While champagne corks were still popping in celebration of the restoration of the long-lost “s” to Shermans Creek, eagle-eyed public servant Dave Unger was puzzling over the official letter from Lou Yost of the United States Board on Geographic Names. You may remember that Mr. Yost’s letter was reprinted in the body of my column announcing the creek’s name change.
Dave is the Geographic Information Systems Coordinator for Perry County, which means that he works with maps day in and day out, making sure, among other matters of crucial business, that 9-1-1 responders have up-to-date and accurate geographic information.
He noticed something a bit odd about the latitude and longitude numbers in Mr. Yost’s letter, which included the new entry for Shermans Creek in the federal Geographic Names Information System. So Dave checked it out. Then he left a bemused, but slightly worried voicemail for me.
It seemed the Feds had decided to relocate Shermans Creek to Montana.
If you’d like to examine the smoking gun, feel free to plug in Mr. Yost’s numbers yourself: 46˚03’59”N, 111˚33’57”W. Just remember to plot the coordinates with the DHS (Degree, Hour, Minute) system, not the newfangled DEC (decimal degree) system.
The coordinates in the letter put the confluence of Shermans Creek somewhere in the southcentral part of The Treasure State, about halfway between Bozeman and Butte, in the middle of parched hill country. The only feature of note in the vicinity is the Missouri River Headwaters State park, which begs a question: was this a case of regional stream-snatching? Or worse, evidence of a nefarious, Socialist-minded, federal redistribution-of-water-resources scheme?
Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists among us, the relocation of Shermans Creek to Montana was simply a matter of that most common of human foibles, the typo. Someone, whether it was Lou Yost himself or the administrative assistant who typed up the letter for him, probably pasted in the wrong latitude and longitude for the confluence of the creek.
I double-checked the entry in the Geographic Names Information System at http://geonames.usgs.gov. You’ll be relieved to hear that the official coordinates for Shermans Creek, for both the source and confluence, are 100% correct.
Phew.
I’d like to extend a public “thank-you” to Dave Unger for his tireless efforts on behalf of the good people of Perry County. Thanks to people like Dave, those larcenous, water-deprived states out West will have to work a lot harder to steal our creek out from underneath us.
The timing of Dave’s call was uncanny. I’d just been reading a fascinating little book entitled Harrison, by Jonathan Betts, Senior Specialist in Horology at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England.
Now before you accuse me of making my own contribution to the vast and miserable sea of typos, let me just state for the record that “horology,” despite its “earthy” ring, is actually the art or science of measuring time.
Why, you might ask, would the Royal Observatory employ a Senior Specialist in Horology?
Therein lies an interesting tale, which begins with a problem that bedeviled mariners from ancient times all the way through the early 19th century: longitude.
We’ve seen, in the case of our own Shermans Creek, how an error of 34 degrees of longitude can cause a body of water to vanish from Pennsylvania and magically pop up 2000 miles to the west in Montana.
But before we dive into subtle questions of geographical time and distance, perhaps a few words on the difference between latitude and longitude are in order.
Latitude is one’s position north or south of the Equator. The latitude of the Equator itself is 0˚. The latitude of Perry County is about 40˚N, which means it’s a little less than halfway between the Equator and the North Pole, which is 90˚N.
The fact that latitude is linked to the Equator is a big advantage to navigators. Imagine the earth as a desk-bound bureaucrat with a perfectly round beer belly. The bureaucrat’s long-suffering leather belt would be the Equator. He can spin around in his desk chair all he wants, but that won’t really change the relative position of the gloomy fluorescent light overhead. Sail anywhere you like on the bureaucrat’s belly, and as long as you can spot that light and measure its angle relative to the blubber horizon, you’ll know how far north or south you are of that creaking belt.
Just so, in the northern hemisphere, you can find your latitude using a measurement of the sun. At night, in both hemispheres, you can find it by a similar measurement of the pole star.
Christopher Columbus would have used these techniques to learn how far north or south of the Equator his ships happened to be.
Knowing how far you are from the Equator is helpful, but it’s not enough. Keep in mind that at 40˚N latitude you could be in New Bloomfield – or Pittsburgh. Or, for that matter, Salt Lake City; Naples, Italy; Madrid, Spain; or even Yerevan, Armenia.
Latitude is only half of the story. You need to know your longitude as well in order to fix your position in this world. And finding longitude is a completely different kettle of fish.
More to follow next week!
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 27 May 2010
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
