Pole of Inaccessibility

[zylepe]

Pole of Inaccessibility is also a useful technique for placing the label for a polygon at a visually pleasing location on a map. @mourner came up with a more efficient algorithm for computing the point https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-algorithm-for-finding-a-visual... (https://github.com/mapbox/polylabel) which JTS's MaximumInscribedCircle utility is based on, which I use for "innermost point" label placement in planetiler.

[dima55]

Fun! If you want to compute these yourself and/or if you like hiking into the mathematically middlest-of-nowhere location, here's a good blog post: https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inac...

[A_D_E_P_T]

> On 12 September 2024, the French icebreaking cruise ship Le Commandant Charcot became the first ship to reach the Northern Pole of Inaccessibility.

Recent. And impressive. Still more impressive is the fact that Le Commandant Charcot is a luxury cruise ship: https://en.ponant.com/cruise-ships/le-commandant-charcot

[elchief]

I guess Furiosa is set near Papunya, Northern Territory, Australia then...

(The first chapter of the movie is titled The Pole of Inaccessibility)

[shakna]

Most of the filming was in New South Wales, but it was intended to do some in the NT originally. Until they realised what the red dust does to all equipment. Cameras, cars, anything.

Might be a reference to that.

[zokier]

Looking at the map there is local maxima in Europe somewhere near Lviv (western ukraine). Does anyone know if that point is noted somehow anywhere? Or even more specifically where it is, the map is not very detailed.

[amelius]

What is more accessible, the middle point of a small island or the interior of a concrete bunker near the shoreline of which the key was lost?

[DiscourseFan]

I was going to say, for “points of inaccessibility” these are pretty accessible.

[wowczarek]

Yes.

[soldthat]

Point Nemo is a nice reminder that some “geography facts” are really optimization problems in disguise: it’s defined by solving the “longest swim” from any coastline, not by some ancient explorer planting a flag.

The fun twist is that the most remote point in the ocean is also our spacecraft cemetery, and sometimes the closest humans to it are orbiting overhead on the ISS.