Interesting Maps

Charles Babbage

mzungu wrote: »

Where Google Street view is available.

This is useful to know if you want to play geoguessr

Lyan

It's actually unavailable in much of Germany and Austria.

greenttc

mzungu wrote: »

Where Google Street view is available.

I just spent 45 minutes reading about midway atoll because of your map! thank you! that is a semi angry semi grateful thanks by the way!:D

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

New Home

Deleted User wrote: »

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

Except for Australians. :pac:

Central Services

kowloon wrote: »

I like going on Wikipedia adventures, but very little of what I take in stays there for long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note-taking

kowloon

Deleted User wrote: »

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

If you have a vitreous haemorrhage you might get to see the blood pool at the top of your eye.

Last post was in the wrong thread. :pac:

kowloon

Deleted User wrote: »

Last post was in the wrong thread. :pac:

Too many tabs open.

New Home

This thread is suffering a bad case of the glitch, tonight.

Edit - no, I'm the one suffering by a bad case of idiocy, I was confusing this thread with this one. :rolleyes:

New Home

New Home wrote: »

This thread is suffering a bad case of the glitch, tonight.

Edit - no, I'm the one suffering by a bad case of idiocy, I was confusing this thread with this one. :rolleyes:

Nah it was me with the idiocy :P

auspicious

[Deleted User] wrote: »

If you did Leaving Cert Physics I'm sure you'll know this but the image on our retina is upside down. Somewhere from there to the brain it gets turned upside-up.

Just an aside. Your brain doesn't process visuals while the eyes are moving. It just fills in the blanks. When your eyes are moving, you're blind.

KAGY

auspicious wrote: »

Just an aside. Your brain doesn't process visuals while the eyes are moving. It just fills in the blanks. When your eyes are moving, you're blind.

I think it's the opposite, though we could be talking about either end of the seeing process. the eyeball can't see anything that it stationary relative to itself. but our eyr compensates by being constantly in motion itself. they did an experiment where they glued a target to a contact lens and it disappeared.

anyway, back to maps

Peters projection accurately shows different countries’ relative sizes. Although it distorts countries’ shapes, this way of drawing a world map avoids exaggerating the size of developed nations in Europe and North America and reducing the size of less developed countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

Capt'n Midnight

auspicious wrote: »

Just an aside. Your brain doesn't process visuals while the eyes are moving. It just fills in the blanks. When your eyes are moving, you're blind.

and a blind spot becasue the our eyes are inside out.

An octupus has it's light detecting cells in front of the nerves. Ours are partially blocked by them so blind spot , that our brain fills in.

Victor

Imagine the scene, a few young fellas are a bit boisterous outside the chipper at 3am on a Saturday and they get done by a garda, who demands their details and someone has to admit to being from here:

Clownstown

https://www.logainm.ie/en/52017 He's in trouble whether the garda believes him or not.

forgottenhills

I always thought that this Meath address was daft

- Newcastle, Oldcastle!

https://bit.ly/36nNDWb

Esel

Victor wrote: »

Imagine the scene, a few young fellas are a bit boisterous outside the chipper at 3am on a Saturday and they get done by a garda, who demands their details and someone has to admit to being from here:

Clownstown

https://www.logainm.ie/en/52017 He's in trouble whether the garda believes him or not.

To add fuel to the fire, that place is in barony of Fartullagh (Fir Thulach).

BonnieSituation

forgottenhills wrote: »

I always thought that this Meath address was daft

- Newcastle, Oldcastle!

https://bit.ly/36nNDWb

Fine shpot...

NEWCASTLE
OLDCASTLE
CO. MEATH
A82 CN13

georgina...c

Great thread. Lots of interesting maps

BonnieSituation

KAGY wrote: »

I think it's the opposite, though we could be talking about either end of the seeing process. the eyeball can't see anything that it stationary relative to itself. but our eyr compensates by being constantly in motion itself. they did an experiment where they glued a target to a contact lens and it disappeared.

anyway, back to maps

Peters projection accurately shows different countries’ relative sizes. Although it distorts countries’ shapes, this way of drawing a world map avoids exaggerating the size of developed nations in Europe and North America and reducing the size of less developed countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

Human's are weird though.

