Mountains Aren't the Shape You Think | Hacker News Reader

Mountains Aren't the Shape You Think

atlasobscura.com

71 pointsjonbaer31 comments

The visualizations are not showing actual mountain shapes. Instead they are showing the envelope of surface area as a function of height. For example, for the Diamond shape mountains, the base of the mountain is very steep and so has almost no relative surface area. The graphic is correspondingly skinny at the bottom.

I think communication would be enhanced here if the visualizations were supplemented with idealized cross-section illustrations of how a typical mountain of each type would look. That is what the pictures of the actual mountains are supposed to convey but they don't really. In this case, a "stick figure" drawing of each mountain type would do a much better job.

I always did think that the Alps looked like mountains were "supposed" to look, and mountains in, e.g., US, did not. Having skiied in the Alps and the US West coast, you really notice that in the Alps, the valleys are steeper and narrower. Standing on a slope in Zermatt or Chamonix you are much closer to the other side of the valley, even though you are a long way up from the valley floor. This is something I only experienced in the Alps.

At least they're mountains. Here in Australia, we just have self-important hills. I drove over 12000' mountain pass crossing into Colorado once, and at my destination, went to compare it to back home - I'd just driven casually through a pass over twice as tall as our highest mountain, Kosciusko.

Kosciusko is a tame enough 'mountain' that friends of mine walked it in a four-hour round trip from the car park. In the fog. While having a near-relationship-ending argument all the way. :)

Mind you, I've also been told that the mountains in central Australia are so old, that when the Rocky Mountains were forming, they'd already eroded halfway to their current height... (and no, they don't look much like 'mountains' either)

Hehe - I am actually Australian - I have been skiing at Perisher valley, Charlottes Pass too. Totally get what you are saying about the Snowy "Mountains". They look like really big hills! ;-)

I also took a look at your HN page - I agree with your criticism: there's no reason that comment should have been downvoted/flagged.

The Himalayas are younger than the dinosaurs - they've grown in the 66 million years since the dino extinction.

Oh, and in Europe the mountains/hills have eroded to be rockier on the slopes, so vineyards are planted there; in much-younger New Zealand, the rocks are in the valleys and the slopes have more soil - so vines are planted in the flat areas.

"These mountains today. ... Get off my slope!"

Your mountains sound similar to the Appalachian range on the eastern coast of the US. The tallest peak is Mt. Mitchell at 2,037 m (Kosciusko is 2,228 m).

Another odd one is a fault block mountain, like Steens Mountain in south east Oregon:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Steens+Mountain,+Oregon+97...

The western slope rises almost imperceptibly (besides of course the gorges) while the eastern side is a straight drop down.

Beautiful area, by the way, if you're into going off the beaten path.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fault_block#Fault-block_mountai...

I don't think this is very surprising, but I suppose that might be from the time I've spent drawing landscapes. I think being an artist and a programmer requires or develops a certain eye for breaking through cultural perception and really seeing a subject. It's how you tell the difference between mountains well enough to be able to draw them from memory. It's how you spot the one missing semicolon in a large file just by scanning it quickly.

I thought this was going to be about how mountains looked too short in Google Earth, so they amplified the height changes by 3x to make them look right. If you go into the settings and put it back to 1x all the mountains look really flat.

Is that because GEarth perspective is from above, not from the foot of the mountain?

You can move the camera around and look at mountains side-on, but it still looks odd. It's probably because the view is so zoomed-out that you can see how smooth the earth really is - it's smoother than a billiard ball proportionally. http://www.curiouser.co.uk/facts/smooth_earth.htm

Edit: I just downloaded Earth and it looks like it's set to 1x by default now. I read about this a long time ago so I don't know if I had it wrong or if they changed it or what.

How can you tell a pyramid from an inverse pyramid? Isn't it just decided by the side you start measuring on?

Gravity. So: yes.

I wonder if non-European descended cultures think mountains are shaped like the Alps.

