On Being as Careful as I Can Be, Seriously, I Care

Doing this background checking for the whole world was truly a wonderful and enlightening experience! Many times did I leap or shout out wide-eyed in excitement discovering some new connection or being shocked by the variety in things like population density and religiosity in countries I could barely have found on a map before. Fascinating stuff, the world *is* incredible.

The reason why I care so much though, is because *all* of these countries have governments and dynamics and 100s of thousands or millions of people. 

People who live and care and have fully functioning brains and lives. As this is the case I’m not going to be dismissive of any country and make every best effort to represent every nation as fairly as possible. 

I’ve been wanting to mention that as every time I’ve felt even a moment of doubt or started getting blasé (Cape Verde I’m looking at you) I’ve thought: “Wow, ½ million people live there! I wonder what it’s like for them?” and been able to continue to be as careful as I can be.

View of downtown Mindelo en Baía do Porto Grande, São Vicente.

The smallest countries and pieces

(You got me Uruguay)

A country could confidently have it’s own piece starting at an area ~270K km2. It just works this way -- I can’t provide logical reasoning here and now but probably could if pressed to.

There is a dilemma for countries that are smaller than this size, that is too small to have their own piece -- which surrounding country’s piece should they be included with? Every single one of these needed to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The piece here that has caused me the most anguish is Uruguay (A4). At ~175K km2, 89th/203 -- it’s too small to have it’s own piece. It is. The next smallest country to have its own piece is ranked 76th (~250K km2) by area and only got its own piece on a technicality near the end (to be discussed later this is a special one). The 75th is Ecuador (~255K km2) which is quite borderline, but I have a soft spot for this country and added (the removed then added again) the Galapagos (because they’re awesome).

Yet despite Uruguay being lose-ably small there was simply no way culturally I could put it in with any of the surrounding pieces. I looked at regional history, economics and ethnography, it is truly quite independent. It wouldn’t be right to say, tack it on to Brazil. I gave it some extra ocean to try and make it bigger so it doesn’t get lost, but it’s an exception that wouldn’t conform.

Piece Sizes and Logical grouping of Countries in Pieces

It was most important to not be biased in pieces sizes.

It’s necessary to have a minimum piece size for physical practicality -- it goes without saying that it would be ludicrous to have one-piece-per-country as some countries are imperceptibly small at this scale.

Though it’s very difficult to ascertain the precise area of any given piece and obviously they are all going to be irregularly shaped. It was also virtually impossible to intuit what a minimum size should be working in the abstract scalable vectors in the software.

Constantly zooming in and out and preserving perfect focus (as scalable vectors allow of course, like zooming in on the text of a PDF) makes if very difficult to keep perspective. The entire workspace is 1.4 metres (yes, 1400mm) long, yet I’ll usually be working at 10s of centimetres at a time and “looking at a border” scale is about 5cm.

Therefore physical tests pieces to hold and play with would be necessary.

South and Central America were used in the first print test to get an idea of piece sizes.

As Central America has a densely populated area with small countries it was good to use as a “rule of thumb” and started drawing up pieces that felt like they was right based on the following factor:

Where possible pieces they were grouped by some cultural grouping.

I spent time studying a range of different ways of grouping countries: Economic regions (useful for Africa), Languages, Religions (discussed further later) and a range of other more general groupings such as ethnicities and political history (useful for the Carribean).

I didn’t agonise on decisions but tried to be faithful to cultural divisions. I redivided and merged pieces as I came across different snippets of culturally interesting information, such as breaking out Cuba into its own piece quite late, and merging Djibouti with Somalia when all the way along I’d had it in with Ethiopia and Eritrea.

From this first pre-physical-test pass at Central America “20mm in some dimension” seemed to be a fair minimum. VCarve has grid points at 5mm intervals, this made the minimum a count-of-4-grid-pips within a piece and a fair bit eye-balling.

Turns out that in practice I decided this was pretty small, and I adjusted “up” a bit in practice.

