xkcd meetup near Davis - Sunday 9/23

[ron_newman]

A few months ago, a webcomic called xkcd published this strip in which a character's dream includes a very specific set of location and time coordinates. The spatial coordinates happen to resolve to the tiny Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park on Cedar St in North Cambridge, a few blocks from Davis Square. The time is 2:38 pm on September 23, 2007 -- this coming Sunday.

Some of the widely dispersed fans of this comic strip took this as a cue to organize a meetup at that location and time, which resulted in the creation of first the xkcd_meetup_07 LJ community and then this bulletin board. Supposedly there are also MySpace and Facebook pages for this event, but I don't know anything about them. People are planning to converge on this park from all over the USA and beyond.

When the assembled multitude discover that they don't fit in the park, many of them will probably head off to nearby Danehy Park, while others find their way to Davis Square. Should be an interesting day....

Comments

[elements.livejournal.com]

xkcd is probably my most favorite comic (web or otherwise) of all time. It's seriously worth watching. Both profound and hilarious, snarky and unpretentious.

The Facebook event page for it this is here (at least, when I'm logged in that's the link I get):
http://harvard.facebook.com/event.php?eid=4872804900

Trivia: the comic artist actually had to post a correction to the panel with the coordinates. He'd originally posted coordinated to a field in upstate New York - not all that far from where I grew up!

[elements.livejournal.com]

... and I forgot to add before hitting to post the comment above:
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=3469 = place on xkcd forums where people have discussed this lots.

Including why the specific date/time is neat for that specific place:
"The time and date correspond to mean solar noon on the autumnal equinox at that particular location." (according to kmartin on that forum thread)

[mattdm.livejournal.com]

The GPS coordinates appear to point exactly at the rope-pyramid structure, which fits nicely with having solar/astrological significance. But there is no such thing as mean solar noon for a given day, is there? (Isn't *mean* solar noon the average of noon times for a whole year?) Hmmm -- actual solar noon on that day is at about 12:38 EDT, not 14:38. (Or 04:38 GMT.)