[geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?

[David Cantrell]

On Fri, Jun 07, 2002 at 05:43:26AM -0700, Fogg, James wrote:
> It does work. You just need granular data. Our database for just Australia
> is 150 gig, and we skip granularity in shallow population areas (no need for
> it).

My mistake, I read "city, province and country" as "city, province OR
country".

> ~ -----Original Message-----
> ~ From: David Cantrell [mailto:david at cantrell.org.uk]
> ~ Sent: Friday, June 07, 2002 5:51 AM
> ~ To: geeks at sunhelp.org
> ~ Subject: Re: [geeks] City & Province -> Lat/Long?
> ~ 
> ~ 
> ~ On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 11:02:16AM -0600, Dave Kimmel wrote:
> ~ > So, does anyone know of anything that I can feed a city, 
> ~ province, and
> ~ > country to and get a lat/long pair back?
> ~ 
> ~ Won't work.  Consider that some countries are tall and thin 
> ~ (eg Italy),
> ~ others like Russia are short and fat, whilst others are 
> ~ square, like France.
> ~ Then consider that really small countries can border much 
> ~ larger countries,
> ~ such as Andorra bordering Spain and France.  A single co-ordinate pair
> ~ for each country will be silly, as something like a sixth of 
> ~ Spain is closer
> ~ to the centre of Andorra than to the centre of Spain, and 
> ~ that a circle
> ~ centred on Rome and big enough to cover all of Italy will 
> ~ also cover one
> ~ entire French department (Corsica), San Marino, Monaco, 
> ~ Vatican, possibly
> ~ Malta, and parts of Switzerland, Slovenia, Albania, 
> ~ Montenegro, etc.  And
> ~ a circle big enough to contain Russia will also cover - well, 
> ~ all of Asia.
> ~ 
> ~ -- 
> ~ David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | 
> ~ http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
> ~ 
> ~    it's amazing that your parents can be so kind and
> ~    thoughtful and produce ... well ... you
> ~              -- Greg McCarroll, speaking to me on IRC
> ~ _______________________________________________
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> ~ 
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-- 
David Cantrell | Benevolent Dictator | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

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