Brisbane’s Ocean Bound Parliament House
While checking out some exotic locations near French Polynesia tonight in Google Earth, I happened to notice that there was a small Wikipedia icon out in the middle of the ocean, just off the coast of some of the tiny islands that make up the area of the globe.
Well, to my surprise, Google Earth had informed me that Parliament House, Brisbane was 2835 nautical miles from where it should be!
Not only that but it was somewhere out floating in the ocean.
More precisely it is here: “Parliament House, Brisbane” lat=-27.4755555556, lon=-153.027222222
Now this leads me to believe either 1 of 2 things…
- This was a MAJOR screw up on Google Earth’s behalf.
- The Brisbane Parliament is outsourcing to an underwater top secret research facility.
Now far be it for me to state what the Brisbane Parliament is doing, but I think we can safely rule out option 2.
Anyhow people, for those with Google Earth here is the KMZ file so you don’t have to track it down:
MajorGoogleEarthMistake.kmz
Although you never know, option 2 might be in fact correct, only time will tell!
June 18th, 2007 at 7:21 am
LOL good fine! Since it is a WikiPedia icon that you found, is it possible that someone else placed bad information into that specific entry and therefor it’s not Google’s fault?
June 18th, 2007 at 8:16 am
Guys
Google Earth is a great tool which I use for work (with the pro version) all of the time.
For those of you who use the UTM function to set co-ordinates for say dispersion modelling (those who do will know). We have found that the UTM co-ordinates can be off significantly in certain areas in North Queensland as an example. This means that if you were to overlay say a topo map with google earth, they wont line up very well, if at all in these areas.
Not bagging it because my job would be harder without it, but it does have some limitations.
Tim, im going for option 2.
Cheers
George
June 18th, 2007 at 8:39 am
hi geeks,
i’ve not commented for a while but am still listening (and enjoying) the shows - good work on strolling up to the 50 show mark! been dead busy on house repairs (boring), and reinstalling XP (no probs!!).
will update my delicious tags sometime this week.
good luck on the house move dave..
I can think of more than a few politicians that I’d love to see in that building!
laters
rich
June 18th, 2007 at 9:58 am
@Jeffro - Yeah I suppose so, but then again, it IS inside a Google app, and you’d think that with the search potential and relevant alternative data from say… http://maps.google.com that they would have some sort of reverse link checking when they uploaded the data.
So therefore, I still blame Google for the mistake.
@George - Ha I’ve seen some crazy overlay data before in some of the earlier versions of Google Earth, especially for some of the Australian cities, if I remember correctly there was a dispersion model of pollution over Sydney a while ago that went around the web, and that was off by about 100kms.
June 18th, 2007 at 10:02 am
It’s OK, Premier Beattie put on his serious face and insisted that the responsibility was his, that he was to blame, and that only he was capable of fixing the problem, and then he announced an election to give himself a mandate so he could deal with it properly.
June 18th, 2007 at 11:39 am
Google’s stock price is probably going to take a huge because of this epic goofup. Nice work, team blogger force!
June 19th, 2007 at 1:26 am
@rich great to hear that you are still listening and thanks for the congrats for making 50!