Can we do this again please? We've all moved house and it would be interesting to see where the new centroid is. Sign up here:
- spimcoot, TerrieBot and Bobcat live here: 51:31:13N (51.5203) 0:06:19W (-0.1053) --- (due to decreasing wiki anonymity, these coordinates are fudged slightly, to preserve safety).
- SiBen is at: 51:28:58N (51.4829) 3:10:20W (-3.1723). Wow - we are 3 degrees away from each other. That's loads!
- → Willow Lane, Wargrave near Reading
- That's a very drepressing name, who would choose to live there? A. The Tongs!
We could just ask people to email it to TongsMailbag.
- It's correct within a 500 yard radius, I just didn't want to post an exact location.
About
A million years ago, FerkelTongs introduced the idea of a Tongs Centroid point, the average of all the places where the Tongs are at any moment in time.
This was used, not very effectively, in planning a place to go which was mutually convenient. Now, with the help of multimap, we can easily calculate the Tongs Centroid and keep track of it, right here, on this damn Wiki contraption. And yes, there's not a lot of point.
Here's what you do:
- Go to multimap.com and type in your postcode.
- Look at the bottom for the coordinates. I searched for King Dick Lane in St. George, Bristol, which is at 51:27:37N (51.4603), 2:32:21W (-2.5392). I want those two numbers, what my maths teacher would have called `decimal fractions', one for northness (51.4603) and one (-2.5392) for eastness.
- Email to SiBen your coordinates.
- Then watch this page update with the TongsCentroid. (History > TongsCentroidIterations)
Note: If all the Tongs were to make a concerted effort to reach the mythical TongsCentroid we would end up with what is technically known as a hug.
- This sounds great - we could make it into an annual event to go to the centroid. `The Eighteenth Annual Tongs Hug'.
Issue: Do we submit where we work or where we live? My point is where I live. Can you do the same please Ferklau, then I'll weight your coordinate by 2, for both you and Mnklau.
- Oh no, the centroid is, by definition, where we are at any moment. It was originally used to try to find the pub that involved the least total walking. A tricky side-effect of this definition is that if we were to attempt to reach the centroid it would move, unless we all approached it at equal speed. Happily however, reaching the centroid is easily achieved by merely all coming together somewhere, thus restoring to Annual Hug to the realms of possibility.
- *grumble* Okay Fergal, but can we relax the definition for this version of the TongsCentroid. Come on son, be possible.
(I'm guessing our current centroid will be somewhere near Rickmansworth, depending on who submits locations. Hmm...)
Current Centroid
Based on: SiBen at home, MnkiFrki at home, RickBot at RickHaus, LordMaderlock and TimboLangford, EmBo and KBo, Poonam, Gray, and Nugget and Ralf (WolfTongs), the WildeFamily?, Yaron, SpimCoot, TedNed in Sofia.
43.221837,3.842485
Just off the resort towns of Sete and Agde, where I have been. They were quite nice places to be in fact, a little crowded at times though.
And with Wowbagger...
39.687730,11.303511
http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?latlongtype=decimal&latitude=39.68773&longitude=11.303511
It's in the middle of the sea near sardinia and italy, but I have forgotten how to make it into an image for the wiki - can other people try?
- As Sardinia and Italy are still a bit of a walk for me (as it would be for everyone else) I am happy to allow my name struck off the centroid list. If ever I move to your part of the world - a remote but not impossible circumstance - I shall submit new coordinates. Until then, consider where I live the meeting point for any Anticentroid gatherings. - Wowbagger
Alternative centroids
The centroid may be in the middle of the sea. There are a number of ways this can be resolved:
- Drain the oceans and hire a car
- Hire a boat (silly)
- Steal a boat (really silly - pirates are frowned upon by the international community)
- Move all Tongs to England
- Create a coordinate system that ignored water such that all points of land join as they once did when all contents were part of the ubercontenent Pangea. We would then have to all go to the US. Yay!
- (
This isn't true, is it? If you reformed Pangaea then the Centroid would be back in the UK - it's certainly less than half way to the US as it is.)
- No, it was a lie.
- (
- Kill all non-English Tongs (might not be universally approved of)
- Kill all non-English (see objection to 6)
- Choose the nearest land-fall from those coordinates
- Calculate the centroid in a way that fudges it onto land
- Hire many boats and tow England into the correct position
- Decide out where we want to meet and then calculate where we need to recruit more people to get the centroid into the right place. This is so monumentally silly that it might have to be done :)
Following on from 9, we could:
- Weight the average position by weight of person, possibly with a monotonic transform such that we all end up at the heaviest person's house
- Ignore foreign people like Prince Philip
- Similar to a, minimise the log of the distance such that lots of low distances are more important than a high one.
Anticentroid
There is another point on earth which could be a kind of centroid, which is the furthest point away from the centroid, on the other side of the earth. This is another equivalent centroid, maybe. People who are good at maths should justify this intuition for me.
The last anticentroid is just off New Zealand. There is no data for the current anticentroid.
- On a closed surface like a sphere you could maximise the distance from a set of points, this would (I think) give you the same anticentroid as just taking the opposite point to the centroid.
- Interestingly, in spaces with a positive curvature, like a sphere, the centroid is not necessarily uniquely defined, unlike in spaces with zero or negative curvature. Consider two tongs on opposite sides of the world, the poles say. Anywhere on the equator could be their centroid. In this case, the anticentroid is equal to the centroid, which makes you wonder where TheBots are going to hold their hug.
- "Hug" means sex in Bot-talk, so they've generally agreed against having an annual Bot hug.