I was a navigator once. I know the word latitude and the word longitude and I know which is which. Left and right have always blurred together in my mind but I was never tested on them for my navigation certificate. Remembering my latitude from my longitude was far from instinctive.
Here's what I came up with: Latitude-Flatitude. (No relation to flatulence.)
Latitude lines lie flat like the slats (get it?) of the blinds above. Longditude lines go up and down. (I tried mneumonics like Longitude-Flongditude but they made no sense and I only needed the flatitude one, and then longitude was the other one.) When the position of a place on the Earth is given using "Lat'nLong" as we navigators like to call them, latitude is the first one, always. They come in alphabetical order, la before lo like in the dictionary. So the first number tells you how far north or south of the equator the place is, the second tells you how far around the globe it is from Greenwich, England, which apparently is the starting place for going around the globe.
This is what's tricky: lines of latitude, which are flat (as in horizontal) tell how far up or down the place is. (Go to the third slat up the blinds.) Lines of longitude, which go up and down (as in vertical) tell you how far the place is measured left to right.(Go to the leftmost window of the building you can see through the blinds.) That was very confusing for a while.
There are, believe it or not... I'm only showing off now so if I just taught you lat from long and you're celebrating this newfound knowledge, stop reading at this point because the rest will make you queasy... there are in fact six different ways to measure latitude just on the planet Earth, seven if you have broader horizons. They are...
Never mind, it doesn't matter. But my favorite of all times is called rectifying latitude (like it needed rectifying) and the reason it is my all-time favorite is because of this charmingly casual coment in the excellent Wikipedia article that I'm plagiarizing from, "... Unfortunately it requires elliptical integration..."
I had a girl friend once who was like that. She pretty much ended my fascination with elliptical integration.
Call me square.
2 comments:
I think if I knew what elliptical intergration was it would make more sense to me why this particular latitude is cool and why your girlfriend was, apparently, not.
I wonder what the person in the window thinks about all this.
Well, just trust me when I say that elliptical integration is fun every now and again but as a steady diet it's a killer.
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