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2011-07-01
[Excerpt from the Web-page; full exposition click here.]
Announcing Beta-1 Digital Version:
Cahill-Keyes Multi-scale Megamap
• with coastlines, and borders;
• one-degree graticule; and 40,000 mm grid-length;
• at eight scales of 1/1,000,000 through 1/200,000,000;
• illustrated by 14 jpegs;
and including for free download:
• 6 very large pdf's plus 13 others;
• the entire one-piece 40 MB 1/1,000,000 Megamap file
(OOo: OpenOffice.org Draw);
• the 2 programs which drew it,
enabling a "Do-it-yourself-Megamap".
Designed and calculated by Gene Keyes
Programmed by Mary Jo Graça
in Perl and OpenOffice.org Draw
After years of design work by me, and months of programming by Mary Jo Graça, I am pleased to present here as a Beta-1 the first complete version of the Cahill-Keyes Multi-scale Megamap at the virtual and actual scale of 1/1,000,000, or smaller as preferred. Virtual, because the whole 40 MB file is on a thumb drive as well as downloadable from my website; actual, because if you have the material and space for it, you can print and assemble the map as a gym-size showpiece, 40 m x 20 m (132' x 66'). Or various other scales from large wall maps to smaller notebook size versions.
This Beta-1 Cahill-Keyes Multi-scale Megamap is still at a very early stage, full of deficiencies itemized further on, but comprising six major firsts, unprecedented in any other world map:
1) First-time-ever digital draft of an entire
single-frame world map at 1/1,000,000, with
2) a complete one-degree graticule, and
3) proportional geocells throughout, and
4) a three-fold grid spanning 40,000 km,
approximate Earth circumference, and
5) scalability from 1/1,000,000 down to 1/200,000,000 or beyond,
all with one-degree geocells; and
ergo
6) a unitary world map whereby all complete or partial segments,
at any size, are scaled replicas of the same parent Megamap, and
two additional firsts for the Cahill-Keyes Megamap endeavor:
(as in conventional world maps):
7) complete coastlines, and
8) complete international borders.
On the minus side, the Beta-1 as of now has at least seven shortcomings, what with its early stage, and our limited resources. [I'm still amazed that we did all this graphic work via the free OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.0 Draw, on a pair of $300 Asus netbooks with a 4 gig drive and a 7" screen — Mary Jo's, that is; I attached a 19" monitor to mine. Also, as to be explained later, we upgraded to OOo 3.0 on a $448 Acer notebook at the last minute.]
Negatives: these are all to be dealt with in later Betas:
1) Outdated borders
(World Vector Shoreline from NOAA: perhaps to be supplanted by
GMT /GSHHS or other GIS data sets later on.)
2) No major internal boundaries (large provinces and states);
3) No major rivers, lakes, or inland seas;
4) No light-blue fill-color for oceans;
5) No numbering, yet, of five-degree meridians and parallels;
6) No re-assembly, yet, of four Antarctica segments,
plus extensions for Iceland, Greenland, and Kamchatka peninsula);
7) Adequate but inefficient sizing and panning mechanism
to view or extract any selected area of the full-size Megamap,
or its smaller counterparts.
Names, and all other features, are TBA. My aim has always been to produce, as a first step, a simple outline map, with coastlines and national borders, at 1/1,000,000 and smaller. A “simple” outline map — but likewise with high precision and high resolution, global totality and fidelity, and those all-important one-degree proportional geocells. For now, this utilizes vector, or line drawn coasts and borders, rather than a geophysical or remote image composite. I hope others can add those in the future, and much else to this basic skeleton.
Questions or comments: here, or gene.keyes at gmail dot com
Note: as explained on the Web page, pdf prints of this and other images there are sharp and accurate, unlike jpegs; also, pdf's load and scroll amazingly faster in the Chrome browser than anything else I've seen, including Acrobat.
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