10 November 2017

Why did my phone think I was in Mongolia ?

I took a rather poor panorama shot in the north woods of Minnesota.  Just before deleting it, I noticed the location information. 

It's possible I stepped through a wormhole, but I suspect there's a more rational explanation.

5 comments:

  1. This is kind of a SWAG, but...

    I think a sign error in GPS data caused it. Based on a quick peek at the Wikipedia articles for the two regions, the latitude is about the same, and the longitude has about the same magnitude, just west and east of the prime meridian.

    So it's not impossible that a bit got flipped somehow, and ~46N / 90W got reported as 46N / 90E.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Josh (but I was hoping for the wormhole...)

      Delete
    2. I kinda was, too. Maybe, with more hikes in those woods, you'll find it again.

      Delete
  2. Presumably unrelated to this bug, but I was amused to hear of people asking Google Home "what is the temperature inside", and receiving answers 5-10 degrees off what their wall thermometer said. Turns out they were getting the temperature in Side, Turkey. (A search for Side, Turkey on Reddit turns up the original.) Someone suggested rephrasing the question to "what is the temperature indoors", so you can get the temperature for a small Scottish town just off Loch Ness.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Last year my husband and I were visiting Movie World on the Gold Coast (in Queensland, Australia). At one point we had been separated and very shortly before he returned to the theme park, Google Maps Location told me he (or his phone, at least)was in Venice. Without the gondolas.

    ReplyDelete

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