First Known Maps

We always use maps for knowing about locations, travel and planning. It is natural to ask when the first map was published and who might have created a map. Greek Geographer Claudius Ptolemy is credited for creating and published maps. He spent most of his time in work and writing in Alexandria, Egypt. He attempted to map the known world at that point of time.  He did this during 2^nd Century AD! In his publications he had even created a map of the mouth of Ganges.

Earliest published India maps

Although map making might have been known even during the Indus valley civilization the maps made during those periods are not available, as they might have been destroyed over the period of time. So, not much is known about the kind of maps produced and used during that period of time.

There has been continues interest in the geography of the region. In the 9th century, geographers under Abbasid Caliph Al-Ma’mun improved on Ptolemy’s work and depicted the Indian Ocean as an open body of water.

Persian geographer Abu Rayhan Biruni visited India in the early 11^th century and studied the country’s geography extensively. He also wrote extensively on the geology of India.

In 1154, the Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi included a section on the cartography and geography of India and its neighboring countries in his world atlas, Tabula Rogeriana.

European scholar Francesco I reproduced a number of Indian maps in his magnum opus La Cartografia Antica dell India which was originally compiled by the polymath Ksemendra .

In 1717, Hermann Moll’s “The West Part of India, or the Empire of the Great Mogul” is published. In 1752,  French geographer, Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville publishes a map of India laying the Indian geographical knowledge on a scientific footing. ‘Atlas Universal’ of Gilles and Didier Robert de Vaugondy is first published with maps of whole Indies during the same period.

Mapping the Country

The first step to officially survey and make map of India was initiated under the British rule in the modern India. This was done to access the area under their command. Survey of India was established in 1767 by The East India Company for mapping the territories. In 1785 the First Map of ‘Hindoostan’ is prepared by the then Surveyor General of India. This is one of the known map  of India showing the country in detail after detailed survey. In 1830 Colonel Sir George Everest was appointed the Surveyor General of India and retains that position till 1843. The British Survey of India maps on 1:63,360 scale were published in 1930.

Itanagar, the capital of Arunachal Pradesh, is shown on Google Maps as north of a dotted line marking the border between India and China, ie in disputed territory Photo: GOOGLE

Google, the internet search engine published a map which cedes parts of the Indian Himalayan states to China. Google’s satellite map of the border area between India and China show several Indian towns in Arunachal Pradesh listed under their Chinese names as part of the People’s Republic of China. The maps also show the state’s southern border with Assam and its northern boundary with China as broken lines, indicating disputed territory. It also appears to question India’s borders with Burma and Bhutan. The publication of the map has provoked an angry response in India, where tensions are high following a series of public statements in which Chinese officials have denounced New Delhi for refusing to discuss a border dispute. China claims vast swathes of Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir as well as Arunachal Pradesh, which it says were illegally ceded to India during the British Raj. It rejects the “MacMahon Line” border drawn up by British and Tibetan officials at the 1913 Shimla Conference.

Source s: http://www.telegraph.co.uk

GIS Development

]]> http://geomatters.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/1st-question/ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:15:42 +0000 sungypsy http://geomatters.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/1st-question/

Question 1.

With reference to at least two examples , explain how maps reflect the beliefs of the people who draw them.

Answer:

The Cartography Historian J.B Harley said in 1990 that “the map is a socially constituted image.”

What he meant by this was that human beings have always represented the world as they see it in relation to their ethnicity, class, and purpose not always as it actually is.

Indeed some would argue that it was not until astronauts and cosmonauts brought back images from the space race in the 1960s and 1970s that people had a clear understanding of the true character of the planet on which we live. Image 22727 from the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972 is widely credited with being the first such image to bring home the connectivity and fragility of the world: seen in isolation from space the Earth as it appeared in the photograph put the socio-political events of the time in perspective and gave the new peace and environmental organisations like Gaia and Greenpeace an iconic image to hang their beliefs and agendas upon.

Before the advent of space photography, via an astronaut carrying a Hasselblad or more usually an image from one of the thousands of satellites that orbit the  planet, maps were the image that most people got their understanding of the world and their understanding of our place in it from. Of course our image of the world is derived from our own social sources and different cultures have different ways of seeing the world. These views have been, and in some cases, continue to be, quite disparate as I hope to show you. I will also explain that despite the history of errors, omissions  and even fantasy in mapmaking modern maps are objects, that when interpreted and used properly, can do nothing but aid our understanding of the world and hopefully instill in us a desire to protect and nurture it.

