A few notes:

- Paper sags over time. Good thing he mounted it to a board

- We printed on tyvek for water/rip proofing, which was interesting. It's surprisingly hard to rip.

- I would have chosen a different projection maybe, but only for purely aesthetics, not any scientific reason. If its hanging on a wall in your house because you want it, you have all the license in the world to do whatever.

- I can't tell, but did NZ make the cut?

- And I may not have used blue for areas in the corners that are not actually water.

What a great job though!

This reminded me of Colonels coming to me in the military saying - "I want all of Iraq on my wall at 1:50,000" and as a junior enlisted man saying something, very respectfully, like "Well, sir, Iraq is about 900km from top to bottom, so that's 900,000m, and at 1:50,000 that's about 18m from top to bottom. How high are your ceilings?"

It absolutely wouldn't. Download TileMill or its successor, Mapbox Studio. Adjust the (Carto)CSS. Done.

Though for a map of this scale I'd probably work straight from Natural Earth[1] without involving OSM, to be honest.

Looks great, anyway.

[1] http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

https://github.com/mapbox/osm-bright

https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik/wiki/MapnikRenderers

I used to work on tile rendering at Google and considerable effort was spent on this. Thank you!

- You could use (cleverly-braided+insulated) regular LEDs if there was a breadboard or something behind the map, but that'd be both huge and inconvenient.

- Maybe LEDs with inductive coils and a large backing induction mat?

- Given a metallic backing, and a regular fridge-magnet-like magnet, is there some way to trade some of the magnetic force the magnet is exerting on the backing for electrical power? Or maybe power a light using the normal force of the backing on the magnet. Either way, this would probably have the side-effect of reducing the coercivity in a regular permanent magnet way faster than otherwise. (You can make the whole backing surface a weak electromagnet, though! I wonder if that's more or less energy-intensive than making an induction mat of that size...)

- Maybe ignore conductive power, and try for radio power? RFID-powered LEDs? Crystal-radio-like LEDs? Or even just phosphorous-coated pinheads (not the matchstick kind; the CRT kind) with an infrared lamp or blacklight on the other wall?

- Or maybe, if you don't care about the LEDs only lighting up when on the wall, you could just make them "permanently" lit in the same way some exit signs are: put a tiny little bit of something radioactive in there, and then surround that with fluorescent gas in a glass shell.

- A chemical solution would be very interesting for its own sake. If there was potentially chemoluminescent fluid in the backplane (which would then have to be a gel/sponge), and the pins could pull it in via capillary action somehow—maybe the heads on the pins could be squeezed, making them effectively into little bulb syringes—then fluid could end up in the pinhead and react with something inside.

>I am now lucky enough to have the opportunity to travel to many different countries and I sadly realized that this planet is not nearly as big as I hoped when I was a kid.

Fly less. I find that my sense of how big the world is is related to how frequently I fly Vs traveling by train, bus, motorcycle or anything else really.

Hurtling from one airport to another at ~800km/hr gives you a false impression about the distances you are covering. I suspect the speeds are simply so fast that we don't have the ability to intuitively appreciate just how far we are traveling. When you take slower forms of transport you suddenly realize how freaking huge the world is.

Flying also isolates you from the area you are traveling across. When you don't fly you see that there is in fact a vast amount of stuff (cities, towns, farming areas, mountains, rivers etc) between the airports. When I fly a lot the world is reduced to a network of airports.

An example from my own life. My wife and I once flew to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia then traveled overland (trains and buses with the occasional ferry) through Malaysia, up through Thailand, around part of Laos, back into Thailand and then over into Cambodia.

Travel time => 8 months.

My impression of how big the world is => absolutely massive.

Then we flew back from Phnom Penh to Kuala Lumpur, where we started.

Travel time => less than 2 hours in the air.

After a few additional flights, my impression of how big the world is => tiny.

As an aside, have you looked closely at Greenland on a globe? It looks all wrong - long and skinny like someone messed up the aspect ratio.

See: https://xkcd.com/977/

I'm somewhat surprised that they didn't end up using an Open Street Map derivitive. If Google was good enough, then they'd probably find something from Mapbox or others that use OSM data acceptable, and many provide tools so that "the additional work to custom style the maps would be extraordinary" wouldn't be true.

