Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our house in Jerusalem with my brother. It is a bit of a heavy morning here—we can actually hear the surveillance drones humming over the valley today, which is a stark reminder of where we are on this sixteenth of January, twenty twenty six.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And man, do we have a deep one today. Our housemate Daniel sent us a prompt that touches on something we see every day here in the Middle East, but from a purely technical and mathematical angle that I think most people completely overlook. It is about the literal ground shifting beneath the most contested borders on Earth.
It is the kind of thing that seems simple on the surface, right? You have a coordinate, you put it in your phone, and it tells you where you are. But Daniel was asking about the precision of these numbers, specifically a term he came across called two sixes, and how we actually define a fixed point on a planet that is essentially a collection of massive, slow moving rafts.
It is a brilliant question because it forces us to confront the fact that the ground beneath our feet is not a static object. We treat it like a stage, but it is more like a treadmill. And when you are talking about things like the Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon—especially now, with the ceasefire from late twenty twenty four still feeling so fragile and the U N drawdown looming later this year—the math becomes incredibly high stakes. A few centimeters can literally be the difference between a routine patrol and a diplomatic incident.
Exactly. And before we dive into the tectonic plates and the border disputes, I want to start with the basics of how we even write these locations down. Daniel mentioned the difference between the decimal system and the degrees, minutes, seconds system, or D M S. Herman, why do we have two? And why does the digital world seem to have picked a favorite?
Well, the short answer is that computers are lazy and humans are traditional. Degrees, minutes, seconds is the old school way. It is based on the idea of dividing a circle into three hundred sixty degrees, then each degree into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. It is beautiful for navigation with a sextant or a paper map because it feels very physical. You can visualize those divisions. But for a computer, doing math with base sixty is a nightmare.
Right, because you are constantly having to carry over sixties instead of tens. It is like trying to do long division with a clock.
Precisely. So the decimal system, or decimal degrees, just takes that whole coordinate and turns it into a single floating point number. Instead of saying thirty three degrees, seven minutes, and thirty seconds, you just say thirty three point one two five. It is much easier for algorithms to process, it is more efficient for storage, and it makes calculating the distance between two points a lot faster. It is the language of O S I N T and satellite imagery.
Now, Daniel mentioned this term two sixes. From what he described, it refers to a coordinate with four decimal places, making six digits total if you include the two digits for the degree. So something like thirty three point one two three four. He called that high precision. But is it? When we look at those four decimal places, what kind of real world accuracy are we actually talking about?
This is where the math gets fun. So, if you have zero decimal places, you are just saying thirty three degrees. That covers about one hundred eleven kilometers at the equator. One decimal place gets you down to eleven kilometers. Two decimal places gets you to about one point one kilometers. Three decimal places is one hundred ten meters. And then we hit Daniel's four decimal places. That gives you a precision of about eleven meters.
Eleven meters? So if I give you a two sixes coordinate, I am basically pointing you to a specific house or a small patch of a field.
Exactly. For a standard commercial G P S on your phone, eleven meters is actually quite good. Most phones are accurate to within five or ten meters under perfect conditions. So providing four decimal places matches the accuracy of the hardware most people are carrying. But here is the thing, Corn. If you are trying to define an international border, or if you are a surveyor trying to place a fence, eleven meters is a disaster. You could be thirty feet inside another country.
Right, so for the really high precision stuff, like what Daniel was asking about with the Blue Line, we must be going way beyond four decimal places.
Oh, absolutely. To get to what we call centimetric precision, you need six decimal places. The sixth decimal place represents about eleven centimeters. If you go to seven decimal places, you are at one point one centimeters. When Daniel talks about two sixes in the context of high precision, he might actually be referring to a six-six coordinate pair—meaning six decimal places for both latitude and longitude. That is the gold standard for identifying something like a specific landmine or a boundary marker.
That is fascinating. So the number of digits is not just a matter of being tidy, it is a statement of how much you trust your measurement. But this brings us to the core of Daniel's question. Even if we have a coordinate with eight decimal places, a perfect numerical address for a spot on the ground, that spot is moving. The tectonic plates are shifting. If I define a point in the year two thousand and then I come back today, in January of twenty twenty six, is that point still where the numbers say it is?
That is the million dollar question. And the answer is no, it is absolutely not. This is a concept in geodesy called the reference frame. Most people use a system called W G S eighty four. That is the World Geodetic System of nineteen eighty four. It is what your G P S uses. It is a global system where the center of the earth is the zero point. But because the tectonic plates are moving, a fixed object on a plate, say a blue barrel on the Lebanon border, is actually moving through the W G S eighty four coordinate space.