A short history of mapmaking would have to start around 2,700 years BC when the first (recorded) maps were drawn in Sumaria. These maps were mostly a result of inductive reasoning: early sailors travelled to other places and drew what they saw.  Of course, even then, “Maps were not innocent” their very premise was the exploitation of the natural resources known and being discovered on voyages and explorations. Technologically these voyages had to be limited, large oceans were too vast to cross in the ships of the time (though as the Kon-Tiki expedition by Tor Hayardahl in 1947 proved, early peoples could have travelled great distances in very primitive craft). The maps these early explorers made often put their own land at the centre of the image and the edges of knowledge, the edges of the “known world” as it were, as still a unreacable mystery that was often filled with myth and hearsay. The almost cliched submission that “here be monsters” on many old maps or the giants and ghouls many 15th and 16th century explorers expected to find in lands like Patagonia (itself named after a dog-headed beast of Spanish myth) on the South American continent were often the result of drawing maps from the reports of adventurers looking for further funding for future expeditions and no real empirical facts at all.

The Vikings, who discovered the North American continent long before Columbus also drew maps of their voyages there showing Iceland and Greenland along the way. Greenland`s name is perhaps also the first case of false advertising listed, when the cold snowy lands were given such an attractive moniker in an attempt to inspire more immigrants to the struggling colony.

Since maps have come, recently, to report our presence on the planet and not merely represent a record of the natural world, names are now perhaps the most important element to be considered by a cartographer making a map. When cartographers write a name on a map,  though they may profess that they are merely “collecting culture” the name they choose whether it be derogatory or racist, or celebrates colonialism and massacre, gives permanence, authority and legitimacy to the choice. (J.B. Harley 1990) It can be hard to erase the name after it has been used for successive generations even if the political and social conditions of the place change. That is the reasons for so many places named Victoria  around the world which celebrate the British Empire and Queen Victoria or the inclusion (since massively amended) of so many racially derogatory place names of maps of the United States Geological Survey. 

Recently many indigenous people, whose culture and language were either sidelined or totally ignored in the expansion of European empires and the attendant explosion of geography`s attempts to catalogue the world in the 18th and 19th centuries have been reclaiming original and historically accurate place names. Mount Everest is known as Sagamartha in the Nepal Himalaya (though Nepal was never colonized the British Geological survey thought it permitted to officially name the peaks it could see from India; Ayers Rock  is always refered to by its aboriginal name of Ulura and Burma, under the dictatorship of a brutal military regime it has to be said, have renamed most of the cities and even the country in an effort to throw off the remnants of past  British colonialism.

Perhaps the most well known map distortion is the one we barely notice however. Everyone will have seen a map of the world and almost without exception that map will have been drawn on what is called the Mercator projection.

The world as we now know is not flat, it is a sphere and as such to represent the shapes and features of the planet on a flat, map surface produces many problems. It is impossible to accurately display the information from a three dimensional object onto a two dimensional sheet of paper. Gerhard Kremer “solved” this problem in 1569 by stretching the lines of latitude in proportion to the lines of longitude or meridian. This flattened the world and created for the first time a visual image of the whole globe that could be seen easily and understood in its entirety. Of course the Mercator projection has been accused of exaggerating the size of the Northern Hemisphere and pinching the continents of Africa and South America. It could be argued that this was a reflection of the Eurocentric ways of thinking at the time. Europe was considered the centre of culture and learning and it was “only natural” that the map should be viewed from an idea of Europe as the heart of the planet. Interestingly maps in North America, though still using the Mercator projection, most often, put the Americas at the centre of the sheet.

To counter the perceived and real distortions of the Mercator projection the Peters projection was published in 1973. This used an ”equal areas” projection that purported to show the continents of Africa and South America in their “true” scale. On this map the longer (poorer) continents are further elongated and the wider (richer) continents like North America are distorted smaller. Interestingly Peters, who was a native of Germany, did not distort his homeland however. This map gave back prominence and dignity to the poorer areas of the world and has since become popular with those that wish to see all nations represented fairly and equally. Though it is almost as equally, if differently, flawed as the Mercator Projection J.B. Harley did credit its notoriety in 1991 with “at least demonstrating the social implications of map projections.”

