Geograph’s Effort to Get Photos of Every Square Kilometer of Britain and Ireland | Hacker News Reader

Geograph’s Effort to Get Photos of Every Square Kilometer of Britain and Ireland

fivethirtyeight.com

12 pointsauton15 comments

"Stott thinks Geographing more countries would require similar arrangements with national mapping agencies. Making contact with them is on his to-do list, he said."

This is important.

I fit the demographic rather well, and I have a filing cabinet drawer full of monochrome negatives of local city features taken in the 1980s and 90s... so there goes the weekend.

Reminds me of http://confluence.org/

I remember when it was relatively new and reading the tales of somebody reaching the confluences in southeast China for the first time ever, like going the middle of the jungle and obsessively chasing the all-decimal-zeros in the GPS.

I remember Kevin Kelly blogging about this. Fascinating project.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/2012/11/the-average-pla/

It's interesting to consider that if you just take a random lat-lon, and go find that place ... most of the time it'll be the middle of an ocean. Hey, 75% of Earth's surface is water, right?

If you find a random land-based location ... as Kevin notes, it's interesting how rare it is to see a building, and how often it's wilderness. As developed as the world is, there's still quite a bit of wild out there.

Even without buildings, farmland appears often, which makes sense ... so that's one cue that civilization is around. Look up and you may see jet contrails during the day, or satellites swimming across the stars at night.

A few more cues ... it's just surprising how rare a random spot on earth shows more than that.

Reminds me of Every Dot, an ambitious project to shoot every dot on the map of one state: http://afiler.com/everydot/

The books that came from the kick starter are nice, too.

The title made me think of planet labs' goals (http://www.planet.com), but the actual ambition (photos from the ground, rather than from space) seems more challenging in many ways.

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