It's also a bit wierd that the comparison screenshots are all at a different level of zoom from the one's that he wanted to use. Many online maps emphasis different things at different levels.

It also makes it very evident how odd it can be to project the surface of a sphere over a flat surface. The distortion of some shapes leaps to the eye.

http://st.houzz.com/simgs/31e1e6fa0fd87c96_4-7734/contempora...

If I were printing all that blue ink, I'd want ocean trenches to stand out in the same way that the mountain ranges do :)

Maybe it is a German thing, in Australia a plasterer is anyone who installs plaster boards on the interior of houses by nailing them directly to the stud work (the wooden tresses).

For a CA transplant who does a lot of driving up and down the state, this map has been fascinating.

It's really very cool to a have that kind of wall-scale high-resolution information display. When I get a more permanent place to live, I'm tempted to do the same thing.

> [...] the real challenge for a map service is to decide what they should and should not display. Google does an excellent job [...]

...so much for this morning's priorities. /sigh

If you're familiar with the Natural Earth data set, do you know if it is possible to apply a transformation so a map could be printed of the World using the Cahill or Waterman projection?

I can envision a striking large-scale art piece that started from a "butterfly" representation of the World.

Mapbox looks like exactly the thing I'm looking for (I want a local street-level map), thanks!

The Mercator projection was indeed originally designed for compass navigation, but the reason it's still used for web mapping is slightly different. The Mercator projection is conformal. What this means is that angles (and hence in some sense shapes) are preserved locally. When we zoom in on a small section of the Mercator projection, we get a reasonably accurate representation of the actual shape of features. This is generally not true for most more fashionable projections, which will stretch and skew things, so they don't always look great when zoomed.

In general with map projections, you have to make a compromise between global properties and local properties. Choosing Mercator means going full-on for local quality, at the expense of the global map being quite distorted. This makes it great for zoomable web maps, because most of the time the global map is just used to find the area you're actually looking for.

Now, you could argue that for a living-room wall, you want something that looks good globally. If it was my wall, I'd agree with you. However, this guy seems to be really interested in local detail. He worries about his four-point fonts becoming blurry, and about having as many small villages marked on the map as possible. If he's interested in that kind of detail, then I think he probably cares far more about local properties than the kind of global properties that would bother me or you.

I am surprised people who read the article are even asking this considering how much he struggled even to get the source image (and how he ultimately wound up manually stitching together print screens).

Still better than no map on the wall. The style looks lovely at this scale! I would have made my own map from NE and OSM data but not everyone knows how much great data is available for free and how easy making maps with it is. We who know should do a better job of sharing.

On some level this is an unsolvable problem, but I was disappointed to see him spend more time on the pins he used than on the tradeoffs involved in the projection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map#/media/File:Dymax...

Unless you're a hipster nerd trying hard to seem sophisticated. In that case, fashion is everything.

Now I wish we did not accepted that fast the lens-flares, but hey - my kid loves them.

You just stab one of these fixtures into the wall anywhere you want; each of the three prongs travels to a different depth and makes contact with a layer representing the hot, neutral, and ground lines so that your light fixture is now plugged into 220 Volt wall socket current.

At the time, I remember saying "that sounds totally insane". I still think it is. But if you made a special map backing board rather than entire walls and ran a lot less power through it....

You need movement to generate electricity, otherwise it'd be a perpetual machine.

An alternative would be to have a "surface of light", ie, a source of light all along one of the walls of the map and passing right over it (not actually illuminating the map); then any object sitting on the map would be illuminated.

Theres a simpler solution that uses the same idea. Have pins that look like mono audio jacks, so the "tip" and "ring" are separate. Put two layers of conductive material down on the map, one on each side of the insulating board, and apply a voltage between them. When you stick in the pin, your "ring" contacts the closest layer, the tip the furthest, and so you have a voltage available to power the LED in the head. The voltage would only need to be about 3V or so, so its perfectly safe, you just need a small fuse in case of shorts.

Manufacturing a conductive "ring" on a pin would be difficult with machining, so using a conductive paint on top of an insulating paint would be the best option. The hardest issue would be ensuring a reliable contact with the ring, as the contact surface would be very small.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LED_art#LED_throwies