Wait, so the barrel stays put on the ground, but its address changes?
Exactly. It is like if you were standing on a moving walkway at the airport. You are not walking, but your position relative to the terminal is changing every second. Most tectonic plates move at a rate of about one to seven centimeters per year. Australia is actually one of the fastest, moving north at about seven centimeters a year. Over twenty years, that is nearly a meter and a half of drift.
So if you are trying to maintain a border with centimetric precision, like they do with the Blue Line, how on earth do you account for that? Do the surveyors just have to update the numbers every single year?
They have two ways of handling it. One is to use a kinematic reference frame, where the coordinates actually have a velocity component. You do not just say here is the X and Y, you say here is the X and Y at this specific time, which we call an epoch, and here is how fast it is moving. So a computer can calculate exactly where that point should be today, on January sixteenth, twenty twenty six.
That sounds incredibly complicated for a border guard with a map.
It is. So the other way, which is much more common for national borders and land surveys, is to use a static or plate fixed reference frame. For example, in Europe, they use E T R S eighty nine. In North America, they use N A D eighty three. These systems are pinned to the tectonic plate itself. So as the whole plate moves, the coordinate system moves with it. From the perspective of someone standing on the plate, the coordinates of that blue barrel never change.
Okay, that makes sense. It is like the coordinate system is a blanket laid over the plate. The blanket moves with the plate, so the spots on the blanket stay aligned with the spots on the ground.
Exactly. But here is where the friction happens. Your G P S satellites are orbiting the whole earth. They do not care about your local plate fixed blanket. They are operating in that global W G S eighty four space. So there is a constant, tiny mathematical translation happening between what the satellites see and what your local map shows. If you do not account for the current date and the rate of drift, your high precision coordinate could be off by several decimeters or even a meter depending on how old your data is.
This really puts the Blue Line into perspective. For those who do not know, the Blue Line is not an official international border. It is a withdrawal line established by the U N in the year two thousand to verify that Israeli forces had fully left Lebanon. And because there is no formal peace treaty, they had to mark it physically with these blue barrels. In recent months, there have been reports of military operations in villages near the Blue Line, and every time that happens, the exact location of that line becomes a matter of life and death.
And Daniel mentioned the tree dispute, which I think is such a perfect example of this. Back in twenty ten, there was a fatal skirmish at a place called Odaisseh. It started because Israeli soldiers were trying to prune a tree that they claimed was on their side of the Blue Line. The Lebanese army disagreed. We are talking about a single tree. When you are arguing over the branches of a tree, eleven meter precision is not going to cut it. You need to know exactly where that line is to within centimeters.
I remember reading about that. The U N had to come in with their cartographers and their high precision G P S units to prove that the tree was, in fact, on the Israeli side of the line. But what strikes me is the collaborative effort Daniel mentioned. He talked about seeing U N I F I L officers working with both the Lebanese Armed Forces and the I D F to plot these points.
It is one of the few places where there is a weird, technical cooperation. They use what they call the tripartite process. Representatives from both armies and the U N meet at a specific point. They all bring their own surveyors and their own G P S equipment. They hammer in these colored pickets. One blue for the U N, one red for the Lebanese army, and one yellow for the I D F.
And they have to agree on the spot before the barrel goes down, right?
Yes. They have a rule that for a point to be confirmed, the difference between their three measurements has to be within fifty centimeters. Once they agree, they build a concrete plinth and put a big blue barrel on top. As of a few years ago, they had over two hundred seventy of these barrels along that one hundred twenty kilometer line. However, with ongoing discussions about the future of the U N I F I L mandate, there is a lot of anxiety about who will maintain those markers and that data.
It is amazing that in one of the most volatile regions in the world, the final arbiter of peace is basically a very precise math problem. But going back to the tectonic plates, does the Blue Line itself move? If the Arabian plate and the African plate are shifting relative to each other, does the border literally stretch or tear?
You have hit on the ultimate geodetic headache. The Lebanon Israel border sits near the Dead Sea Transform fault system. It is a plate boundary. Now, the movement there is relatively slow, maybe four or five millimeters a year of slip. But over decades, that adds up. If the land on one side of the line is moving north slightly faster than the land on the other side, the line is technically deforming.
So the blue barrels are literally drifting apart or closer together?
In theory, yes. But because the movement is so slow, we usually treat the area as a single block for mapping purposes. However, if there were a major earthquake—like the devastating one in Turkey in February of twenty twenty three—a big jump of a meter or two along the fault would physically break the Blue Line. You would have a literal offset in the ground where the barrels on one side no longer align with the barrels on the other.
