Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

World Airports Voronoi (2014)

jasondavies.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#51

Post by rimliu »

JoeMalt wrote: post #43
glup wrote: post #31

Interesting to compare with ETOPS (good maps: gc.kls2.com) which governs how far away from acceptable alternate airports a commercial plane can be. It corresponds to safe flying time with a single functional engine. So a lot of the area in some of the larger Voronoi regions, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, is actually unreachable by any commercial flight from the closest airport.

It's worth noting that ETOPS only applies to 2-engine aircraft; a 4-engine aircraft can travel outside the ETOPS-permitted areas as long as it has enough fuel.

And ETOPS was one of the reason for the trijets. Just recently watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxnptDPy47M about this.

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#52

Post by jtlienwis »

When I did work on Voronoi, i used the Mathematica built in function. I would get the gps coordinants from Google maps and use them as input. The output put into a google function that could make rectangular colored transparent regions on the map. But this was all 2d.

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#53

Post by mattlondon »

tclancy wrote: post #45
weeksie wrote: post #38

I've flown in and out of Mataveri and I know it sounds superstitious or whatever, but I felt that isolation. It's amazing to me that the Polynesians were able to colonize so widely. Also, I love Voronoi diagrams. I ran across them many moons ago when I was building a wayfinding application and was looking for ways to generate map meshes—this was not that—but I thought they were super interesting.

I am in love with the so-so reviews they happily places on the homepage of the airport: https://www.mataverinternational.com/ - "It's a small airport with just one place to eat and a few store to buy stuff." Truth in advertising lives!

What I thought was curious about this airport was that yes, it is indeed very small and very basic (the departure lounge included outdoor seating overlooking the tarmac - a small waist-high fence separating you from the apron), but the flights in and out were on brand new 787s!

Easter Island really does feel very remote though. Even though the 787s are jam-packed with tourists, you're flying due-west from Chile for 6 hours to a tiny spec in the middle of the pacific. The in-flight map was mostly just entirely blank the whole time since the island itself is so tiny it didn't really show up!

In the museum there they had some really interesting exhibits about how the original inhabitants used interesting navigation aids to find land - e.g. looking for the directions birds were flying or sea-turtles were swimming, or the sea swell etc. Fascinating stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation#Navigati...

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#55

Post by snag »

mattlondon wrote: post #53
tclancy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in love with the so-so reviews they happily places on the homepage of the airport: https://www.mataverinternational.com/ - "It's a small airport with just one place to eat and a few store to buy stuff." Truth in advertising lives!

What I thought was curious about this airport was that yes, it is indeed very small and very basic (the departure lounge included outdoor seating overlooking the tarmac - a small waist-high fence separating you from the apron), but the flights in and out were on brand new 787s! Easter Island really does feel very remote though. Even though the 787s are jam-packed with tourists, you're flying due-west from Chile for 6…

787 can land because the airstrip there is really long (more than 3Kms according to wikipedia. This airport was chosen by NASA at some point as an emergency landing stop for the shuttle, and paid for it's extension. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mataveri_International_Airport

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#56

Post by davidw »

Interesting - was looking at some of the larger area ones in the US and learned that Santa Fe has a tiny airport - smaller than the one here near Bend, Oregon in Redmond. Seems Bend is bigger than Santa Fe for that matter... didn't realize that.

Which means that the Albuquerque one ends up as the largest, it looks like, followed (eyeballing it) by Elko?

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#57

Post by extremelearning »

megaman22 wrote: post #19

Voronoi diagrams are so fun. I messed around for months with them after I saw Amit Patel's procedural map generator that used them. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/... Fortune's Algorithm is pretty simple, but it's tricky to get right, particularly if you're also maintaining the information in a form that lets you do something useful with it besides spitting out the points of the Voronoi c…

I also love using Voronoi diagrams as well as Delaunay diagrams (via Mathematica).

My most recent exploration with them was to understand and visualize the different structures and characteristics of various low discrepancy quasirandom point distributions in two dimensions.

http://extremelearning.com.au/unreasonable-effectiveness-of-...

Also interesting to compare them with @burfog's comment about the Voronoi / Delaunay diagrams of Penrose Tilings.

Re: World Airports Voronoi (2014)

#59

Post by bovermyer »

OskarS wrote: post #35
megaman22 wrote: post #19

Voronoi diagrams are so fun. I messed around for months with them after I saw Amit Patel's procedural map generator that used them. http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/... Fortune's Algorithm is pretty simple, but it's tricky to get right, particularly if you're also maintaining the information in a form that lets you do something useful with it besides spitting out the points of the Voronoi c…

I also consider Voronoi diagrams fun, and in my life I've implemented three different algorithms for generating 2D Voronoi diagrams (or Delaunay triangulations, which are the duals of Voronoi diagrams): 1. Fortune's algorithm [0] 2. The Bowyer-Watson algorithm for generating the Delaunay triangulation incrementally [1] 3. Quickhull (which generates the 3D convex hull of points, which is the 2D delaunay triangulation…

I spent a couple weekends trying to implement Voronoi via Fortune's algorithm in PHP, since there is no existing library for generating them.

I couldn't get past the point of creating a seemingly random mass of intersecting lines. My math knowledge is lacking (I'm not good at groking geometry for some reason), so I wasn't sure what was wrong or how to approach fixing it.

Maybe I should give Quickhull a go. I think I understand what it's doing.

Post reply on HN