Alex Heberling

Chris and I recently started getting into geohashing.  There’s a whole wiki dedicated to it, spawned from a comic that laid out an algorithm for determining daily, random coordinates based on the given day’s date, the most recent Dow opening, and your home latitude and longitude.

Using the wiki to organize, there are official meetups every Saturday in every graticule (one degree rectangle of latitude and longitude) in the world.  Columbus happens to be split by the 83rd West meridian and the 40th North parallel, so we essentially have four graticules to monitor and can choose the closest point in any of them.  So far, we’ve made it to five different hashes among three of our surrounding graticules.

Our first hash was on June 14th, near Grove City, in the southwest graticule.  We overshot the location by quite a bit, and nearly got to Chillicothe before turning around.  In fact, we managed to get dramatically lost on our first three hashes, but were successful in getting to the fourth and fifth on the first try.

The second hash we visited was in the northwest graticule, which was on our way up to Toledo for the weekend, June 20th.  The coordinates were close to Upper Sandusky, Ohio, which is the halfway point driving between Toledo and Columbus.  It was in a field on a farm, and on the way back to the highway, we came across the Indian Mill Museum, which was tucked into a little pocket of trees.

The third hash was two days later on Sunday the 22nd.  It was also very close to Upper Sandusky, so we stopped there on the way back to Columbus.  Unsurprisingly, the hash was also in a large field, though since it was quite far away from the road, we didn’t trek all the way out.

Our fourth hash was on June 29th in the northeast graticule, on our way back from ColossalCon in Cleveland.  It was reasonably close to the highway, though the fact that the exits on I-71 are spaced far apart meant we had to zigzag around on country roads quite a bit to get there.  We’d given Grace, a friend of a friend, a ride up to Cleveland on Thursday night, so by bringing her to the hash with us on the way back, we recieved what’s called the Drag-Along Geohash, which is given when you bring someone to the hash who doesn’t know what geohashing is.

The fifth hash, on July 5th, was actually within the realms of civilization (not that farmland isn’t, per se) in the parking lot of a Kroger in Westerville.  We brought our friend Susan with us, since she lived nearby, and we left many chalk drawings at the spot in the lot.  At this last one, we were really hoping to meet other local geohashers, since hashes don’t fall within the metro area very often, but we ended up being the only ones there.  So sad.

I find the shockwave that Randall Munroe has created to be amazing.  It keeps reverberating throughout the entire internet.  After reading his comic for so long, I wonder incredulously, “Where was this guy hiding all this time?”  A single comic last year spelled out a date, time, and coordinates to the character in the comic, and when the day actually came in real life, people were there.  With geohashing, people of all walks of geekdom are traveling miles and miles to find these secluded little spots nearly every day.

Munroe somehow takes the underexposed, pure emotions in people’s hearts and manages to stir them into action.  The feelings of adventure and fun that adults seem to forget about are suddenly brought forth, and instead of feeling childish, we feel alive for once, knowing that there are others who feel the same things.  When you’re tired of feeling like you should repress such thoughts and emotions, it’s incredibly refreshing to not only be told it’s okay, but to have evidence that a whole slew of other people feel the exact same way.

XKCD is a comic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” but I didn’t realize until recently that the romance part of the slogan wasn’t just referring to loving another.  It’s about loving the world, loving your life, and exploring all the facets of both.

Put on your rose-colored blogging goggles; it’s so much more lifting to look at the world that way than through a screen of dry cynicism.

[ Columbus wiki entry | My Flickr Set of geohashing pictures | Columbus Geohashers Facebook Group ]