Greetings from Nowhere

Here's one of those Digital Age pursuits that manages to be at once fascinating and meaningless. I'm talking about the Degree Confluence Project, where people all over the world travel, armed with GPS and camera, to any one of the thousands of places on earth where latitude and longitude lines cross (no minutes, no seconds, mind you -- only degrees) and snap shots of what they see there. (No matter where you are, by the way, there's such a confluence within 49 miles of you.) The picture above was snapped from the imaginary geographical crosshairs at 18 degrees N, 16 degrees W, which puts you about 6 miles outside of Nouakchott, Mauritania, in the Sahara Desert.

What a strange species we are.