The Bizarre Story of the PA 9/11 Memorial and GIS

I’ll let you read the details of allegations of the memorial being designed points to Mecca along with alleged threats. I want to draw out just one paragraph from the story in the Daily American News (Somerset County Pennsylvania’s paper) because of how it covers the tools used by one professor to explore the directionality issue:

“My assessment has gone from unconvinced to definitely stating that Mr. Rawls does not have a mathematical proof — he has only a calculation,” Griffith said. “I have produced counterexample graphics (employing Mr. Rawls’ own memorial orientation graphic) with both ArcGIS (a state-of-the-art GIS software package) and Google Earth.”

I think it’s telling that ArcGIS requires an explanation as an unknown scientific tool and Google Earth requires none. Equally interesting: GIS is not written out, nor defined. The author, who I believe included the parenthetical remarks, clearly feels readers know of GIS if not ArcGIS.