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  • 2019-01-02 (xsd:date)
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  • Did the SS Warrimoo Exist in Two Centuries at Once? (en)
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  • The SS Warrimoo, launched in 1892, was a passenger ship that briefly plied the Australia-New Zealand route before it was switched to providing service between Canada and Australia. The ship was converted to a troop transport with the onset of World War I in 1914, a role it maintained until May of 1918, when it sank after colliding with the French warship Catapulte. SS Warrimoo would be little remembered today were it not for a quirky Golden Shellback tale now attached to it, one holding that the ship's crew once managed to navigate it to a point such that it simultaneously existed in four different hemispheres and two different centuries: Part of this tale is unremarkable, as any time a ship (or other object) crosses the equator it momentarily straddles hemispheres (and therefore seasons), and any time a ship crosses the International Date Line, it momentarily spans two different calendrical days. But is the most compelling part of this tale true -- that the Warrimoo not only briefly bridged different hemispheres and days simultaneously, but that it managed to exist in two different centuries at once (putting aside the quibble that the 20th century didn't technically begin until 1901)? We do know from contemporaneous reporting in January 1900 that the SS Warrimoo was generally in the right area at the right time for this account to possibly be true: However, that's about as much as is objectively verifiable at this remove. Most of what's now claimed about the Warrimoo's purported feat stems from a 1942 Canadian newspaper article that read as follows: This account may very well be true, but the fact that it apparently wasn't reported until more than 40 years after the fact is a potential cause for skepticism. Other forms of documentation -- such as copies of the ship's log, contemporaneous reporting of the event, and accounts from other Warrimoo crew and passengers -- would go a long way towards verifying the claim, but we haven't found that any such documentation exists. Additionally, even if the Warrimoo's crew had the intent of positioning the ship so that it simultaneously spanned the equator and 180th meridian precisely at midnight on 31 December 1899 and attempted to do so, whether they could have accurately achieved that feat given the navigation technology of the time is an open question. As Spatial Reserves blog noted of this tale: Our modern digital world is full of fragments that are interesting if not completely accurate, but I think as GIS professionals and educators, it is worth applying 'be critical of the data' principles even to this type of information. The story is still interesting as a hypothetical 'what could have happened' and provides great teachable moments even if the actual event never occurred. (en)
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