Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections (2008)

win.tue.nl

48 pointsdredmorbius19 comments

Professor Jack. What a gentleman. He's a friend of my graduate lab PI and visited our scientific and information visualization-focused lab in 2008. He made the rounds, quietly and attentively listening to each of us demonstrate and discuss in-progress work. I remember expressing some frustration that academic work in sci- and infovis felt like to complete crapshoot with respect to publication in "respected" journals (e.g. IEEE Vis, SIGGRAPH). The community felt exceedingly subjective, particularly when compared to other branches of computer science. I remember he just smiled, said "May I?" reaching for the keyboard. He typed in the address for this very page. Paraphrasing him: "I sent this paper to all the typical Information Visualization conferences, and they all rejected it. All of them. So I sent it instead to the top cartographic journal in the world. It won best paper," said with a smile. This made a HUGE impression on me, and I appreciated his sincerity, humor, and general infectiously positive demeanor. More than any direct statement, this demonstrated the importance of believing in your own good ideas, even when others are quick to dismiss them. For Professor van Wijk, this was just one of countless interactions with graduate students from across the globe. But it certainly bettered me as a person, and I will never forget it. Thanks, Professor, if you're out there.

While interrupted maps are a clever hack to solve the projection problem, I'm not convinced thst humans are particularly good at interpreting them. In particular useful study would be how well people are able to estimate sizes/lengths/angles of various features

Tanja Auerbach does wonderful prints from this kind of map projection as Diagonal Press: https://www.instagram.com/p/CG45Vnrgjmp/

Do you have a archived version of that? Instagram redirects me to a login screen, I think you don't even get to view posts these days without making an account.

If you're on Firefox, there's an add-on called 'Instagram guest' that allows you to get around their annoying attempts at lock-in.

Oh man, I didn’t realise that :/

There’s a website: https://diagonalpress.com/products/interrupted-polyconic-pro...

Feeling a bit spammy now. I swear I’m not affiliated. Just saving up to buy their stuff, nose pressed against the window :)

That's what I expected to see (no account here), but it actually showed me the post, so apparently it still works for some people. The maps are exactly the same as in the linked article, just with a different (garish IMHO) colour scheme, and not nearly as many different versions (there are some other types of projection on the site AnthonBerg linked too).

Garish is good! haha

Ocean-centered projections are some of my favorite projections to track down. Myriahedral, dymaxion, spilhaus, and one or two others make for fine ocean-centered maps. Students have a new perspective on Mahan's notion of seapower or Mackinder's "unity of the ocean" when you show them one of those.

Whenever I get across this page I first get very impressed and happy, and then I realise there's no code so I can't use this method myself to make my own maps :(

Nico Belmonte ported this to WebGL in 2018 for its 10th birthday.

https://twitter.com/philogb/status/968530476259450881

Sure, but did he release the code as a repository?

I've seen that site before but I think all you get is minified js, which isn't terribly helpful if you want to make your own maps to unfold.

Oh, I didn’t notice that the directory[1] only has compiled source. Wouldn’t hurt to file an issue, maybe no one ever asked him for it.

[1] https://github.com/philogb/page/tree/gh-pages/myriahedral

At this point it might be easier to relocate the entirety of humanity to a ring world just so we don't have to deal with this.

Your task-difficulty estimation methods may be miscallibrated.

Halo theme starts playing

In Larry Niven’s Ringworld, there were maps of various planets in the ocean, including one of Earth. I always wondered what projection they were in.

We would quickly end up with zig zag maps.

Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/977/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com