Woodcut Maps: Handcrafted wood-inlay maps, designed by you

Look at DC, which is the exact same thing - but with masonic symbolism rather than mayan symbolism.

The site is built on python/django and hosted on AWS.

Most of the interesting work happens in python with PIL, numpy and scipy. We download maps tiles (Google for now, working on an OSM render path), and split them into channels for landscape, water, roads and parks. Then we apply several steps of scipy's image morphology filters to get the masks ready for laser cutting and to ease assembly by simplifying the design. Removing small pieces, filling small gaps (which gives the maps the distinctive look of dense roads being filled in, creating chunky blocks), and simplifying boundaries.

All the rendering happens on picloud.com, which has been a really robust part of our infrastructure. It helps us scale up and down based on demand without having to manage an autoscaling AWS backend processor setup ourselves, or overpay for AWS instances.

I'm probably going to talk more in detail about it at WhereCamp this weekend if anyone wants to talk in person.

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"They...come in with weapons, they seized a half-million dollars worth of property, they shut our factory down, and they have not charged us with anything," says Gibson Guitars CEO Henry Juszkiewicz...

The feds raided Gibson for using an inappropriate tariff code on wood from India, which is a violation of the anti-trafficking statute known as The Lacey Act. At issue is not whether the wood in question was endangered, but whether the wood was the correct level of thickness and finish before being exported from India. "India is wanting to ensure that raw wood is not exported without some labor content from India," says Juskiewicz."

http://reason.com/blog/2012/02/23/the-great-gibson-guitar-ra... (disclaimer: Libertarian news site is a partial source, interpret that partiality as you will. other sources and commentary exist. many of them are probably better, this was just convenient because I remembered it and could google it quickly. you should look up these other sources if you're interested!)

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The cynics suggest that this is all at the behest of the Pacific Northwest domestic timber lobby, using environmental sentiment to dampen competition from overseas. Gibson's case, by that theory, is a deliberate scare tactic designed to create a chilling effect.

And to bring the discussion back to the matter at hand: whatever you're doing, I hope you're aware of all this, and documenting everything you have meticulously, or you could end up screwed. Like, possibly-in-jail screwed. For working with wood veneer. Believe it.

Being from a lumber producing area, the whole concept of "recycled wood" really annoys me.

Old wood breaks down, causing no waste.

"New" wood is produced on farms. Exactly like corn and soybeans, but with much longer crop cycles. Just like other cash crops, if you remove the demand for new wood, Weyerhaeuser will cut down all the trees and plant something else that makes money or sell off the land for urban development.

All of the major concerns with commercial lumber production have been mitigated with smarter land management practices and technology. All of the "old growth" forest that environmentalists like to jump on is actually pretty impractical for large scale commercial operations to deal with, and protected by existing laws anyway.

Some species (like Zebrawood as you mention) are threatened by initial commercial exploitation, and sadly the biggest offenders are indigenous farmers. Once a wood becomes commercially viable the big players move in with established reforestation and resource management policies that actually help to stabilize the situation (because they can't make money long term off an extinct species).

Edit: looks like another comment has since been posted which talked about 'working on an OSM render path', there you go