The goldfish grows to the size of the bowl in which you put it in

The other day I met with Henri to discuss some more work he wanted tackled. This time it consisted of converting over 5000 points of collected ant specimens. The conversion that he wants is to convert a point that is in degrees, minutes, seconds (DMS or 0°24'35''S) to decimal degrees
(-.40972, -90.708) a format more conducive to mapping in ESRI and Quantum. This is usually done manually with a formula that looks a like this.

D + M/60 + S/3600

Manually works great when only doing a few points, but we are tasked with over 5000 which would not only take a large amount of our time, would be painfully mind numbing work. I believe this would be quite a simple task if given the extension licenses in ArcGIS by calculating normalized fields. But we are going the route of doing it within Excel first hand then adding our file to ArcMap to map it. Our excel sheet by the way is of course highly disorganized... The person who entered the information randomly chose to use super case zeros in combination with the (°) symbol
as well as using double apostrophes instead of quotation marks (i.e '' " <---look very much the same huh?) So we first used find and replace to change all of the values to the same format. As I was working a code to write a formula in Excel Chema goes Rocky double fist pose in the air and says "I got it!" The guy knows his stuff because he worked out a solution in open office by writing a formula that identifies the location of the number then divides where it needs to and does that for each part of the DMS format.

It took me awhile for him to explain what it was and what it was doing but it's a great way to learn new solutions to old problems. The actual formula is below and saved so in case we need to do this again.

This scenario is also a great example of bringing new solutions to old problems can get things done highly efficiently. Henri thought this would take up to a week or more which would of consumed all of our time in the process. It was done in little under 3 hours...NEXT task.

10lb binoculars from back when they
were doing military operations
in the Galapagos

Yesterday we also set out on expedition two to go find the tracking device that we looked for last week. The errors of all the points were made into ellipses then overlapped to find a more accurate location of where this thing could be. We set out at 8am with a smaller boat, and more people. It took about an hour to chug around the southern portion of the island but we made it to another cove that was coated in marine iguanas and large sea turtles that look like moving rocks beneath our boat. We searched the coast for about 5 hours including climbing through the jungle gym of mangroves, and wading around the inner coves further cut off my mangroves. Nothing but trash, and a huge quantity of perfectly round kettle stones that have scoured equally perfect holes into the basalt. Due to wave/tidal action rocks stuck within other rocks then get blasted around in circles acting as a drill bit and over how every many hundred years have created 5 foot holes with all but a ball at the bottom. Overall, we didn't find the device but it was a beautiful day to hike around in a spot were no one has ever probably hiked before.

I've also recently watched the movie Big Fish. Great movie, check it out.

The greatest part of large challenges is that they tend to reap the greatest rewards : )