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Quotes About Longitude

The latitude and longitudinal lines of where you are born determine your opportunity in life, and it's not equal. We may have been created equal, but we're not born equal. It's a lot to do with luck and you have to pass that on.
~ Brad Pitt
I found that this was a desert region so obscure that the designers of atlases typically stitch page bindings directly over that very latitude and longitude, obliterating the map's topography as surely as any sandstorm.
~ Adrienne Mayor
Scramblers deactivated, then? Well here's some good news. You feel no pain. You will go straight to a hospital. Remember nothing of this place. And every time you hear the words parsley, intractable or longitude, you will vomit uncontrollably for forty-eight hours.
~ Joss Whedon
One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.
~ Dava Sobel
The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.
~ Dava Sobel
Earlier maps had underestimated the distances to other continents and exaggerated the outlines of individual nations. Now global dimensions could be set, with authority, by the celestial spheres. Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.
~ Dava Sobel
In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of "discovering the longitude" became a synonym for attempting the impossible.
~ Dava Sobel
The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child's play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.
~ Dava Sobel
To learn one's longitude at sea, one needs to know what time it is aboard ship and also the time at the home port or another place of known longitude—at that very same moment. The two clock times enable the navigator to convert the hour difference into a geographical separation. Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees.
~ Dava Sobel
The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king's ransom (several million dollars in today's currency) for a "Practicable and Useful" means of determining longitude.
~ Dava Sobel
Indeed, King Louis XIV of France, confronted with a revised map of his domain based on accurate longitude measurements, reportedly complained that he was losing more territory to his astronomers than to his enemies.
~ Dava Sobel
John "Longitude" Harrison was born March 24, 1693, in the county of Yorkshire, the eldest of five children.
~ Dava Sobel
There was no present, no past, no future. No sadness, no sorrow, because those were ordinary little human emotions that required a frame of reference, and she had none to cling to. She had caved in, become a measureless void, no poles, no lines of latitude or longitude. She was an emptiness bigger than galaxies, unmapped and unmappable.
~ Alastair Reynolds
Precisely," Meredith smiled. "If they want to know where they are they'll follow the time of the Royal Observatory. We shall call it Greenwich time," he added.
~ Edward Rutherfurd
People used to pooh-pooh the idea of a check-in, saying that this wasn't interesting. But when you have 3 billion of those data points, you can take any latitude and longitude anywhere in the world, and I'll tell you what is interesting now, 20 minutes from now, and 6 hours from now.
~ Dennis Crowley
I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
~ Christopher Columbus
I must say that "Right" has no meaning to me whatsoever! Truth has meaning - as a direction. But one of the peculiar imbecilities of our time is the grid of morality we have placed on human behavior: so that every act of man must be measured against an arbitrary latitude of right and longitude of wrong - in exact minutes, seconds, and degrees!... -Henry Drummond, a character in Inherit The Wind
~ Jerome Lawrence
about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?' (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either
~ Lewis Carroll
schoolroom, and though this was not a VERY good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) '--yes, that's about the right distance--but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I've got to?
~ Lewis Carroll
IN 1493, WHEN COLUMBUS returned from his unimaginable voyage, a Spanish-born pope granted all of the lands on the other side of the ocean, everything west of a line of longitude some three hundred miles west of Cape Verde, to Spain, and granted what lay east of that line, western Africa, to Portugal, the pope claiming the authority to divvy up lands inhabited by tens of millions of people as if he were the god of Genesis.
~ Jill Lepore
Without geography, you're nowhere.
~ Jimmy Buffett
You've probably seen latitude and longitude specfied in both degrees/minutes/seconds, such as (47°38'34'', 122°32'32''), and in decimal values, such as (47.64, -122.54). With the Geolocation API we always use decimal values. If
~ Eric Freeman
S. Latitude 34° 21?, W. Longitude 152° 17?
~ H.P. Lovecraft
Women, are a map, Avik. You've got to understand their longitude, and how much latitude you can take.
~ Walter Russell