Which to believe?

Back in early February, I headed to Yuma for the Southwestern Arizona Geocachers annual mega event. Lots of fun was had all weekend long and our geocaching adventures took us all over the southwest corner of Arizona. At one point, we came across this benchmark on a canal overdressing. If you look closely, it's an elevation benchmark listing the elevation above sea level as 132.8 feet. I'm not sure when this benchmark was placed, but it was probably placed sometime in the middle of the last century.

When I saw it, I decided to get out my phone and pull up an app that I have on the phone called My Altitude. I've used it in the past and it's proven to be pretty accurate when comparing it to other spots of known elevation. One summer when camping in the eastern Sierras, my friends and I hiked up to the top of Kearsarge Pass out of Onion Valley. This pass tops out at 11,760 feet above sea level according to the sign indicating you're entering Kings Canyon National Park. When I pulled out the phone on that particular occasion the My Altitude app was within about 10 feet of the same numbers. Several other times I've noted that the app was very close to what was an already known altitude.

Which brings me back to this benchmark. I spotted this one and once again decided to see what the app said about the altitude on this bridge. As you can see, there's almost a 30 foot difference in elevation between the posted altitude and what was showing on the app. I have theory behind this which, I think, offers a possible explanation as to why the app was so different from the posted altitude.

Altitudes are constantly being changed and/or as better technology rolls on to the scene. When I was growing up, I remember Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the contiguous United States measuring out at 14,495 feet above sea level. Yet today, if you look on new maps, you'll see that Mt. Whitney stands 14,505 feet above sea level. What? An earthquake happened and the mountain grew by ten feet? If that had happened, we'd know about it because that kind of earthquake would be common knowledge, especially in this day and age.

What's happened is, over the course of time, new technology has allowed us to measure things more accurately, hence the change in the elevation of Mt. Whitney and other peaks all over the world. Even Mt. Everest in the Himalayas is a different height than when it was when I was a kid. New technology has caused our measurements to be more accurate.

So if this benchmark was embedded into the bridge before the advent of satellites, which is entirely possible, we're looking at probably outdated information on the benchmark. Please notice on the My Altitude app that the elevation is accurate to plus or minus 11.09 feet. So the benchmark could be as high as 172 feet above sea level or possibly only 150 feet above sea level according to the app. Now if we extrapolate it out and say that technology might have added an additional ten feet in actual elevation to where the benchmark was located on the bridge, then we actually fall into the margin of error, especially if the app was measuring things a little bit too "tall" that particular day. 142 feet as opposed to 132 feet on the benchmark and the app could be as low as 150 feet, which means there's only a difference of 8 feet between the benchmark and the app, which is about what I've been seeing ever since I started using the app.

Granted, this is all hypothetical, but that's my best guess as to why the two were so far apart originally. I guess what I need to do is bring out the My Altitude app more often when I come across things that have a posted elevation so I can get more data.

So what are your thoughts on this? Do you think I'm close? Or do you have a different hypothesis of your own that you'd like to share? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Five States in One Day

I was thinking I hadn't written here in awhile, but I was surprised to see it's been almost a month since my snake post. This continues my series of posts regarding my 2017 summer road trip.

When last on this series, I'd written about Mingo, the oldest active geocache in the world, located in eastern Kansas. The next day, we left heading to northeast New Mexico, but our route took us on a non-intuitive trek through five states, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Had I been thinking a little bit more, I could have routed us through Nebraska and/or Wyoming and Utah. The purpose, obviously was to find at least one geocache in each state. And yes, there's challenges out there for finding caches in several states in a single day. 

I've signed one that challenges you to find caches in 7 states in a day. It's a lot easier on the east coast than on the west coast, but this one day took us through 5, so even in the west it's possible. Start at the edge of one state, travel through 5 others and end on the edge of the next state, which is about what we did at least to get 5 different states. The photo is of the two of us getting a virtual cache at the confluence of the borders of Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Believe it or not, this was the second confluence of three states that we'd visited on this trip, having previously visited the confluence of South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota. Once the pandemic restrictions have totally lifted, I guess I'll need to eventually get back to the four corners area and get a photo of me there as well.

Things I learned on this day's travel. 

1. Eastern Colorado is much more part of the Great Plains than it is of the Rocky Mountains. 

2. Smart phones and time zones are remarkably accurate. There was one cache we found, where we were driving on the road into New Mexico. I parked the car at the side of the road, walked across the road to find a cache at the northwest corner of Texas. In the time I walked across the road, my smart phone had adjusted itself to Central Daylight Time (Texas) and once we walked back on the other side of the road, it had adjusted itself back to Mountain Daylight Time (New Mexico).

A new voting experience

This morning, I wandered over to my polling place to vote.  The city where I live had one thing on the ballot, whether to raise the sales tax within the city boundaries. Lots of signs all over the city expressed the two side adequately and I choose (as is my prerogative) to not tell you how I voted.

First, I don't like to vote absentee ballot. I like to go to the polling place and "ink" my ballot. From the looks of things, it looks like I won't be inking my ballot in the near future. They had two electronic voting booths and a woman was trying to find people who wanted to try it out. Apparently, the county of Los Angeles is moving toward this for the next election, meaning the primary in the springtime, and they were testing it out. By the looks of it, they need to work out more kinks in the system. Either that, or the voting machine just didn't like me.

I had my sample ballot's barcode scanned which brought up the pertinent information about me and then the precinct worker put a sheet of paper through a printer which printed my electronic ballot and told me to go over to the voting booth and follow the instructions. So I did. I got one step in and there was an internal code 103 error. Neither worker knew what that meant and they couldn't clear the machine without rebooting it. They also had to open up the machine in order to get my ballot.

Once someone had voted at the other machine, I asked if I could vote on that machine with my ballot. Sure.  So I went through the procedures again and the machine gave me the same error. Until I retired this past spring, I used to teach computers at the middle school. Thinking to myself and troubleshooting, my ballot caused two different machines to error, indicating that it's not the machine, but the ballot that's the problem, especially since it was taking other people's ballots and allowing them to vote.

So now, the precinct workers voided my ballot and we decided to go through the process again with a new printed ballot.  I figured I'd be their Guinea Pig this morning to help them out, although I heard both of them vent their frustrations that they'd not gotten any kind of training on these machines. That, in itself, is a very bad thing if they're planning on rolling these things out en masse next spring.

So a new ballot was printed, I went over to the machine, started the process and got the same error message - Error 103.  Troubleshooting again, now it appears as if perhaps it's not the ballot, but the machine at the source doesn't like me for some reason. Needless to say, we didn't go through the process on another machine after that, my ballot was again voided and I went over and voted the "old fashioned" way, by inking my ballot. 45 minute after I'd walked into the building, I was walking out with my "I Voted" sticker. At the moment, I'm not impressed, nor am I satisfied that this could stop willful hacking of the system. I may end up going to absentee balloting in the future.