So for all the pros of Peters it looks weird for us so it will never be used by lay people. And in a GIS/Geomatic context, it never is.

I was once in a meeting and one of the actuaries put his hand up and queried "why does Ireland look weird?" on a map that our UK team were presenting.

And it was an ever so slight distortion that was generally imperceptible, but noticeable in the context of how maps were presented in our office.

They used a different projection than he was used to from my team so it threw him (and tbh myself off). It was very distracting.

georgina...c

I agree with the situation above ^^

KAGY

KAGY wrote: »

I think it's the opposite, though we could be talking about either end of the seeing process. the eyeball can't see anything that it stationary relative to itself. but our eyr compensates by being constantly in motion itself. they did an experiment where they glued a target to a contact lens and it disappeared.

anyway, back to maps

Peters projection accurately shows different countries’ relative sizes. Although it distorts countries’ shapes, this way of drawing a world map avoids exaggerating the size of developed nations in Europe and North America and reducing the size of less developed countries in Asia, Africa and South America.

Would thinking that’s the reason the map is currently drawn as it is, is tinfoil hat territory?

Subbuteo

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

Would thinking that’s the reason the map is currently drawn as it is, is tinfoil hat territory?

Representing the surface of a sphere as a 2d map is quite a difficult thing to do. All the different projections are trade-offs between scale, geometry or legibility.

I quite like the Dymaxion map, scale and geometry are pretty consistent, but legibility suffers (Oceans are cut up)

quickbeam

I like Google Maps' new feature where you can toggle between flat Earth anad spherical Earth. It really give a different persective. It's weird how when it's flat, and you go large distances, eg, Ireland to Los Angeles, how the route curves. It's difficult to understand why it wouldn't just go in a straight line. It's only when you see it as spherical that the curve really makes sense.

cnocbui

The most extreme example of this I have seen recently was a Flight Radar track of a plane flying from Santiago in Chile to Auckland NZ. They head SW down the coast, headed for Antarctica and get fairly close, before 'curving' away up to NZ.

Capt'n Midnight

ReginaldSmythV wrote: »

Would thinking that’s the reason the map is currently drawn as it is, is tinfoil hat territory?

Mercator was kinda handy for navigating at sea in the days before reliable navigational aids.

Straight lines on Mercator are straight lines in the real world. It gave you a compass direction, follow that and you get there. The other way of navigating was to sail north or south to get to the destination's latitude and then sail east or west until you got there.


The only problem is that at two points that map projection would stretch to infinity. Since noone back then was sailing through the Arctic or Antarctic that not much of an issue.

Mercator also means that for Europeans the part of the map we use most is shown at a higher reasolution.


And ANYTHING other than a speroid is distorted so for large scale maps it's pick your poison.

cnocbui

My favourite representation is a spherical globe on a computer. All the 2d projections are cack. On Samsung phones, the standard clock/alarm app has a World Clock tab, which if you click the + to add a city, shows a world map for you to choose from. Pinch zoom out on that and you get a lovely spherical globe you can spin and manipulate for a proper perspective. It really sheets home how massive Africa really is.

Which reminds me of the greatest map app ever made - Celestia - which is a planetarium that lets you explore the solar system in 3D and look at all the planets, moons, big asteroids and even space probes, from any perspective. You can even fly down to your current location on the Earth and turn around to look back out to see what the night sky would look like if it wasn't cloudy. By manipulating the clock you can see what the night sky and planet positions would have been for any point on Earth at any time in history or the future.

https://celestia.space/download.html

cnocbui

Mercator, even.

Victor

BonnieSituation wrote: »

I was once in a meeting and one of the actuaries put his hand up and queried "why does Ireland look weird?" on a map that our UK team were presenting.

And it was an ever so slight distortion that was generally imperceptible, but noticeable in the context of how maps were presented in our office.

They used a different projection than he was used to from my team so it threw him (and tbh myself off). It was very distracting.

Irish publishers tend to rotate Ireland so that it takes up less space on a page.

OSi use 8 degrees west as the centre line of the maps they use, whereas other would use something else.

cnocbui

Did you know that Ireland looks like a Koala that's drivng a car and has turned it's head to look back at something it's just passed?

Probably a couple young female koalas in short skirts.

Thought you didn't.