UXBlog | IDV Solutions’ User Experience : Silly Geographic Precision
▻http://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2013/11/silly-geographic-precision.html
Here’s a breakout of coordinate precision by the actual cartographic scale they purport: Decimal Places Actual Distance Say What? 6 10 centimeters Your footprint, if you were standing on the toes of one foot. 7 1.0 centimeter A watermelon seed. 8 1.0 millimeter The width of paperclip wire. 9 0.1 millimeter The width of a strand of hair. 10 10 microns A speck of pollen. 11 1.0 micron A piece of cigarette smoke. 12 0.1 micron You’re doing virus-level mapping at this point. 13 10 nanometers Does it matter how big this is? 14 1.0 nanometer Your fingernail grows about this far in one second. 15 0.1 nanometer An atom. An atom! What are you mapping
As a reference, six decimal places of precision is generally plenty-good-enough territory for cartography. Unless (...)
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