On our first full day in Ecuador we were driven on a bus tour to a geography theme park called La Mitad del Mundo. Here's the monument, and its red line along the equator. Actually, it was about .18 minutes south of the equator as reported by our portable GPS unit. Perhaps the equator moved since the late 17th century when French scientists came to Ecuador to locate the equator and to study the shape of the earth (they discovered that it bulged slightly in the middle), or perhaps their measurements weren't perfect. I'm kind of thinking it was the latter: I know the arctic circles move as the axis wobbbles around but the equator ought to stay the same. Anyway, the actual location of the equator is classified information, along with all the other detailed gravitational geography of the earth required to guide nuclear missiles to any town where someone might have had a conversation objecting to the privatization of his country's resources in favor of Halliburton, or terrorism for short.