For data loving nerds out there, this one’s for you:
So how do you know that you traveled “Around the World”? As far as I know, there is no association to call up and ask what the rules are on what qualifies as having completed a circle around this planet. That means you pretty much get to make up whatever rules you want. In our case, the thought at the outset was to keep travelling east until we get back to our starting point and that should do the trick. There is undoubtedly a camp of some type of purists out there with strict rules about routes, number of countries visited or something like that. I haven’t gone looking for them, but in the interest of providing a bit of data to our jaunt, I’ve decided to track our progress by comparing it to the circumference of the Earth. Since our route is developing as we go, we might match this number, we might not, but it gives a tidy little benchmark.
According to numerous internet sources (if they all say the same thing it must be true after all), The accepted circumference of the earth is approximately 40,000 km.* With that in mind, our starting point was Toronto, Canada and as I write this first data point we are in Annecy, France. Next step is to use some other fancy websites to obtain latitude & longitude figures, punch them into an online calculator & poof, we generate data!
As of today, This puts us around 7,000 km travelled or approximately 17% of the way around. If I can figure out how to do it, eventually I’ll build some cool graphic to show our progress but since I’m really about the data, it’s entirely possible that this just won’t happen.
Happy Monday!
*note 1: several sources claim significant figures to the nearest km, others to the nearest meter. In general this seems to be done for the purpose of illustrating the difference between the equatorial circumference and the polar circumference). Quite frankly I don’t need this level of accuracy, nor do I believe it without having a detailed list of assumptions made since a perfect circle simply does not fit around the earth. With this in mind, I will consider significant figures only to the closest 1000 km, anything less than that is well within the error of extra distance travelled on short car trips, bicycle trips or even daily walks to the grocery store which would just be absurd to measure! Comparing the circumference of 40,000 km to say the distance if you just went around the 45th parallel (roughly 28,000 km according to the same internet sources), we see a sufficient level of accuracy at the 1000 km mark to see if we made it close to the distance that in general allows us to Circle the Sphere.