Always knew this subconsciously but now I can put it into words.
Traffic can warp spacetime.
Maps that show time instead of space
41–47 of 47 posts
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
#42We did this globally in 2018. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25181
Cool! I'd love to have a look at that, but the two links in the paper seem to be broken :( http://roadlessforest.eu/map.htm and http://www.map.ox.ac.uk/accessibility_to_cities/
There is a preprint linked on the sister comment
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
#43There have been so many interesting map sites posted to Hacker News lately and my favorite thing about them is how they're all (seemingly) hosted on a Linode Nanode...
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really - you have to wait for the subway, it also takes a finite time to travel, and it frequently stops. It can avoid traffic, but the actual MPH can be slower than a car when you include both those things.
Isn’t the point that you have a way to get to a point far away faster than you can get to a point in between? The worm hole thing ist because you can only exit at discrete points so it pulls a single point far away, and it’s sorrounding, closer to the starting point. That’s probably hard to map to a 2D map because there would be some overlap between the different „islands“ starting from subway stations
If you could take the shortest path to each point, it would solve the problem and be interesting. Not necessarily easy to do though.
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
#45If there was a place that was impossible to go to for some reason, would it become a sort of “black hole”? Are there any such black holes on earth? Or are they only theoretical.
It would not be representable, since even 1 unreachable point would have to have infinite area. If you allowed the 2D map to become 3d, I suppose you could have an infinitely high spike or low trough.
So it would be like a 2D black hole, you could approach it from any side, and you could move along the edges a bit, but if you go too far into it, you’ll just find yourself moving along an infinite area toward a point you’ll never cross, forever.
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
#46This sounds conceptually difficult: Wouldn't the presence of one-way streets or airport security checkpoints, for example, mean that the travel time from A to B might not be the same as the travel time from B to A? How can a map then be drawn?
Before trying the site I assumed the way they would resolve this is that the distance calculations would be made relative to the point at which you held the map, but what actually happens is that the map is drawn uniformly no matter where you hold it. and of course this is an impossible representation due to the reasons you describe as well as the differences in mappings between a path that is configured to be walked in one direction, but traveled by vehicle in the other.
Re: Maps that show time instead of space
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