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Nerdy Day Trips

nerdydaytrips.com

137 pointsjgrahamc30 comments

Great idea. Dragged my wife out to Lowell Observatory on our honeymoon in the US. She will be horrified to learn that I now have many more options for future trips.

My brother, father and I visited the Budweiser Budvar factory in České Budějovice earlier this year and could've watched the bottling processes and robotics at work for hours. We talked later about how tours of so many factories would actually be a really interesting experience. Auto plants, cooperages, electronics factories, food processing factories, etc. If these opportunities already exist, I imagine they'd be lost in a sea of common tourist options.

My son (4 years old) and I are big fans of the tv show "How it's made" which gives interesting tours and insights into various manufacturing and industrial processes. He got really excited about last weeks episode: water treatment plants (not a joke - he's always been curious about flushing toilets and draining water)

http://science.discovery.com/tv/how-its-made/

He'd like the poop tracker, then!

http://flushtracker.com/

The trouble with factory tours is that they're uneven in quality. Many of 'em don't let you see anything interesting. I've soured on them after a couple of bad experiences. The Ben & Jerry's ice cream factory in Vermont should be fascinating, but it consists of watching a long video followed by looking through a window at the factory floor while they point things out to you. You're not allowed anywhere near the actual machines. The Lindt chocolate factory in Zurich is even worse -- there's no tour at all, you're just stuck in a museum room at the factory. The free tasting redeem 'em both somewhat, but for what it costs to get there you might as well just stay home and eat ice cream and/or chocolate without the factory.

Best factory I've ever seen wasn't open to the public, it was a factory making fibrous cement sheets. I've also toured radiotelescopes and the National Ignition Facility, but the fibrous cement sheet factory was way cooler.

The Cadbury factory in Tasmania (Australia) is now similarly weak - no more factory floor tour: now you just watch a video and see a basic chocolate making demo. It's also only redeemed by the shop selling discounted and seconds chocolate.

A real shame.

I do not think it is a coincidence the first two are producing food. Hygiene laws make it practically impossible to let visitors walk the floor.

Fibrous cement sheets, on the other hand? That one isn't open because of the risk that a visitor gets hurt.

John Graham-Cumming is also the author of The Geek Atlas.

http://www.geekatlas.com/

Thanks for mentioning my book. For people who are interested in maps there's a map of all the locations in The Geek Atlas here:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&#...

And if anyone's got the energy they can enter them all on the Nerdy Day Trips web site. I've done the first 22, but need to do other stuff tonight. If you do that and enter a significant number (say > 30) then (a) please add a note "This is one of 128 geeky places from the book, The Geek Atlas" and (b) email me and I will send you a free signed copy of my book.

As a fan of the The Geek Atlas, this was pretty awesome. It turns out I used to go past the Mossman Lock Collection every day at an old job many many months ago, and I didn't even realize it until I saw it put on a map!

Don't forget the world's tallest (guyed) structure, a TV broadcast mast in North Dakota: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KVLY-TV_mast

First man-made structure to exceed 2000 feet in height.

Feedback using Firefox 6.0.2

- no meaningful feedback when mousing over a tag.

- mouse scroll wheen controls the window's menubar, not zooming in and out. Disconcerting for someone used to Google Maps.

- clicking on a tag takes a relatively long time to load.

- when you load location information maybe make the background a little more transparent.

I was definitely looking for a Google Maps-like experience. In addition to what you said, I'd like to the place description to not cover the destination, so that I can keep track of where it is on the map.

Also, clicking the search box doesn't clear the existing text. I ended up clicking multiple times before realizing that the window wasn't frozen.

If you focus on the UK check out openstreetmap. The map data coverage might be better. cloudmade has some beautiful styles.

This is brilliant. I hope it stays spam-free. Thanks for building it.

Can we have a way to go back and re-edit our entries as I'd like to add a website link to one of mine?

What does everyone think of the map as the background portion of the UI? I found it to be a little cluttered.

I recently wrote similar app for cougar sightings (the cat) http://cougarreport.com . I moved the map into a separate spot.

Any opinions on which layout is the preferred way?

Big maps look really good. I remember the first time I used the 'hide panel' button in Google Maps, I literally voiced 'ohhh'. I'm not a fan of the modal dialogs on the linked site (nor the cufon - for whatever reason I can only see a handful of letters). The modal dialogs just add that unnecessary 'close' step which really detracts from casual browsing of trips.

On your site, you could definitely make the map bigger using a fluid design and you may be able to show all the cougars to some users. On an aside, the way you present the data on both the map and text is very slick.

Thanks for the idea... I am planning on making it fluid so that it will look good on mobile. I think I will make it full screen with a long sidebar on the side that can be hidden. It is never a bad idea to steal UI design from Google :)

I had a similar issue with Cufon, and it was resolved with a graphics driver update. Perhaps try that?

Not that it isn't a hideous piece of software that has no place in the web eco-system.

this is awesome. I just discovered another place to hit on my vegas trip next march.

Great idea! A little browser geolocation would be a nice finishing touch.

Love the idea! But please can you make the map the default action for mousewheel scrolling? I want to zoom into the map, rather than up and down a page I'm not going to read anyway.

Reminds me of http://atlasobscura.com/

How about a little IP geolocation action? The UK isn't exactly a day trip for me.

Also in complaints: do not break Maps's scroll-zoom for me. Unforgivable UI design.

Or at least give the option not to break it. Scroll-zoom drives me crazy - the slightest touch causes the map to either zoom in fully, or out too far (I wish all websites that used maps gave me the option to turn it off).

Indeed. This is my major gripe with Google Maps. IMHO, forced scroll-zoom is a broken UI mechanism.

This is actually a wider problem than just scroll-zoom. Using JS to hook scrolling to anything is a UX nightmare. The problem is that on my desktop I can discretely scroll one step at a time with my mouse but on a laptop using a trackpad a scroll ends up firing dozens of events. This discrepancy basically bars scrolling from having any use on the web besides, well, scrolling.

Seconded, this is truly awful. Navigating the map instantly becomes a chore.

Slowwwwww. :(

are all nerds living in the UK (or going only there for day trips)?

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