The Southern hemisphere still feels under represented on global maps however a fact that was corrected in 1979 when Stuart McArthur of Melbourne published his McArthur`s Universal Corrective Map of the World. This put the North at the bottom of the map and the South at the top creating and “upside down” map.  McArthur argued that these compass point are arbitrary anyway the reason being, as we saw before, that European sailors, using the North Star for navigation, were the map-makers of old. This fact is reinforced when one considers that still older maps used to put Jerusalem (the East) at the top of the map, and in Edo Era Japan (1603 – 1868) map makers used to put the Japanese Emporer`s place at the top of the map with place names unreadable unless you placed the map over your head and metaphorically subjugated yourself to the divine power of the Japanese royal household.

There has been much talk recently of the the demise of paper maps as new computer generated maps and images gain consumer and user prominence. GPS system help us navigate around the countryside and cities of the world. And yet one of the most used and most famous maps in the world is perhaps the London Underground map designed by Harry Beck  in 1933.  He famously answered criticism of his ungeographic design by saying; “if you`re going underground, why do you need to bother about geography?”  What this proves is that we have become” map literate”: people all over the world are used to seeing visual representation of the spaces they live and travel in a map form and then using that knowledge to guide them. And this form is still usually a folded piece of paper or a book. Indeed the most commonly used map on the planet must be any of the road maps every country produces to aid it motorist navigate their way around the cities and countryside of their nations. If you think about this for a minute, these maps are not absolute, realistic images of the world the traveller is moving through. A motorway on a UK roadmap is not blue in the real world and if the map showed the road to scale it would be miles wide. These maps are results of a de-cluttering” process that takes out superfluous information, for example railways or minor rivers on a road map, and allows more space for information deemed important to the reader by the map maker; just as earlier maps of exploration showed where colonies, natural resources and “civilisation” existed and filled the blanks with monsters and fear.

Modern peoples no longer believe in such things but cartographers and governments can still control how we see the world. Military installations are often omitted from maps as are inconveniences like favelas or shanty towns from the tourists maps of Rio de Janeiro. Such unwelcome realities can cross over into other images too, for example a large, ugly nuclear power station was airbrushed out of a tourism poster showing an otherwise beautiful beach scene in the Wakase Bay in Fukui in Japan.

But as I said before despite some obvious such mistakes and lies most people have become literate at reading maps. We know when we see the Underground map in London that the distances and positions are not real but merely aid us in our navigation of that metropolitan rail system. We know when we look at road maps that more is going on outside of the lines we are following and even the likes are a satellite car navigation system that is both interactive and nominally three dimensional as we can on some models see the roads disappearing off into the distance as we drive along them, does not try to show us too much unneccessary information. The rise in programs like Google Earth that present satellite images of the world to us prove that too much information is bad. More than “maps do not show everything”, maps should not show everything as anyone who has used a satellite images to follow a path through woodland would tell you.

As Stefano Boeri said maps are now built from a “superabundance of data” and if we are hoping to use them for a specific purpose, to map ideas, or processes for example it is possible but perhaps unneccessary to add all or even any geographical information to that map.

But the map will always have a place in human society. Our understanding of the concepts of mapping has grown along with the skills of the cartographer. Though problems and prejudice still occur in representing the world and our place within it as the continued debate and search for solutions to the projection dilemma proves, a paper map like that produced by the Ordnance Survey in Britain has no immediate purpose or design is thus the simplest and most sensibly concise representation we have of the place we wish to look at. It may not show everything, but it usually shows most of what the average person would need. Also if  affordably and widely published and distributed is it, without doubt, the best way to spread basic geographical knowledge to the peoples of the world and teach them about their own place in it.

Scientists from the United States would work with the researchers of Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University (TNBU) to analyse the quality of water of river Ganga and prepare a map of riverbed through Global Positioning System (GPS). The Inland Waterways Authority of India will support  the effort with a well equipped vessel to aid the research, between October 21 and 31.The School of Natural Resources and Environment of Michigan University would provide a specially developed computer programme and Doppler machines to study a 250-km stretch between Kahalgaon in Bhagalpur and Patna. The scientists from United States have shown interest in Ganga. The team from the US will be led by Dr Mike Wiley and includes the noted specialist on Zooplankton, Dr Umair, who will also train TNBU scientists to carry on deeper investigations. The scientists hope that some newer forms of life could be uncovered in the process of the research.