Yet a small number of pieces *are* this small when it turns out that there just is no reasonable way to group otherwise.

Latitude and Longitude v. Country Borders

This is one of the areas where I’m unhappy: The internal countries are comparatively arbitrarily placed -- they’re correct relative to each other, but there is no reason why they’ll be accurate to lat/long lines.

This distresses me as I want to print the country borders and lat/long lines. Because they look cooool.

I haven’t checked to see the dymaxion projection lines up properly with the lat/long lines, I trust Prof. Buckminster-Fuller gave this a lot of consideration (apparently he spent 12 years working on this project!) and I’ve chosen not to explore the accuracy of this as time is tight enough.

It’s possible to cheat here and not print lat/long lines on land.

At time of writing the decision on this hasn’t been made.

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The machine makes the best noise when makes those big long curved lines.

The First Test Cut

(more an experiment)

The magical day with with the documentary and printing The project started on Sunday, April 12th.

By Friday April 19th I’d made it to the Artifactory for a go.

Having ascertained that there were appropriate SVGs readily available from wikipedia (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fuller_projection_rotated.svg) I simply imported one to VCarve discovered the “Trim” tool (which I still whole-heartedly love), whipped up some tool paths.

With the help of talented and beautiful Jenna (I still didn’t have the authority to use Swarf-o-mat by myself), found some scrap MDF and cut out Antartica -- the very first test.

As expected it was an un unusable failure, but I learned a *lot* and I was still thrilled.

The big lesson being that the milling bit has a diameter of 3mm.

Can you see how these fit together, er, not at all?

This defines the amount of detail that’s allowed. I know that this should have been obvious, but some things have to be learned empirically.

A solution came pretty quickly, as you can hopefully see from the pencil sketch on those pieces. The answer is to make a simplified "cut" outline as is appropriate for each piece, with the borders engraved on the piece (if possible!). 

Reckon it'd look amazing! Noooot quite sure how this is done though :)

“Offset” and “Smooth” tools are (also) your friends

Like many aspects of this the solution happened fast: Thank you VCarve!

The Offset tool would allow me to make what I called “Cut” lines. This would allow the lovely squigly country borders to stay.

Though the first set of challenging design decisions came out of this:

~ If there is going to be an offset, how will the real country borders  be “printed”?

~ Countries girt by sea are fine, but how will borders be handled?

Around this point I was also coming to understand that the SVG Dymaxion projection didn’t have countries *on* it.

Sure, easy, I’ll just copy the SVG maps of the countries on a per continent basis on to the dymaxion project. Huh! How naive I was.

The project is skewed and slightly distorted. So are the country map SVGs.

There was no obvious easy way to overlay these. There was the long, hard way though.

What happened is I switched off my brain and spent hours and hours lining them up by-hand using Inkscape, as it’s a vector graphics editor that’s more powerful than VCarve (though also has its weaknesses!).

Gosh, I’ve learned a lot about vector software. Though not immediately, obviously.

Inkscape strength that really helped me was the ability to “Sculpt” nodes. This took a little while to get used to, and is a pretty simple tool (if you select a bunch of nodes and then move one, the nodes that are further away move proportionally less), but very helpful.

Getting the first continent I tried (Africa) lined up right right took … a very very long time. I spent 3+ hours at the Artifactory pushing, skewing, resizing back and forth then realising that I shouldn’t be using VCarve for this task and making a start on doing this in Inkscape.

The first priceless thing I learned was that by clicking on an object you can scale it. But clicking once *again* you can skew it. Yeah. Starting at the ground floor.

Another factor was because there were soooo many vector nodes (10s thousands) if you weren’t zoomed right in it before you switched to node-mode if would load all the visible vectors and set the CPU to grindy-grindy. The longest wait for node selection would have been in the order of hundreds of seconds. Though the wait was worth it because in the end I was selecting large numbers of nodes (Chile and Norway I’m looking at you) to delete them to reduce resource load on the computer and because I just didn’t need these award-winning coastlines in that much detail (sorry Slartibartfast).

