It's dependant on what you define a sense of humour. Outright name calling isn't humorous, the OP just wasn't very good at explaining what they wanted help with and in turn their thread was abused. The 'pretty colours' are just an attempt to remind people that they might be getting a little overkill with the hostility.
He dared, and in doing so the infractions have been reversed. Nice fluffy pictures Red. If only other posters cottoned on how to deal with infraction points.
Someone revert my infractions. Here are two fluffies. (text by redarmy11/ drawings by copying and pasting by spuriousmonkey) Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
It's probably too late, but here is some basic cartography+geodesy: The Earth's physical surface is very irregular. To describe it (3d) we use the geoid -also irregular- but smoother. It is an equipotential surface and gravity measurements are used to define it. It is the most accurate we have. Very complicated math. The second best thing to describe the earth is an ellipsoid of revolution. Even less accurate, math and calculations are simpler but still complicated. Because of the Earth's rotation it resembles an oblate spheroid. For precise measurements we stick to the ellipsoid. Since the Earth's flattening is very small, apr. 1/300, we use the sphere where the math is even simpler. At the expense of precision again. (Note that none of the above 3 surfaces exist physically) To create a map, we have to transform X,Y,Z or long/lat coordinates to x,y map coordinates (3d to 2d). We use projections for the above transformation (the correct word is mathematical functions because not all these functions are projections). The problem is that the sphere is not a developable surface, so we cannot move to a plane without some kind of distortion. Most of the times we move to an intermediate developable surface (cylinder, cone etc) and then go to a plane. Different projections are used for different purposes. The field which studies the mathematical part of all this, is called analytical cartography. You can see now that in a globe the 3d to 2d transformation is not necessary since the body is already three dimensional! But since you have to first print the map there is no way to avoid it. The UTM you are referring to, Universal Transverse Mercator, is cylindrical and uses different projections for different zones. However, you CANNOT use these zones in one map. UTM was designed to map objects within one zone at a time. Instead the way to do it is print an interrupted map with sections (called lobes or gores). The more gores in the map the less distortion you have but more paper discontinuities. In my opinion, choose a compromise projection with no major area, angle or distance distortion instead of eg. an equidistant. And print the map in a flexible material instead of paper if you can before gluing it to the sphere.
funny forum: 31 post, 1 useful. Thanks ntgr. OT: how many megabytes of disk space are wasted on this forum's hard disks by users like those who replied in this thread? That's the reason why moderators exist...
Unfortunately this isn't a Knowledgebase article which means the grain and the chaff tend to sit together with no sifting involved. (Democratically run forums don't delete all posts just to have the outright specific answer). You are right it would make sense to just delete all the nonsense, however without the colourful content it would either be filled with very dull people or no discussion at all. [Edit] I've copied the first OP post and post #32 (Ntgr's post) to the Sciforums Knowledge Base where it will be untouchable by the forums community. So this thread can be left to degrade or discussed further.
Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! sorry cant help Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Cannot you just print google earth and stick it to the ball? google earth is 3D, and so is the ball. Its just like moving the google earth skin into the ball. In addition to that, you have satelite image globe.