Am I the only one bothered that they mislabeled the Cascades and Sierras as the Rockies?

I'm assuming you're referring to the map in column "a" of the graphic. They didn't mislabel them. The Cascades are nearer to the coast. Same with the Sierras. I think what's got you mixed up is the perspective of the map. It's slightly oblique, which shortens the apparent distance between the mountains and the coast. It's not a terribly good graphic. There are no state borders, yet the map is clipped in a way that gives very little context.

Off-topic, but these kind of headlines drive me nuts... the Partial Clickbaitisation Of Everything. Like, "Mountains Aren't the Shape You Think," are they not? How do you know what shape I think mountains are? The headline is needlessly provocative, the story is interesting enough without dressing it up like Buzzfeed-authored Facebook fodder.

I understand this is how the web works, it's attention economics and so shared headlines need to create traffic (which will convert into more shared headlines and so on). But I guess I'm wistful for the "inverted pyramid" of newspaper journalism where the headline was the condensed summary of the whole story, and imparting information took priority over attempting to produce an infantile grab response. And it's fine for natively clickbait publications to do this (Buzzfeed is a fine publication!), but sad when the same pattern is used by media outlets and blogs that shouldn't need to.

You Won't Believe What This Grumpy Old Man Has To Say About Modern Trends In Headlines On The Web.

> But I guess I'm wistful for the "inverted pyramid" of newspaper journalism where the headline was the condensed summary of the whole story, and imparting information took priority over attempting to produce an infantile grab response.

I don't think that's been true for a long time, headlines on newspapers (especially on the front page) are carefully crafted to sell papers.

Definitely, but there's still a core of summarising the story. As an example, check out the headlines on this local newspaper:

http://www.advertiserandtimes.co.uk

  TORY TRIUMPH AS VOTERS STAY BLUE

  Jon runs 50k to mark RNLI’s golden year

  Train suicide soldier was saying ‘sorry’ to girlfriend as he died

The front page acts as a kind of static Zooming User Interface, where I can apprehend the low-res information from a distance, and the detail appears as I lean in and read.

No, it's still a thing. The headline conveys the general idea/summary of the article, the first paragraph conveys the most meat, and information gets more and more 'fluffy' from there.

Headlines are carefully crafted to sell papers, but definitely convey a message. So, for example you get (from the NYT today) "Banks Admit Scheme to Rig Currency Price"; "ISIS Seizes a City Pivotal in Syria and in History"; "Rallying Cry in Anti-Test Movement: 'Opt Out'; and "Kentucky G.O.P. Left in Disarray by a Close Race."

Instead of: "You'll never believe what these bankers were caught doing"; "Four things ISIS is famous for"; "Teachers want your kids to skip these tests?!?"; "5 reasons the Kentucky G.O.P is in Disarray".

See the difference?

> I guess I'm wistful for the "inverted pyramid" of newspaper journalism

As a new study in Newspaper Journalism Change shows, the shape of newspaper journalism is much more complicated. Every newspaper article might eventually start at a peak, but on the way back, it might flatten into expansive plateaus or set from a sharp decrease into a slow decline towards the end. By analyzing the area of newspapers as length increased, Princeton doctoral student Paul Elsen and his colleague Morgan Tingley (now an assistant professor at University of Connecticut) identified four different shapes that describe how newspapers behave. And, they found, the traditional "inverted pyramid" shape, that fits journals like The Wall Street Journal, actually describes only a minority of newspaper articles.

I see what you did there

Yep. I live in Denver and clicked that and was pretty much told that the Rockies are indeed the shape I think. Interesting article but the headline is bad.

In other news, humans are not accurately depicted by stick figures.

No no no no no -- that's "humans aren't the shape you think they are".

Wrong again:

"12 reasons humans aren't the shape you think they are"

Is your body a stick figure? Read this before you hit the beach.

Isn't that an old Charles Atlas ad?

I used to draw humans as stick figures, but what I then learned will surprise you!

"Your body shape? What doctors don't want you to know"

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