an entirely remote controlled (as opposed to autonomous) car race could be fun to watch - can go much faster, risks of huge crashes are acceptable (or desirable...)
I wonder if it would be feasible to make a fleet of race cars that have self driving technology that has each car communicating with the others and monitoring the human drivers, with the car letting the human drive but able to step in if the human tries to do something that would cause a crash?
I bet you could make some pretty good money with such a fleet running open races that members of the public can pay to drive in.
The self driving system could keep track of the number and severity of its safety interventions which could be used to give time penalties at the end of the race [1], so that the winner is determined by the skills of the humans.
Besides racing, you could also do car chases that recreate scenarios from action movies. Add in something to simulate guns, and you could do scenarios where a car with a driver and a couple armed passengers is trying to escape a couple pursuing cars, each with a driver and armed passenger.
[1] Or maybe actually do the time penalties during the race. If the self driving system has to take over from you, it could slow you down for a bit before returning control to you.
... but this could probably be the poster child of where not to use the Mercator projection.
yeah, Greenland overlaps five time zones. but they're tiny at that latitude! this makes it seem like places as far apart as New York & Los Angeles are in the same time zone.
edit: Miller not Mercator - but the point stands that it's distorting the size of countries at high latitude, significantly exaggerating the issue.
> Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span
95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span.
Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections.
Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people.
the distance between the western and eastern tip of Greenland (which is one time zone) appears to be the same width as the continental US, but it's far, far smaller.
> Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span
95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span.
Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections.
Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people.
not sure I agree - a non-continuous projection such the Dymaxion / Fuller projection could indicate the same timezone errors without size distortion.
the Miller used here gives the impression that an utterly huge physical area - as with Greenland, appearing to be several thousands of miles from edge to edge - has just one timezone. this detracts from the point it's trying to make.
Antarctica would have been cool to see, yeah. I love the concept :)
> Greenland has a single timezone for a 4-hour span
95+% of Greenland's population lives on its west coast. The most common map projection one is likely to come across makes it look like that spans a pretty large longitude range but it actually only covers about 15°, a 1-hour span.
Take a look at a projection that does a better job of representing latitude, such as this [1] azimuthal equidistant projection and you can see that west coast Greenland is a lot more north/south than you might have expected based on the more usual projections.
Here's a map of the towns in Greenland with >300 population [2] showing how much more populated the west coast is than the rest of the country. If you add their populations and the populations of the towns listed in the table but too small to make the map it comes to about 3100 people.
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