I'm starting to think we're stretching the definition of "beautiful" nowadays. I see it every other day describing js libraries etc and now this. The technical stuff behind this is interesting and sort-of impressive but "beautiful" is going a bit far.
Here we have a small showcase where a company took pictures of Earth from space - something that when described clumsily by second hand observers has brought tears to people's eyes - and their goal is to build a base layer that is the idealized, cloudless view of our planet in peak vibrancy.
A map of paradise.
And it's generated by a clever, possibly elegant, algorithm using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm).
This is perhaps the most appropriately, unambiguously beautiful thing I've personally seen here.
It’s just barely clever enough that no one thought of it before. It has to be really simple, because the innermost loop (estimating how cloudy a given pixel is) runs several trillion times.
using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm)
EC2’s m2.4xlarge (> 64 gigs of memory, 8 decent cores) is going for $0.14/hour right now. You could run ten of those all day and spend less than on dinner at a restaurant with cloth napkins.
I was the opposite. As soon as I saw that image of the UK, I really thought it was "beautiful", in the way that other people may think a piece of art is beautiful.
I find the maps they make really pretty, but the technical stuff doesn't quite deserve the hype. This seems like blue marble, which NASA did in 2005 (and every month since).
That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.
For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.
Blue Marble was a big inspiration here, and we’ve had fun comparing notes with some of the people who made it. Blue Marble is, however, ten years old, and has a number of (justifiable) limitations. You can get a sense of these if you zoom in on its depictions of, say, the Niger Delta, or the northern tip of Greenland.
What has been lacking in the past is an open source type effort to make derived datasets available. There are numerous commercial projects that process public domain data and resell it, but do not publish methods or make the data available for free. The community tend to use NASA datasets with known limitations, or commercial data with high entry pricing. There is a distinct lack of cost-free domain specific derived data.
> I see it every other day describing js libraries etc and now this. The technical stuff behind this is interesting and sort-of impressive but "beautiful" is going a bit far.
Is that really what's being described? I don't think anyone is discussing the libraries this is written on when they say, "Beautiful." They're talking about the actual maps, which are things you could print out and hang on the wall if you wanted to.
Comments
I'm starting to think we're stretching the definition of "beautiful" nowadays. I see it every other day describing js libraries etc and now this. The technical stuff behind this is interesting and sort-of impressive but "beautiful" is going a bit far.
Really? (Prolly not, but I'll bite.)
Here we have a small showcase where a company took pictures of Earth from space - something that when described clumsily by second hand observers has brought tears to people's eyes - and their goal is to build a base layer that is the idealized, cloudless view of our planet in peak vibrancy.
A map of paradise.
And it's generated by a clever, possibly elegant, algorithm using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm).
This is perhaps the most appropriately, unambiguously beautiful thing I've personally seen here.
a clever, possibly elegant, algorithm
It’s just barely clever enough that no one thought of it before. It has to be really simple, because the innermost loop (estimating how cloudy a given pixel is) runs several trillion times.
using tools anyone could use (aside from a massive server farm)
EC2’s m2.4xlarge (> 64 gigs of memory, 8 decent cores) is going for $0.14/hour right now. You could run ten of those all day and spend less than on dinner at a restaurant with cloth napkins.
I was the opposite. As soon as I saw that image of the UK, I really thought it was "beautiful", in the way that other people may think a piece of art is beautiful.
I find the maps they make really pretty, but the technical stuff doesn't quite deserve the hype. This seems like blue marble, which NASA did in 2005 (and every month since).
That said it should yield a dataset with twice the resolution of Blue Marble, which is cool. The size of a pixel will be 250m, i.e. a small town will be 2 pixel, as opposed to 1 pixel.
For high resolution imagery, you'd need to pay. There is 0.5m data out there, for about $5+ a kilometer, and I'd love NASA to dump a whole world data-set of this. But until then, I think Google and ESRI are safe.
VERY LARGE FILE http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/7375... NASA's blue marble.
Blue Marble was a big inspiration here, and we’ve had fun comparing notes with some of the people who made it. Blue Marble is, however, ten years old, and has a number of (justifiable) limitations. You can get a sense of these if you zoom in on its depictions of, say, the Niger Delta, or the northern tip of Greenland.
What has been lacking in the past is an open source type effort to make derived datasets available. There are numerous commercial projects that process public domain data and resell it, but do not publish methods or make the data available for free. The community tend to use NASA datasets with known limitations, or commercial data with high entry pricing. There is a distinct lack of cost-free domain specific derived data.
Blue marble is half the resolution MapBox is aiming for and also their goal is a generalized base layer. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475899]
> I see it every other day describing js libraries etc and now this. The technical stuff behind this is interesting and sort-of impressive but "beautiful" is going a bit far.
Is that really what's being described? I don't think anyone is discussing the libraries this is written on when they say, "Beautiful." They're talking about the actual maps, which are things you could print out and hang on the wall if you wanted to.