111–120 of 234 posts
This guy "loves world maps" but chose Mercator for the wall of his room? I guess there's no accounting for taste. There are hundreds of projections to choose from, why choose the one optimized for navigation by compass ?
Guarantee everyone in this comment thread saw that episode of the West Wing where CJ meets the cartographers for social cartography. Me too. Big block of cheese, indeed...
This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with light-up LED pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily. - You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient. - Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat? - Given a metallic backing, and a…
You need movement to generate electricity, otherwise it'd be a perpetual machine.
An alternative would be to have a "surface of light", ie, a source of light all along one of the walls of the map and passing right over it (not actually illuminating the map); then any object sitting on the map would be illuminated.
Just want to know if someone will be interested in such a kick starter project if "someone" was to build this commercially?
Not sure of the resolution but the easiest solution would be wallpaper. Googling "world map wallpaper" returns quite a lot of results, eg: http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...
This article's throwaway notion of glow-in-the-dark pins has got me thinking about how to make a surface with light-up LED pins that can be stuck in arbitrarily. - You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient. - Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat? - Given a metallic backing, and a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can just generate one from OpenStreetMaps
How would you approach it? Setting up a renderer with global coverage isn't really a trivial task. It is straightforward, and there are reasonable guides, like https://switch2osm.org/ , but the planet database is just a big database to work with. (I think I would take advantage of Mapbox's free plan, which allows for 1 custom stylesheet and enough usage to get the image together. I guess there are lots of people who…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would you approach it? Setting up a renderer with global coverage isn't really a trivial task. It is straightforward, and there are reasonable guides, like https://switch2osm.org/ , but the planet database is just a big database to work with. (I think I would take advantage of Mapbox's free plan, which allows for 1 custom stylesheet and enough usage to get the image together. I guess there are lots of people who…
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering
I was wondering if you had a specific setup in mind when you said 'just generate', as I did not find the process to be particularly trivial, even for a smaller region (and I do have experience messing around with arcane syntax and command lines).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't believe I'm doing this, but I think I'm going to defend Mercator here. The Mercator projection was indeed originally designed for compass navigation, but the reason it's still used for web mapping is slightly different. The Mercator projection is conformal . What this means is that angles (and hence in some sense shapes) are preserved locally. When we zoom in on a small section of the Mercator projection, we…
If I understand correctly, Mercator is the only conformal projection where north is always up, no matter where you zoom in. That makes it nice for online maps. If you relax the "north is up" requirement, there's tons of conformal projections that look nice: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjConf/projC... I really like the "classic Guyou" projection: http://www.progonos.com/furuti/MapProj/Normal/ProjCo…
But referring back to the OP, notice the grid of books and curios along the entire neighboring wall, and the grid-like pattern of the wood flooring underneath. The Mercator projection seems of a piece with this grid theme in the room.
Your curvy Guyou projection would look great in this Lautner house: http://cdn.cstatic.net/images/gridfs/53e53330f92ea16cd900340...
Why do people feel like they can just edit Antarctica out?