Sources

GIS Development

Bihar Times

To ensure perfection in drafting the city’s development plan, the Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) has decided to get satellite images of its development area. LDA plans to get aerial pictures of the city and land use-mapping of major urban/rural objects. According to LDA authorities, the state government has already decided to divide the Lucknow development area in 22 zones for better planned development and that satellite images will help design the layout plans of the zones. The Lucknow development area is spread over 1,400 square kms approximately, including 350 square kms of urban area and 1,050 square kms of rural area. The LDA will hire a consultant to prepare the ‘base map’ of development area with details of urban and rural settlements, cultivated land, forest, vegetated land/orchards, barren land, waterlogged land, water bodies, canals, brick kilns, national and state highways, other roads, power transmission lines and embankments.

LINKS:

GIS Development

Read More

Here’s a (sorta) brief explanation of all of the different types of servers currently on cs:s, with my own personal rating next to each one out of five. I’ve lifted this from a post I made on Thunderboltgames.com:

Normal cs:s – ***** – Rescue hostages or defuse bomb. These are normally on the maps that come with cs:s, example would be cs_office which is really popular, or the de_dust maps. You start every game with 800 in money, which can buy you a deagle or kevlar and that’s it. That p22 thingy is really nice though (forgot the name, the black one above the deagle) which you can buy a nade with I think. Your team winning/ killing people increases your money for the next round.

GunGame – ***** – Servers start everyone off with either the most powerful weapon or weakest, and works their way up/down the ranks of weapons until they get to knife. First one to kill with a knife: their team wins. Your gun normally changes the next round after you kill someone, but Turbo Gungame servers have it change instantly. Those games go over so quickly though.

Deathmatch – *** – Just simply Ts vs CTs without any other goal but last man wins for his team. I only ever go on these for a mess around, as normally it’s continuous spawning – no rounds, just endless killing. You also choose your weapons via an onscreen panel, meaning no money is needed.

Surf – **- These are just deathmatch servers, but the maps have these shaped objects forming some kind of track. It’s really hard to do to begin with, and most maps are terribly ugly. It’s quite fun once you get onto a full server with people talking though.

Zombie – ** – I havn’t been on a zombie mod server in ages, cos the maps people make for them are 9/10 terrible. There’s also two types of zombie mod that a server can have. One is that everyone is on CT, and then there are loads of bots as zombies on the T side. The other type has it that everyone spawns as a CT, and one person picked randomly turns into a zombie, and killing anyone turns them into a zombie too. I prefer the former because otherwise it’s literally impossible to kill anyone as a zombie after about ten minutes. There’s always one bottleneck that the CTs get behind, and it’s just boring.

Jailbreak – * – This is like a role playing server so to speak. It’s really boring and quite sad when you see people getting really into it. Map is always a prison of some sort (obv), and the Ts start in individual cells. The CTs basically have control and tell the Ts what to do. There are rules like “you can’t kill a prisoner without warning” etc but it always ends with one T escaping, coming back a minute later and killing the majority of CTs from some crazy hidden spot xD. It’s not fun, and it drags on so much.

Google has admitted that it committed a mistake by wrongly depicting certain parts of north-east India’s Arunachal Pradesh as Chinese territory, and promised to correct the maps soon.

According to a statement by a Google spokesperson, “Earlier this week, as part of routine update to Google Earth, we published new data for the Arunachal Pradesh region that changed the depiction of certain place names in the product. The change was a result of a mistake in our processing of new map data.”

source

The Chennai Corporation’s efforts at technology-aided infrastructure development have got a fillip with the Survey of India completing the digitalised mapping of a majority of the city’s area. Survery of India has submitted 146 sq km of digitised maps of the city. The agency’s geo spatial data centre in the city is all set to complete the remaining 26 sq kms by the end of August. The digitial map, on a scale of 1:1000 is part of the GIS enabled services to help government departments to formulate schemes and plan infrastructure development. The utility mapping project of the Union Planning Commission was formulated with an objective to create large-scale digital maps with data like water, sewage, electricity, police and fire superimposed on them with the support of service agencies, like the corporation, Metrowater, Tamil Nadu Electricity Board and the police. The National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), Hyderabad had completed aerial photography of Greater Chennai in April 2007. Following clearance from the Defence, NRSA handed over the photos to the Survey of India, for digitising the map with additional attributes through physical survey. About 50 technical staff from various states like Rajasthan and neighbouring Andhra Pradesh prepared field attributes like names of streets and landmarks. Corporation properties like public convenience, ward offices, health posts, schools, community halls and street lights will be added soon. The civic agency has also floated tenders to survey the field attributes for another 50 sq km for which digitised maps are available. At present, the agency has data only on paper maps, which are inaccurate and difficult to manage.

