I built one, tracking fleet vehicles with a custom box, using tiled maps, on behalf of Vodafone, back in 2002.
I still remember I wrote a basic trans-mercator library too!
> This is why most online mapping platforms like Google Maps or Apple Maps rely on a variation of the Mercator projection to provide directions. Using the Equal Earth projection for navigation would not be as effective as the Mercator projection.
> What the UN did was endorse the broader message that Equal Earth is a fairer projection that more equitably displays the true size of the Earth’s land
You are right about this though - it's a moral fashion. Who cares about land size on a map unless you've got the priorities and advancement of a prehistoric king? People with plenty of spare time who constantly talk in an echo chamber[0], that's who.
One of the things I discovered a while back is that even fairly crude trig approximations don't put that much error into your position, over a small enough distance.
To calculate things like straight-line range from where you are now to where you need to put a unit for an emergency, you're probably not working over an area of more than a couple of hundred kilometres radius and the error will be within a few dozen metres. And once you get within about half a k, you're driving towards the column of smoke anyway ;-)
[OP] JPLeRouzic | 4 hours ago
"It used Voronoi Cells and reduced most math to 8- and 16-bit integer calculations with one or two single-precision floating-point calculations."
I wonder if it can be used to speed up LLM inference.
razashaikh92 | 4 hours ago
svag | 3 hours ago
SillyUsername | 2 hours ago
Of course Mercator projection may go out of fashion soon https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/world-map-eq... :)
Hope I'm called back to update the library ;)
philipallstar | 15 minutes ago
> This is why most online mapping platforms like Google Maps or Apple Maps rely on a variation of the Mercator projection to provide directions. Using the Equal Earth projection for navigation would not be as effective as the Mercator projection.
> What the UN did was endorse the broader message that Equal Earth is a fairer projection that more equitably displays the true size of the Earth’s land
You are right about this though - it's a moral fashion. Who cares about land size on a map unless you've got the priorities and advancement of a prehistoric king? People with plenty of spare time who constantly talk in an echo chamber[0], that's who.
[0] https://un.org/en
guenthert | 2 hours ago
Not the IMHO more interesting analog tech which lifts signals out of thermal noise.
ErroneousBosh | 2 hours ago
To calculate things like straight-line range from where you are now to where you need to put a unit for an emergency, you're probably not working over an area of more than a couple of hundred kilometres radius and the error will be within a few dozen metres. And once you get within about half a k, you're driving towards the column of smoke anyway ;-)