6 ms·

Phenomenally interesting; it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before, because I cannot visuali

Phenomenally interesting; it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before, because I cannot visualize direction in Tupaia's map at all and would need hours of practice to make it work. It also reminds of something sad, which is the tendency of westerners to assume that their culture and technology is "default" and "boring", whereas indigenous culture is "interesting" and "exotic". The truth is that almost every single type of technology is marvelous. I know many people who find the building of thick clay houses by the pre-colonial southwestern Americans fascinating, because the simple insulation delay was used to keep the house cool in the day and warm at night. Those same people would fall asleep at an explanation of an HVAC system.

roughly 5y ago
> it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before There’s a book by James C Scott, See Like a State, that talks (in part) about the notion of what you could consider human or experiential measures as opposed to surveyors or overseers measures - notions like distance for a human making the trip are better expressed in terms of time or difficulty (“A 3 days’ walk”) than actual map distance (“10 miles”), since 10 miles on a grassy plane is very different from 10 miles through mountains. Almost every way we talk about time, space, distance, and measures in the modern (western) world are in the style of surveyors, whereas premodern western cultures and other groups frequently spoke of things more experientially. If the assessment of Tupaia’s map is correct, it’s solidly experiential - “look at the sun at noon, turn to where the next island is on this map, go that way.” Terrible for a surveyor, kind of brilliant for a sailor.
- quacked 5y ago
  That's a great point, and I've wanted to read SLaS before, I guess this settles it. I think that might explain why people think huts are interesting and HVACs are boring. There's technology that exists at the human scale, like Tupaia's map or saying things are "a 3 day's walk away", and technology that exists far beyond the human scale, like a Cartesian map of a continent or saying things are "15 miles away".
- EdwardDiego 5y ago
  Exactly - when travelling on foot in the mountains, the only useful measurement is hours. You can use topographical map information to estimate travel time, ascending a bush clad slope without a cut track, 100m height gain an hour is a reasonable rule of thumb.
- banana_giraffe 5y ago
  Reminds me of LineDrive [1], a feature of MapBlast that would give you directions in something that looked like how a human would write out directions, where roads were simplified. The overall result is reducing a map to only the parts that are important to someone that needs directions along a specific route. A bit of a moot point in today's world where everyone has a GPS enabled device capable of giving them turn-by-turn directions interactively. [1] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/ https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remember...
  - couchand 5y ago
    What an amazing technology, it's really a shame there's not a current version. Maybe given the original paper's algorithm and the OSM dataset we could recreate it? I think this would be particularly useful for transit and other multi-modal trip maps. A Mercator might be mildly useful for driving (though as your link points out, not so obviously useful that it should be the only option), but there's really not much of a reason you need that for a bus or train trip. Individual bus or train lines very frequently have published maps in this style, and many subway system maps are reminiscent of it.
  - mc32 5y ago
    Bing Maps had an experimental feature like that as a print option at one time. It was a chicken scratch map and included the intersecting roads where you needed to change direction. [ah, yes, as noted in the comments section, it was a showcase for silverlight]
    - gnat 5y ago
      I think because Maneesh Agrawala, who created LineDrive, was at Microsoft after completing his PhD thesis (which was basically LineDrive). He's done huge amounts of really interesting work -- one of my absolute favourite CS researchers. He's worked on cropping videos using gaze tracking, making architectural models from photographs, usability analysis and design systems for isometric assembly instructions, text editing of talking head videos, and more. Most things he does have an element of magic to them. Current homepage: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/
- peterburkimsher 5y ago
  "A 3 days’ walk" has actually influenced place names in New Zealand! Ninety Mile Beach is only 55 miles long. One theory is because it took 3 days for 30 mph horses to travel from one end to the other, but horses walk slower on sand. https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1kasdw/why_is_it_called_90_mile_beach_clarkson_xpost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1kasdw/why_is_i... https://www.dolphincruises.co.nz/bay-of-islands-info/ninety-mile-beach https://www.dolphincruises.co.nz/bay-of-islands-info/ninety-... I certainly agree that the proposed system is brilliant, whether it's what was originally intended by Tupaia or not. It's closer to a GPS turn-by-turn view rather than a birds-eye map view.
irrational 5y ago
> It also reminds of something sad, which is the tendency of westerners to assume that their culture and technology is "default" I remember how surprised I was to learn that many ancient cultures oriented their maps so East (the direction of the rising sun) was at the top, instead of North (the direction a compass points) as we do. It had never occurred to me before that North being the default direction was cultural, but of course it is.
- Zanni 5y ago
  Indeed, that's literally what "orient" means. [0] To orient something to the North is an oxymoron. [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/orient https://www.etymonline.com/word/orient