Source : http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Since tf2maps.net is having a mini mapping contest for their new swamp theme pack, I decided I’d use this as a way to reignite the part of my mind devoted to level design (located just behind the part of my mind devoted to enjoying the band Rush way too much) and try my hand at building one. This works out since I’m working on something small-scale and nonfuctional, which will allow me to experiment in an almost miniature form before going back to work on Moai Caldera. Since I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do (a map with a fair amount of water leading off into an impassible dropoff), it’ll also help me learn how to use displacement maps and water, as well as a few other things like soundscapes and particles. After all, the swamp pack includes those and I figure I might as well use them if I have them. Now I am by no means expecting to win, especially since I only have about 15 days to finish and submit something and the contest is 10 days in already. This is more of an exercise to see what I can do and sort of build up some level of self-confidence in my ability to use hammer.

RANCHI, India: The National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) has offered to do free mapping of mineral reserves of Jharkhand through exploration.  NMDC CMD Rana Som, said there is a huge area which needs to be explored to find out the exact amount of the mineral reserves, especially iron ores. Mr Som said Jharkhand has estimated iron ore reserve of 4 billion tonne. “Out of this, Chiria mines contribute to about 2 billion tonne. Half billion tonne area has been explored. But, the remaining 1.5 billion tonne area is unexplored. The NMDC does not want any benefit from the state government in return. “We want to build a solid data base of the mineral reserves which can be used by mining companies. Exploration will help us establish the grade of ore, its span and the depth, which will be for the benefit of companies and the state government as well,” Mr Som added.

Source : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

Archaeologists  have unearthed what they believe to be the oldest map in Western Europe, in a Spanish cave steeped in legend.The complex etchings were engraved on a hand-sized rock 13,660 years ago, probably by Magdalenian hunter-gatherers.A team led by Pilar Utrilla from the University of Zaragoza in Spain, discovered the rock in 1994 but it has taken them 15 years to disentangle the mess of etched lines.They discovered the sandstone rock in the cave of Abauntz Lamizulo, which was traditionally thought to be the home of the ‘lamias’ or mythological bird-footed nymphs.

read at source

In Bunei the Survey Department under the Ministry of Development launched its Brunei Darussalam Geocentric Datum (GDBD 2009). Through the project, the department will gain the advantage of mapping GDBD coordinates that are immediately compatible with global coordinates obtained from GPS and with other coordinate systems adopted in many parts of the world. The system will also allow an efficient exchange of data and linking of products from various information systems. A global geocentric datum is supported and adopted by a growing number of international organisations like the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG) and the International Hydrographic Organisation. The key advantages of the GDBD over Brunei’s current datum are that GDBD 2009 is totally compatible with satellite-based navigation systems such as the GPS and with major international geographic systems. The GDBD 2009 will provide very significant and substantial benefits to those using satellite positioning, whether they are operating nationally or internationally.

Source : http://www.survey.gov.bn/

The Central Mine Planning and Design Institute (CMPDI), an arm of the Coal India Limited, signed an MoU with the Survey of India for preparation of the large scale updated topographical maps of 28 major coalfields of the country, based on remote sensing technique. The project, for which the Coal India Limited has funded Rs 117 crore, will be jointly implemented by CMPDI & Survey of India and will complete in five years. This is said to be a major task for the CMPDI to expedite coal exploration, mine planning, environmental management and infrastructure development in the coalfields area to match the coal-based energy demand of the country. CMPDI CMD A.K. Singh said topographical maps will be prepared for about 26,000 sq km area on 1:5000 scale with 2 m contour interval in digital GIS formats. Large scale digital topographical maps will be useful for detail coal exploration, mine planning, infrastructure planning, railway siding for coal transportation, rehabilitation and resettlement and environmental management planning as well as integrated master planning of the coalfields.

Source : http://economictimes.indiatimes.com

Every now and then, a person will start upon a lengthy journey. More often than not, this journey will also be painful, yet hopefully, in the end, quite rewarding. This journey that I speak of, happens to be the creation of a map in Heroes of Might and Magic III. Yeah, okay, it doesn’t sound like much of an ordeal, but trust me, if you’ve done this before – like I have – you will know that this particular task – if done properly – can take up to a year to complete to a satisfactory level.