That is a wild thought. A geological event could technically trigger a border dispute. It makes you realize how fragile our definitions of geography are. We think of nations as these permanent shapes on a globe, but they are really just temporary agreements written on a moving surface.
It is the difference between geography and geodesy. Geography is about where things are. Geodesy is about the science of measuring the earth's shape and its orientation in space. And the deeper you go into geodesy, the more you realize that nothing is truly fixed. Even the center of the earth, the origin point for our coordinates, shifts slightly because of mass moving around inside the planet and the melting of polar ice caps changing the earth's crustal loading.
So, when Daniel asks how we define a position numerically on a mass that is constantly moving, the answer is essentially that we pick a moment in time and freeze it. We say, this is the coordinate as of the year two thousand, and then we just do the math to adjust for the drift.
Exactly. We call it the epoch of the realization. If you look at a professional survey, it will say something like I T R F twenty twenty, epoch twenty twenty six point zero. That is the technical way of saying, these numbers are exactly right as of today. If you are using them five years from now, you better know how to calculate the drift.
This has huge implications for the future, does it not? As we get more and more high precision technology, like self driving cars that need to stay in a specific lane, or drones that need to land on a specific pad, we cannot just ignore this drift anymore.
We really cannot. In fact, some countries are moving toward what we call dynamic datums. Australia is the leader here. Because they are moving so fast, they realized that their old static map was becoming dangerously inaccurate for modern tech. So they moved to a system called the A T R F, or Australian Terrestrial Reference Frame, where the coordinates on the map actually change in real time to match the global G P S coordinates. It is a live map.
That sounds like a nightmare for land deeds and property lines. Imagine your neighbor's fence slowly creeping into your yard on the digital map.
It is a massive legal hurdle. But the alternative is worse. If your car thinks the road is a meter to the left of where it actually is because of tectonic drift, you are going to have a lot of accidents. We are reaching a point where the precision of our sensors is outstripping the stability of our planet.
It is a classic case of second order effects. We wanted better G P S so we could find our way to a new restaurant. Now we have it, and suddenly we have to account for the fact that the restaurant is moving at the speed of a fingernail growing.
I love that analogy. It is exactly that. It is slow, but it is relentless. And when you multiply that fingernail growth by forty years of border history, you end up with a very real problem.
You know, it makes me think about those blue barrels again. They seem so solid, so permanent. But they are really just markers for a conversation that is still happening. And that conversation has to be updated every time the earth takes a breath.
It is a perfect metaphor for international relations, is it not? You cannot just set a border and walk away. You have to maintain it, not just politically, but technically. You have to keep measuring, keep calculating, and keep agreeing on where the pickets go.
So, for the practical takeaways for our listeners, what should they keep in mind next time they look at a coordinate?
First, remember the decimal place rule. If you see four decimal places, that is about eleven meters. If you see six, that is about ten centimeters. If someone gives you a coordinate with twelve decimal places, they are probably just copying and pasting from a computer that is giving them false precision, because at that level, you are measuring the width of an atom, and your G P S definitely is not that good.
And second, if you are doing anything that requires real precision, check the datum and the epoch. A coordinate without a date is like a house number without a street name. It might get you close, but it will not get you to the door.
And finally, just appreciate the sheer complexity of what is happening when your phone tells you where you are. There is a massive mathematical dance happening between satellites orbiting at twenty thousand kilometers an hour and tectonic plates moving at five centimeters a year, all so you can find the nearest coffee shop.
It really is a marvel. And I think it is a great reminder of why we do this show. No matter how mundane a topic seems, like a string of numbers on a screen, there is always a deeper, weirder story underneath.
Absolutely. Thanks to Daniel for sending this one in. It is definitely going to change how I look at the blue barrels next time we are up north.
For sure. And hey, if you have been enjoying My Weird Prompts and you want to support what we are doing, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a quick review on Spotify or your favorite podcast app. It genuinely helps other curious people find the show.
Yeah, it makes a huge difference. And if you have a weird question of your own, head over to myweirdprompts.com and send it our way. We love diving into these rabbit holes.
You can find all our past episodes there too, including episode two hundred thirty nine where we talked about why high altitude balloons are still used for surveillance. It actually connects quite well to this discussion of how we look at the earth from above.
Oh, good call. That was a fun one. Well, I think we have covered the two sixes and the moving earth for today.
I think so too. Thanks for listening to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. We will see you in the next one.
Until then, stay curious.
And keep an eye on those tectonic plates. They are faster than they look.
Alright, let's go get some coffee. I promise I will not calculate the drift of the cafe on the way there.
No promises from me. I think we are currently four millimeters north of where we started the episode.
Of course we are. See you everyone.
Bye!
