The Keypad System Of Global Navigation

I have long been thinking that there must be a better way to define points on the earth's surface than the system of latitude and longitude that has been in use for centuries.

Here is a question for you. Without looking at a map, what is your latitude and longitude? If you are like the vast majority of people in the world, you do not have the slightest idea of what the latitude and longitude coordinates are where you live. In fact, there are very few people who actually use latitude and longitude.

Latitude and longitude was a revolutionary development at the time as a method of pinpointing a location anywhere on earth. The earth is a sphere and latitude is the location of a point on the surface in degrees north or south of the equator so that the equator represents zero degrees, the north pole is 90 degrees north and the south pole is 90 degrees south. Lines of latitude are also known as parallels. It is easy enough to measure one's latitude by measuring the apparent angular altitude of the north star above a flat horizon.

Measuring longitude is more difficult. Longitude is the degrees east or west and a line of longitude is also known as a meridian. The best way to measure longitude is by time. Britain's John Harrison developed a very accurate clock that was not based on the motion of a pendulum. Clocks based on a pendulum were considered as unreliable at sea because the pitching and rolling of the ship in rough water might affect the timing of the pendulum.

Longitude could then be measured by keeping a clock set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on the ship and then measuring local solar time by means such as a sun dial. The difference would be the ship's longitude. The north-south line through the observatory in the London suburb of Greenwich was defined as the Prime Meridian, which represents zero degrees longitude. If local solar time was ahead of GMT, the ship must be east of the Prime Meridian and would be west of the Prime Meridian is it was behind GMT.

You may have heard of a so-called "nautical mile" that is used at sea. This nautical mile is defined by the sphere of the earth and is one-sixtieth of a degree of latitude or of longitude at the equator, it is equal to 1.16 statue miles. A "knot" is a reference to speed, meaning one nautical mile per hour.

The trouble is that while latitude and longitude was revolutionary in it's day, it is not really user-friendly. The real difficulty is that we are used to dealing with square maps, and since the earth is a sphere it's surface cannot be rendered with complete accuracy on a square map. There is equal distance between lines of latitude, but the distance between lines of longitude vary according to latitude. Meridians are furthest apart at the equator, the same distance apart as lines of latitude, but converge at the poles. Various methods of projection have been developed for mapping the entire earth, but all must necessarily involve either breaks or distortion.

One reason that latitude and longitude is not user-friendly concerns our number system. It is based on a 360-degree circle because 360 is a nice, round, easily-divisible number. Our number system is based on ten, because people have ten fingers, which is not a nice, round, easily-divisible number. The result is that latitude and longitude coordinates cannot be easily rendered into the decimal system that we are used to. I covered this in detail in "The Queen of Numbers", on the progress blog. It may be that one of the greatest mistakes ever made by humans is counting by tens instead of twelves, because 12 is much more divisible.

I would like for the earth's entire surface to be rendered as squares to be mapped. This is not possible to do with accuracy if the equator extends across the middle, as we are accustomed to. The approach that I want to take is to put the equator diagonally across squares so that the equator extends from upper right to lower left, instead of laterally across the center.

Suppose that we divide the circumference of the earth into thirds along the equator. Under my system, each third will be the diagonal of one of nine squares that will cover all of the earth's surface. The squares will be imposed on the earth's surface as nine four-sided diamonds with the equator being the diagonal of the three squares that are a diagonal across the middle, from upper right to lower left.

The equator will be the diagonal of three squares, there will be two squares in the spaces between these three squares, on each side of the equator, and one square in the space between these two squares. This will bring us to a total of nine squares that will cover the entire surface of the earth. The north and south poles will each be in the center of the one square in the space between the two squares.

Now, do you notice that these nine squares are identical to the keypad on a phone or computer? That is why this is called the keypad system.

Suppose that we now take each of our nine squares, that cover the entire surface of the earth, and subdivide it into nine squares? We can easily express any square with it's number, from 1 to 9. Then, with each square subdivided into nine squares, we can also express that with a number. So, if the first square is 5 and the square within it is 9, we would express that portion of the earth's surface as 59. Nice and simple.

This could be a modern system of navigation designed for expression via a keypad, since it is designed to match the numbers on a keypad. The concept also fits perfectly with the philosophy of the metric system.

We can then subdivide the second, inner, square also into nine sqaures. Then, we could further divide all of those squares into nine squares. By doing this, we can narrow down the area of the earth's surface as much as we like or as much as we are able to. The more numbers in the expression, the more accuracy and the smaller the square. 5391684 will represent much more accuracy than 5391.

The number of a particular location could be entered into satellite imagery software and would bring up the designated square on the earth's surface automatically. It would also be much easier to get an idea of the distance between two points. This can be done with latitude and longitude, but involves calculation (For my formula, see "The Geographic Formula" on this blog).

Notice that the squares are only number from 1-9. This leaves us with the zero to separate the numbers of multiple squares that are designated. For example, 346206851 would mean squares 3462 and 6851. If an area that we want to designate does not fit neatly with these squares, we can easily define the points that do signify the area that we want to designate by separating them from one another with zeros.

This system would be much more convenient than latitude and longitude, particularly with there being so much technology using keypads.