12:29

Stacy and Lidy-Loreen 12:36

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