Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it • Hacker News Board

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#181

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 9:52 PM UTC

oh_sigh wrote: post #164

amscanne wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what projection would you go with?

Dymaxion would be disorienting but it would certainly get you thinking Example: http://basementgeographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/uap...

This is the projection I’ve been working on for the past few weeks, a conformal spinoff of Cahill’s maps from the early 20th century:

http://i.imgur.com/Y6ki0l9.jpg

I think it’ll be great for a map where the triangular sections are each about a meter on a side (1:10M scale), or perhaps half a meter on a side (1:20M scale).

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#182

Post by parennoob » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:04 PM UTC

dietrichepp wrote: post #7

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 ?

Yeah, a world map that shows Greenland and South America at the same size is probably not a map I want in my living room. Even sticking pins in it would feel weird, knowing that Brazil is the size of Montana or whatever.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#183

Post by smegel » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:07 PM UTC

> There is a profession called »plasterer«

Maybe it is a German thing, in Australia a plasterer is anyone who installs plaster boards on the interior of houses by nailing them directly to the stud work (the wooden tresses).

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#184

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:10 PM UTC

jamesfe wrote: post #102

I was formerly a cartographer with the military; I have lots of experience with large format maps, both of the world and of single countries (usually Iraq). It was fun to read an article about a map that wasn't hastily tacked up on a wall with nails or duct tape. A few notes: - Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board - We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisin…

[deleted]

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#185

Post by bobbles » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:14 PM UTC

kens wrote: post #82

I can't believe how negative the comments are here, criticizing the projection. I don't really like the term "middlebrow dismissal" but it seems to apply. As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.

There's an unbelievable amount of pretentiousness in this thread, it's ridiculous.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#186

Post by morganherlocker » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:24 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #148

natural219 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't follow that because CartoCSS/Mapbox studios is "editable", "customizable", and "easy", that the specific combinations of configuration and adjustment available would meet his complex criterion of minimizing time, effort, money, and aesthetics. I'd imagine Google Maps is optimized to a T for all of the tiny specific label placements you want, and I'm not convinced from the one-off choice it would have been…

There is indeed no great solution to 'prominence' in the OSM data. There have been efforts to add population information to places, and to promote so called villages into so called towns when they are locally important, but those efforts have not been completely systematic (so they might be better in Austria than Minnesota, and even worse in Wisconsin). Which is one reason to turn to the Natural Earth data, it has be…

..or get the best of both worlds with a data mashup.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#187

Post by simplemath » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:43 PM UTC

ianbicking wrote: post #150

derefr wrote: post #104

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…

Maybe put a strong light behind the map, and use a fiberglass pin? Kind of like a Lite-Brite.

That would be a reasonably practical solution with a lowish profile lightbox as the mounting.

Hmmm.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#188

Post by mparramon » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:45 PM UTC

Just found out about www.wallpapered.com, pretty relevant to this article.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#189

Post by aw3c2 » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 10:53 PM UTC

carlob wrote: post #122

I don't really understand why OP decided to print it and glue it in separate steps. It seems rather expensive rather than finding someone to do all the work. For example these guys would do the job for 142 euros http://sprint24.net/go/29ul/ I'm not sure they'd ship internationally though (or at all, for an item of that size).

Cleaned link: http://sprint24.net/buy/online/rigid-panels/panels/

Please don't use shortened URLs and don't sneak affiliate codes.

Re: Printing a wall-sized world map and what I've learned from it

#190

Post by andyjdavis » Thu, Apr 30, 2015, 11:11 PM UTC

This jumped out at me.

>I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid.

Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really.

Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is.

Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports.

An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia.

Travel time => 8 months.

My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive.

Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started.

Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air.

After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.