I’m not just talking about whacking down a few castles, a few mines, and off you go. No. I am talking about the creation of a balanced map, where any castle type has a chance to win, where the player can pick any of the options available, and will stand the same, equal chance of winning. Aside from that, I am talking about a map that is beautiful, that makes sense, where everything placed can be accessed, and where a good story line can also be found.

I have started with a medium-large sized map, and have divided it into three separate realms. I’ve got a snowy realm with a Tower faction in place, then I have two grassy realms, one for the Rampart faction – the only faction my SO will actually play, she just loves those faerie-like folk – and another grassy realm for a Castle faction. Each player will start with one fort, and can take a second one.

I am yet to write the story that will go along with these, but that’s alright. I will have plenty of time to flesh that out in the months it will take me to make my map. You can’t spend very long in one go making these things, and it takes a great deal of time to play test to and adjust to ensure that all the factions are equal. I am really looking forward to playing it, and just playing more of the game in general. I think this has to be one of my top 5 games of all time.

NASA and Japan released a new digital topographic map of Earth that covers more of our planet than ever before. The map was produced with detailed measurements from NASA’s Terra spacecraft.The new global digital elevation model of Earth was created from nearly 1.3 million individual stereo-pair images collected by the Japanese Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER, instrument aboard Terra.NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, known as METI, developed the data set. It is available online to users everywhere at no cost. The new ASTER data expands coverage to 99 percent, from 83 degrees north latitude and 83 degrees south. Each elevation measurement point in the new data is 98 feet apart. NASA and METI are jointly contributing the ASTER topographic data to the Group on Earth Observations, an international partnership headquartered at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, for use in its Global Earth Observation System of Systems.NASA, METI and the U.S. Geological Survey validated the data, with support from the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and other collaborators. The data will be distributed by NASA’s Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Resources Observation and Science Data Center in Sioux Falls, S.D., and by METI’s Earth Remote Sensing Data Analysis Center in Tokyo.

read more…

Dear readers,found this good news on map room recently and thought of sharing with the world.Click here to read this interesting post.

Left 4 Dead Campaign Idea #1- SkyHigh

Description

Sky High is a campaign based on Downtown Toronto. The basic premise will be that the four survivors somehow find themselves in a stadium (The Skydome) and will attempt to climb the CN Tower to escape. As usual, a five level system will be adopted spanning across both the Rogers Dome and the CN Tower.

The Levels

1. Rogers Dome-On the grass, in the middle of the stadium. The safe room will be the actual exit of the skydome.
2. Passageway in between the Rogers Dome and the CN Tower. Though in actual the path is quite short depending on the exit used, there will be many obstacles for the Survivors to overcome. Essentially this passageway will become much longer with many high points for smokers and hunters to attack from. The obstacles stated could be destroyed busses and what not. One notable landmark required will be the ticket stalls where preferably there will be graffiti spray painted.
3. Inside the CN Tower, the survivors will attempt to work their way from the lobby towards the shopping area/The Elevators. This level will be our “Press button, and survive for X minutes” level. The basic wait will be for the elevators and from all sides zombies will attack. For added effect, it would be preferred if the inventory held by the stores could be burnt using a Molotov.
4. Once inside the elevator, the lift will stop half way to the top. Though I am not sure if the architecture of the CN tower is actually like this, what the survivors will have to do is exit the left via an exit built into the roof. There, they will have to go through a hole and make their way up the stairs. Ladders and platforms will be made to provide at least two methods of achieving their goal. Preferred option for this level is the ability to blow up stacks of rock and send them rolling downwards crushing incoming zombies. Due to the inherent difficulty assumed for this map, an abnormal amount of health packs should be provided albeit being hidden behind obstacles.
5. The final level where the rescue will happen will take place at the top of the CN tower. One difference from the actual CN tower will be that the entire floor will be made of glass further adding to fear. From this point we can see a burning Toronto (Similar to the burning city across the river in the Boathouse level) down below. Zombies at this point will come from many sides including the stairwells, the broken elevators and etc. The rescue itself will come from the spectators viewpoint where people can use binoculars to overview Toronto. The protective cage however will have been destroyed by incoming zombies and what not.

Difficulties Presented

1. The added preferred elements of game play.
2. Laziness.
3. Finding schematics for both the Rogers dome and the CN tower.
4. Plotting out the maps.

