Slightly offtopic - coordinate conversions

[Peter Sergeant]

I've been playing around with Google Maps recently, and noticed that they've started using hashes of some coordinates:

latlng: 52.54296 -0.308166
hnear : 0x4877f21032e242f5:0x805cb103d71d5051

latlng: 51.411586,-0.300893
hnear : 0x47d8a00baf21de75:0x52963a5addd52a99

A few attempts at working out how this was done with Perl have failed me - anyone got a better idea?

-P