roughly 5y ago

> it reminds me of how hard reading a regular map is (cartesian N-S E-W) to someone who's never done it before There’s a book by James C Scott, See Like a State, that talks (in part) about the notion of what you could consider human or experiential measures as opposed to surveyors or overseers measures - notions like distance for a human making the trip are better expressed in terms of time or difficulty (“A 3 days’ walk”) than actual map distance (“10 miles”), since 10 miles on a grassy plane is very different from 10 miles through mountains. Almost every way we talk about time, space, distance, and measures in the modern (western) world are in the style of surveyors, whereas premodern western cultures and other groups frequently spoke of things more experientially. If the assessment of Tupaia’s map is correct, it’s solidly experiential - “look at the sun at noon, turn to where the next island is on this map, go that way.” Terrible for a surveyor, kind of brilliant for a sailor.

quacked 5y ago
That's a great point, and I've wanted to read SLaS before, I guess this settles it. I think that might explain why people think huts are interesting and HVACs are boring. There's technology that exists at the human scale, like Tupaia's map or saying things are "a 3 day's walk away", and technology that exists far beyond the human scale, like a Cartesian map of a continent or saying things are "15 miles away".
EdwardDiego 5y ago
Exactly - when travelling on foot in the mountains, the only useful measurement is hours. You can use topographical map information to estimate travel time, ascending a bush clad slope without a cut track, 100m height gain an hour is a reasonable rule of thumb.
banana_giraffe 5y ago
Reminds me of LineDrive [1], a feature of MapBlast that would give you directions in something that looked like how a human would write out directions, where roads were simplified. The overall result is reducing a map to only the parts that are important to someone that needs directions along a specific route. A bit of a moot point in today's world where everyone has a GPS enabled device capable of giving them turn-by-turn directions interactively. [1] https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remembering-linedrive/ https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/remember...
- couchand 5y ago
  What an amazing technology, it's really a shame there's not a current version. Maybe given the original paper's algorithm and the OSM dataset we could recreate it? I think this would be particularly useful for transit and other multi-modal trip maps. A Mercator might be mildly useful for driving (though as your link points out, not so obviously useful that it should be the only option), but there's really not much of a reason you need that for a bus or train trip. Individual bus or train lines very frequently have published maps in this style, and many subway system maps are reminiscent of it.
- mc32 5y ago
  Bing Maps had an experimental feature like that as a print option at one time. It was a chicken scratch map and included the intersecting roads where you needed to change direction. [ah, yes, as noted in the comments section, it was a showcase for silverlight]
  - gnat 5y ago
    I think because Maneesh Agrawala, who created LineDrive, was at Microsoft after completing his PhD thesis (which was basically LineDrive). He's done huge amounts of really interesting work -- one of my absolute favourite CS researchers. He's worked on cropping videos using gaze tracking, making architectural models from photographs, usability analysis and design systems for isometric assembly instructions, text editing of talking head videos, and more. Most things he does have an element of magic to them. Current homepage: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/ http://graphics.stanford.edu/~maneesh/
peterburkimsher 5y ago
"A 3 days’ walk" has actually influenced place names in New Zealand! Ninety Mile Beach is only 55 miles long. One theory is because it took 3 days for 30 mph horses to travel from one end to the other, but horses walk slower on sand. https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1kasdw/why_is_it_called_90_mile_beach_clarkson_xpost/ https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/comments/1kasdw/why_is_i... https://www.dolphincruises.co.nz/bay-of-islands-info/ninety-mile-beach https://www.dolphincruises.co.nz/bay-of-islands-info/ninety-... I certainly agree that the proposed system is brilliant, whether it's what was originally intended by Tupaia or not. It's closer to a GPS turn-by-turn view rather than a birds-eye map view.

irrational 5y ago

> It also reminds of something sad, which is the tendency of westerners to assume that their culture and technology is "default" I remember how surprised I was to learn that many ancient cultures oriented their maps so East (the direction of the rising sun) was at the top, instead of North (the direction a compass points) as we do. It had never occurred to me before that North being the default direction was cultural, but of course it is.

Zanni 5y ago
Indeed, that's literally what "orient" means. [0] To orient something to the North is an oxymoron. [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/orient https://www.etymonline.com/word/orient