All together, my friends are an accident

[desh]

Because I'm bored and a nerd, and an Excel master, I decided to calculate the geographic average of everyone on my Friends list right now. (Well, minus the people who I never talk to anymore or whose location I don't know.)

The Hawaii and England/Israel people approximately canceled each other out, as did the British Columbia and Florida folks.

And I end up with an average practically on top of a town called Accident in Western Maryland. Which puts me barely closest to bloomable, who just beats out the Pittsburgh folks, with the DC-area folks probably edging out Baltimore, Richmond, and Hurricane WV for third place.

Comments

[lord-emo.livejournal.com]

Wait how do you calculate averages on the surface of a sphere? Shouldn't the average be somewhere in the interior? Or do you find that point and then use the point directly above it? I think too much.

[burr86.livejournal.com]

I assume Josh just took a weighted average of the latitude/longitude?

[desh]

Yeah, sorry to disappoint. It was just latitude/longitude, with adjustments in sign conventions to make sure that I was never wrapping around "the long way".

Everyone is within about 30 points of latitude anyway, so the rectangular projection of latitude/longitude is about as good as any other projection. But yes, I did want some sort of surface projection.