Update:

Idea #1:Another idea that came to mind was the level of detail on the map. In a usual L4D map, you will find messages from other (usually dead by the time you come) survivors that passed through the area alongside public announcements. The idea mainly for the top level is to copy the exact details from the current CN Tower i.e copy the timeline posted on the walls of the actual tower and then add several other messages from other former survivors.

For eg. Lets say the time line goes up till 2010. From there, continue the pasted timeline and using red marker add new times such as “2010- August- Keith was here” and etc etc.

Idea #2. For the load screen, the CN tower and Rogers dome will be shown in the background amongst a burning Toronto. The Tagline that comes to mind is a little silly but appropriate: “They thought the glass floor was the scariest part.”

I was browsing through Digg’s music category and found this rather great Micheal Jackson Sample map.

After an inconsistent estimate of how much Mike gained in royalties, I decided to look into this sample map-making a bit further.

It was made by computer nerd Ethan Hein (his own words), and can be found on his Flickr account. I was unsurprisingly surprised to see not one single sample map, but many samplemaps from many different artists. Apparently Ethan made these thanks to the artists’ Wikipedia profiles and other sites such as Rap Sample FAQ (which is an awesome directory of who stole what from who). Since the most prominent samplers are rappers (or do we say samplerers in this case?), most starting points of these rotational maps are either funk musicians and funk bands from the 70’s and 80’s, or hip-hop artists.

You can see the sample maps of:

• Herbie Hancock
• Miles Davis
• Al Green’s “I’m Still In Love With You”
• Parliament’s “Mothership Connection”
• Jackson 5
• Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” and “Jazz Jungle”
• James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”
• Run DMC
• Hall and Oates
• Naughty by Nature
• Salt-N-Pepa
• Wu-Tang
• Fugees’ “The Socre”
• Missy Elliot
• Common
• Kanye West
• Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”
• M.I.A.
• Destiny’s Child

,and a couple of others I didn’t really know about.

Ethan’s Flickr account is truly nice and entertaining, so I encourage you all to check it out. You can also have a look at his “Computer Evolution” book who’s front page will greet you with yet another very interesting map.

A warm Woof to Ethan!

Location on the Earth

The earth is effectively a sphere, so how do we describe where a point is on its surface? The most common way to locate points on the surface of the EarLocation on the Earth The earth is effectively a sphere, so how do we describe where a point is on its surface? The most common way to locate points on the surface of the Earth is by standard, geographic coordinates called latitude and longitude. These coordinates values are measured in degrees, and represent angular distances calculated from the center of the Earth.th is by standard, geographic coordinates called latitude and longitude. These coordinates values are measured in degrees, and represent angular distances calculated from the center of the Earth.

What is latitude?

We can imagine the Earth as a sphere, with an axis around which it spins. The ends of the axis are the North and South Poles. The Equator is a line around the earth, an equal distance from both poles. The Equator is also the latitude line given the value of 0 degrees. This means it is the starting point for measuring latitude. Latitude values indicate the angular distance between the Equator and points north or south of it on the surface of the Earth.

A line connecting all the points with the same latitude value is called a line of latitude. This term s usually used to refer to the lines that represent values in whole degrees. All lines of latitude are parallel to the Equator, and they are sometimes also referred to as parallels. Parallels are equally spaced. There are 90 degrees of latitude going north from the Equator, and the North Pole is at 90 degrees N. There are 90 degrees to the south of the Equator, and the South Pole is at 90 degrees S. When the directional designators are omitted, northern latitudes are given positive values and southern latitudes are given negative values.

What is longitude?

Prime Meridian

Prime MeridianLines of longitude, called meridians, run perpendicular to lines of latitude, and all pass through both poles. Each longitude line is part of a great circle. There is no obvious 0-degree point for longitude, as there is for latitude. Throughout history many different starting points have been used to measure longitude. By international agreement, the meridian line through Greenwich, England, is currently given the value of 0 degrees of longitude; this meridian is referred to as the Prime Meridian. Longitude values are indicate the angular distance between the Prime Meridian and points east or west of it on the surface of the Earth.

The Earth is divided equally into 360 degrees of longitude. There are 180 degrees of ongitude to the east of the Prime Meridian; when the directional designator is omitted these longitudes are given positive values. There are also 180 degrees of longitude to the west of the Prime Meridian; when the directional designator is omitted these longitudes are given negative values. The 180-degree longitude line is opposite the Prime Meridian on the globe, and is the same going either east or west.

source

]]> http://rashidfaridi.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/varsity-gets-user-friendly-digital-map-from-students/ Mon, 11 May 2009 18:52:29 +0000 Rashid Faridi http://rashidfaridi.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/varsity-gets-user-friendly-digital-map-from-students/

Vadodara: With the creative efforts of students of MSU’s department of geography, the university has got its first digital map showing various faculties and locations of the MSU campus.

