I'll Meet You At... How'd The Dow Do This Morning?

The web-comic xkcd has touched my geo-nerd heart today with a single-panel comic that explains an approach to geocaching based on the daily opening of the Dow Jones Industrials. There's a more expansive explanatory wiki entry that may build into a geo-comic-caching-nerd-core-social movement (or something).

Basically, it is an algorithm that takes the date and Dow and mashes them into new and more or less random post-decimal portions of lat-long coordinates. Users select the pre-decimal part using a map interface. The result is a random point where geo-hashers can agree to meet.

The official xkcd meetups happen every Saturday afternoon at 4:00 PM. If the coordinates for your area are in the ocean, a military base, or somewhere otherwise unreachable, that meetup is of course postponed. Unless, of course, you own a boat, are a soldier at said military base, or are James Bond.

I think it's a charming idea and one that should appear on more than one GIS/geo-related blog this week.