roomthily

The Null Island Referendum

Today the people of Null Island are celebrating a successful referendum to their constitution, a small victory on their path to become recognized by the international community. The campaign was documented by citizen bloggers who participated by contributing to the http://nullisland.crowdmap.com deployment of Ushahidi. Nuhla, one of the people behind the deployment says, “With this victory, today we are all Nulliers!” She went on to add, “However, this is but a small step in our journey. Until we are a recognized by the international community, Null Island will remain in limbo.”

via Ushahidi

it’s like no place on earth.

Null Island

WARNING: A troubleshooting country has been added with an Indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island (1, 2). It is a fictional, 1 meter square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross. Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services. Aside: “Null Islands” exist for all local coordinate reference systems besides WGS84 like State Plane (and global if not using modern Greenwich prime meridian). Null Island in Natural Earth is scaleRank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping. Side note: Rank 30 (zoom 29 in Google speak) is 1:1 scale and would require over 288 billion million tiles with a total storage requirement of more than 3.5 billion million megabytes which verges on Borges’ essay On Exactitude in Science). Null Island should only be used during analysis and will keep errant points off your maps. 

via Natural Earth (v1.3 release notes)