This unintentionally taught me something cool: Placing the Ever Given on my street gave a surprisingly intuitive sense of scale. This seems way better than I could get from numbers.
Perhaps there's significant value in using a map overlay with spaces you are most familiar when showing scale; As opposed to using standard measurements, or units like football fields.
>The Maeslantkering ("Maeslant barrier" in Dutch) is a storm surge barrier on the Nieuwe Waterweg, in South Holland, Netherlands.[1] It was constructed from 1991 to 1997. Part of the Delta Works, the barriers are controlled by a supercomputer, and automatically close when Rotterdam (especially the Port of Rotterdam) is threatened by floods.
>Maeslantkering has two 210 meters long barrier gates, with two 237 meters long steel trusses holding them. When closed, the barrier will protect the entire width (360 meters) of the Nieuwe Waterweg, the main waterway of Port of Rotterdam. It is one of the largest moving structures on Earth, rivalling the Green Bank Telescope in the United States and the Bagger 288 excavator in Germany.
It did that too, then shifted it over a bit to find that it’s almost the same diameter as Apple Park. Gives insight into why people often bring bikes aboard massive ships like these!
I think the amount of people doing silly things like this has certainly gone down in relative terms, but probably gone up in absolute terms (think of the statistics about how many people gain access to the internet for the first time every day-- they can't all deny their human impulse to make silly things!).
I think it's gone down in relative and absolute terms.
Websites like NewGrounds flourished pre-platform Internet. Flash was an innovation engine and kids were making tons of content - animations, games, music videos. (Maybe this has moved to Roblox? One can at least hope it lives on somewhere.)
In that era, lots of people had homepages. These weren't lazy - most had really great CSS or unique and novel gimmicks, and they almost all had links to projects and libraries and fun experiments. And blogs. Lots of blogs.
Once the platforms arrived, the desire to curate a fun personal website dropped. The enjoyment of engineering got sucked out - it's now just a job, the mega monopolies get all the profit from our labor, and there just isn't the same audience for this type of content anymore.
Facebook and Google killed the old Internet. Maybe this isn't bad, but it's certainly not the same.
StumblingOn.com [1] let's you find lots of great non-professional fun sites/projects quickly. Great way to experience the "old web" as you describe it, today.
I don't believe that for a second. There are more silly things than there were users of the Internet back then. Facebook and Google didn't kill anything, there is an incredible amount of silliness on their platforms too, and they don't represent even a single percent of the internet.
This makes me realize how hard it is to navigate a map without labels and borders... Would be nice to have a search feature to navigate to a specific location.
It's also handy when trying to find zones in the gps game Turf, the Web interface only uses the satellite imagery with Google maps. Some countries does not have big lakes to orient with but instead there might be forests or surface coal mining you can use.
>Great tool for getting an idea how big this thing is.
For me, it puts it into perspective how narrow the Suez canal is. Yes, Evergiven is a large boat, almost as large as my local mall, but when rotated at an angle is only 2-3 of my small neighborhood blocks wide.
It depends on the place. I can see it being hard for the US, but Greece is small enough and shaped distinctly enough that I have no trouble zooming exactly to my house from the global map.
Maybe that only works for places near the water, though.
After played it around somewhere I'm familiar with, I realized that although it's huge, it's not as huge as I imagined it to be. (How accurate is that "Boat is to scale" checkbox?)
I tried bringing it into some ports like Busan (South Korea), Kaohsiung (Taiwan) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) and it seems like it might be a tad large, but pretty close. It's also fun to roll it up to next to any intermodal rail terminals you know of to see all the containers next to one another.
I thought it was pretty accurate - I put it on 55th Avenue here in Portland and it went past 60th Avenue. Blocks are 200 feet long, streets are about 30 feet. Total seems close to the 1312 feet that Wikipedia says the Ever Given is.
I did the same in the Ballard Locks in Seattle. It takes all the space from the railway bridge to the other east end of the locks. I guess we won’t be seeing this ship in Lake Washington unless they embiggen the locks.
Looks like it can only start to get stuck in the Thames somewhere between the Thames Barrier and the dome (but the Thames Barrier doesn't look wide enough to let it through in the first place.)
I makes me realize how much we live in a eco-catastrophy:
- Every few days, such a ship lands in Europe and all 122km of goods are dispatched to everyone’s houses (122km is the length of its containers), half of it probably being styrofoam,
- 10-20 years later, all this gear lands in landfills. And we keep piling them up. Transferring so much mass for a century from Australia (ore) to China (transformation) to Europe can’t possibly not change the Earth’s rotation axis, let alone raise the average level if land in Europe ;)
The logistics of 500 million humans are truly staggering. Ecologists want us to save 40% carbon emissions, but that can’t possibly be enough. It feels like we should be 10% as many as we are, plus save 40% ecological footprint per person...
The figures are given in TEU's which is equivalent to a 20 foot container. Most of the containers are 40 feet, so the number is half that. Still impressive. Also, above deck appears to be stacked roughly 10 high, 24 wide, and 28 bow to stern, with some areas not filled in, so about ~6000 on top and ~3200 below deck.
And here I am, had to spend like 4h just to get curl to work properly in a docker container (with the right path, env vars, logging to stdout and schedule controllable from a docker-compose file's env vars).
It sure would be nice if the docker daemon supported scheduled starts instead of this mess.
First thing I tries was to place the boat at the river port of Manaus, near the Amazonas river. So I zoomed into the river, and when I put the boat into scale, it disappeared...
So I decided to reduce the river. The boat certainly can not cross the Nile while perpendicular to it, and will need to be really careful about sandbanks on the Yellow river.
Nice idea and execution! Just one small suggestion. Could you consider increasing the height of the map? Even if it means putting the top white-background banner as a vertical
column on the left edge. I was trying to find a location which required navigating due north, and one has to make very many short swipes because of the limited height of the map. Compared to when you're navigating East-west, in which case you can make wide sweeping swipes. Also it would allow you to see more context for any given location. Thanks. Nice work!
It's "only" 2 furlongs long, so you only need around a 4 square furlong property before you can easily fit it.
In a semi-rural location, where you have roads that were last built out when everything was still fields, it's not uncommon to have lots divided for houses that are long, but not wide. Spending a few minutes looking at the parcels near me, I found one that was 390m long and 50m wide -- slightly too small, but not by that much, not not even a particularly large lot as these things go.
Its a funny shape. Like Biden's nose. But you could also easily reuse this code for a game of "Where's Noah's Ark?", just change the shape of the ship. This makes me think, if aliens came to attack us. They could so easily block the World's supply lines in two strikes.
Perhaps there's significant value in using a map overlay with spaces you are most familiar when showing scale; As opposed to using standard measurements, or units like football fields.