The campus of MSU includes various faculties and departments scattered at various locations of the city such as Fatehgunj, Sayajigunj and Nizampura. In past years, the geographic appearance of the university campus has changed and keeping this requirement in mind the detailed map of university campus was prepared by the students.The entire university is represented in five maps. The first map presents the location of the university and its different campuses in Vadodara city. The other four maps represent separately the main campus, Fatehgunj campus, Faculty of Engineering and Technology and Faculty of Medicine.

source

Adventure Cycling Association, claimed to be the largest membership cycling organisation in North America, announced that its cycling maps will now be produced using GIS technology. Kevin McManigal, Adventure Cycling’s GIS specialist, and cartographer Casey Greene recently completed the conversion of one map section of the Association’s Great Parks South Bicycle Route from a strictly illustration software-based format to a GIS and illustration software-based map. It is the first map in Adventure Cycling’s Route Network to receive this treatment, which adds new features such as shaded relief, and a revised north arrow and scale bar.Created specifically for cyclists, Adventure Cycling’s maps feature turn-by-turn directions, detailed inset maps for tricky sections, and elevation profiles for the high country. The maps are waterproof and sized to fit in a handlebar-bag window or jersey pocket. Source : http://www.adventurecycling.org ,http://www.ppolnews.com

1. Your life is not an adventure. You want to get excited about something again, like when you were a kid. You want to experience “flow” every day…not once in a blue moon. You’re bored. But every time you try to make time for yourself something else comes up. Some other pressing need: the house, co-workers, the boss, etc…and then there is no time left for you.

2. You have read “How To” and “Self Help” books but yet…here you are still. You try to follow the tips and advise of experts, but it doesn’t work for you. You give yourself positive affirmations every morning and focus all your energy on the “Top 5…” and yet 2 hours into the day you find yourself relying on your old habits and your day turns out the same as the last.

3. Your time is “limited” (true…we all have the same number of hours in a day but it seems like you have so much more to do than anyone else and you don’t have any help) . You’re life has become overwhelming. It seems like the only time you have to yourself is when you are too tired to do anything with it.

4. You really don’t want to work 24 hours a day and never sleep or take a break. You don’t want to reinvent the wheel either, you prefer to learn from others and maximize your time. You don’t want to develop a totally revolutionary system to enhanced productivity…but if someone has invented one that will work for you, you want to know about it. You want to focus on the the things you want, not meeting all of your obligations to everyone else.

5. You just want to learn how to make your own maps…cool!

Let’s get started then. Click on one of the categories on the right and find an article that applies to you and start reading. Most importantly, find something to get excited about and map out your course to change. YOUR course to change.

Wikipedia redefined the encyclopedia business by relying on an army of online volunteers to post entries. OpenStreetMap hopes to do the same for maps. And CloudMade hopes to turn the data into a business.

The two-year-old Menlo Park startup CloudMade relies on the OpenStreetMap project and its 97,500 volunteers in more than 30 countries to fill out maps of communities around the world.

The plan is to give away the map data but charge for services

It also thinks big: its hopes OpenStreetMap will finish the U.S. by 2010 as a step toward transcribing the entire globe. Already Germany is near completion and the United Kingdom is well on its way.

“This is going to be the map of the future,” says founder Steve Coast of his company.

The advantage of using map-making volunteers is their local knowledge. Many live in the neighborhoods they chart and add details such as footpaths, post office boxes and buildings.

They also can update maps more frequently, since a volunteer can log in at any time with new data. Traditional mapping companies update their local surveys every 18 months or so, says Coast.

This is the map of the future, says Steve Coast

But it’s also a daunting task. CloudMade raised $3.5 million from Sunstone Capital, but, well, the world is a large place.

Businesses, such as Google and Microsoft, typically rely on one of two cartography firms for mapping data – Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ – striking deals that can climb into the millions of dollars. At present, both Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ seem to dismiss CloudMade, much the way Encyclopedia Britannica dismissed Wikipedia.

But if the 50-person company is successful, this relationship may change. Coast says the goal is to give away the OpenStreetMap mapping data for free and charge for services.