Converting Lat/Long from degrees-minutes-second to decimal degrees [telecom]

Of course, with no disrespect to Dale Bickel, it's also trivial to do with a calculator.

-GAWollman

And if you don't need much precision, it's not too hard to do in your head. 10 minutes is .167, 20 minutes is .333, 30 minutes is .5, etc.

I think you guys want to drag out the slipstick that's on display, IIRC, in the M.I.T. AI Lab: the one that's mounted in the fire-extinguisher case, with the label that says

"*In*Case*of*Power*Failure,*Break*Glass*".

(Pause for laughter to finish).

Now, I agree that, if I were the captain of a square-rigger rounding the Horn (pun intended), I might want to have an Astrolabe on hand, or to have the table of logarithms memorized the way Bowditch did it.

I am, however, only occasionally in need of such expertise, and I'm content to let a machine do the calculation for me. The late Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was on my side: he wrote an essay about why he flunked a math course at Harvard Medical school because he refused to do calculations by rote after calculators had been invented.

OBTelecom: There was a researcher at Bell Labs who pointed out that measures of traffic load for exchanges could be done more simply (and faster) by merely recording the power consumed by an office during the desired time period. He was told that it would take too much effort to retrain workers who were used to tallying call counts and using Poisson tables.

Bill

I find it handy to use Wikimapia. Place the "+" over the desired target, click the coordinates in the lower-left corner, and you get a table with the coordinates in three formats: