151–160 of 207 posts
By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
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Yeah. This is showy and really cool. But it seems kind of unnecessary to make it "a map" In terms of solving real problems, I don't see it as functionally any better than a list ordered by distance with a small compass showing directionality. Basically what you see on the left when you search google maps for "pizza in san francisco". The benefit of that list is that it uses space much more efficiently and can show th…
It's actually much more useful as a spatial data visualization then as a "map" as such.
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The issue is that people slide from it being a good map for some particular purpose to some blanket claim that all people really need to know is is . The old classic case of this is geographically challenged reporters raphsodising about the London tube map https://tfl.gov.uk/maps/track/tube . I love the London tube map, but when I lived there, it was all the more useful to me because I look at other maps so that I co…
I disagree about the London tube map. I think it's brilliant. I barely looked at a real map any of the times I've stayed in London. I know the places I want to go, all the guide books (and locals!) tell you the nearest tube station, I know the nearest tube station to where I am. Why do I need a 'real' map?
I guess that when your abstraction is at the level of start station and end station, that is where the value of the tube map is.
Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
I worked in a hostel for years and Europeans often noted how funny it was that people from the states referred to distance in regards to time ie, an 8 hour drive, or 20 minute walk It was always fun to sit around and speculate as to why
That 200 km could take anywhere from 2 hours to 3.5 hours to drive to, depending on the road and terrain. The distance isn't actually very relevant.
The tourist guides here specifically mention this, that don't plan your travel by distance, because 100 km in one place is not 100 km in another. In the old road maps, they'd have a travel time matrix, rather than distance (like this [0] except with times)
[0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05e...
Oh my.... They just invented the 'list'. Or better yet a list that drives map interactions....oh my and an ordered list too! I could swear I did that like 10 years ago on google maps, but I guess it must have just been a dream.
Seriously, adding a fancy radius dial overlay doesn't really improve much over a plain old ordered list.
A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..." Constant. Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
I've always wondered even further about this - how you take this and extend it to 3 dimensions + time. In terms of maps, that would also help you with elevation or other obstacles that might slow you down from a straight line path.
Certainly, with the processing power and capacity today, we have the capability of knowing not only the two dimensional direction and the time it takes, but even the three dimensional position plus time.
I like to think of this crazy idea like a 3-D video recorder (maybe)... something that records positions of all objects in the specified space in slices of time, and can reconstruct any such slice and analyze the relative position of objects in space over time to each other.
I am not sure how such a technology would be made... capturing all the positions of everything in slices of time. I think we can do it with 3-D simulations, but not sure how we could record such data for the real world without modeling it in the virtual.
Still, this is such a cool direction and I for one like seeing people experimenting with something that we take for granted so easily, the map. I feel like everything that is amazing about time and space is somehow embodied by maps - astronomy, time, geography, relativity, etc.
I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination. Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if…
Location cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.
