I would imagine that since neither the size of the earth, nor the laws of mathematics and geometry have any scheduled
changespending for their source code any time in the near future, it's reasonable to rely on the long/lat information
andextrapolate the distances using basic planet earth dimensions.
There are only so many degrees along the arc of any given sphere (360) and there are only so many minutes in a degree.
The size of the earth represents only one number that needs to be looked up unless you care to include miles in
additionto the international standard of km. If so, then you have an additional factor to consider in your
calcualations.
Am I making any sense?
Tamir
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael A Nachbaur [mailto:mike@nachbaur.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 26, 2003 11:55 AM
> To: Ryan; rudi@oasis.net.au
> Cc: pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
> Subject: Re: [SQL] Off topic : world database
>
>
> On March 26, 2003 10:56 pm, Ryan wrote:
> > Your best bet is buying a good zipcode database that has
> lat/long, but
> > would only really help you in the USA. This kind of data
> tends not to be
> > cheap...
>
> Either that, or web scrape mapquest.com or some other site
> that provides
> lat/long for returned results, but that probably violates the
> acceptable use
> policy of those sites.
>
> I for one would be very interested in such a web service (I'd
> really like a
> address / street lookup to find lat/longs for addresses, but
> thats not likely
> to happen).
>
>
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