I also had to learn on what to focus on. It took me right to the very end to fight the compulsion to line up all the coastlines correctly. I only need internal country borders and where they meet the sea, which I spent ages meticulously lining up by comparing to google maps.

I didn’t do Eurasia until as late as possible so I could skill up as much as possible before taking on this beast. It was worth waiting too, because by this stage I deleting coastlines with reckless abandon and focussing on which lines mattered and deleting everything else as much as possible.

Just for the record at home I had to put an old windows box into commission, as VCarve is windows only. I literally found on the computer on side of the road with a working version of XP on it. I’d keep it around for exactly this kind of thing.

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The Idea

Ages of Empire

It all happened really fast actually.

In late April I was watching a nice BBC doco about the "Ages of Britain". The hosting historian was talking about an early British king of Empire and pulled out a magnificent toy wooden hand-carved puzzle of all of the countries in the Empire which the monarch had had made for the princlings and princlets to play with so they would learn the extent of their kingdom.

It hit me like lightning that such as thing must be the wedding present for Dave.

You see back in the day Dave and I had shared an interest in geography. As a memory improvement tool (and who doesn't need that) we were playing with a flash card system (written in python of course).

One of the first sets of things we were memorising in this system was all the countries of the world -- so such a puzzle was a perfect game to play to test Dave's crazy-good knowledge and geography.

I immediately googled and it quickly became apparent that no such puzzle existed for purchase on the internet^[1], which seemed kind of incredible, but it's like that sometimes.

Within a few flashed of thought of figuring out that purchasing one was probably out of the question, it occurred to me I could make one.

Not too long before this I'd become involved with the local hackerspace (The Artifactory, Perth) and had been learning to use their CNC milling machine known as "Swarf-o-mat". My partner is going through a phase of making electrical circuits which need cases and I was going to make this necessary hardware.

Despite not being able to use the machine independently, this nonetheless is one of the most ideal tools you could hope for to make a thing such as a puzzle* [note about laser-cutters].

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[1] Since found evidence of such a thing in USA, courtesy of Shay at the Artifactory: http://www.alisonsmontessori.com/Maps_s/167.htm

Projections

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It was immediately apparent that it was a blessing in disguise that I didn't in fact find it earlier as

It was about 45 minutes from conception of the idea to having pulled down SVGs from wikipedia

Buckminster-Fuller Map Puzzle Introduction

You need to understand that I owe my friend Dave big-time.

Not in any material sense, but in terms of giving me the advice and tools that have now become the core of my life's purpose. I feel really fortunate for having met Dave and having met him at the time that I did. He was essentially the first person I'd encountered as an adult who respected me enough to suggest that I try out the programming language, applications and tools that I now use for a living. 

He's a man of few words (and even fewer back then!) but his steady, calm gently insistent advice has consistently been amazing (to this day). Back then I was scared and green and dumb enough to try his suggestions because honestly he's one of the smartest guys I know and if Dave thought it was a good idea it implicitly must be. He then put up with my complaining, whining, badgering and insecurity as I was learning (I'm a terrible student) with utmost patience and still keeps giving me great advice, suggestions and just someone to nerd-out about this stuff to.

This was years ago and we've all come much further now. I do that stuff, Dave finished his PhD and the magic time when we were all hanging out at the uni in that funny pre-adulthood evaporated. There was death, marriage break-downs, new life and we all kind of grew up and dispersed all around the place. We all keep in touch but it's not the same as all working in the same building without the rigid constraints of real adult responsibility.

In this meantime Dave had met an amazing girl -- so when he invited me to his wedding in April of 2013 I was so thrilled. I live over the other side of the country now but wouldn't have missed it.

It was also important to me that I got him a present that really represented how much I valued his friendship over the years.

Then towards the end of April came ... The Idea