• 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • It’s a misleading legend, but the note at the bottom tries to clear it up a bit. This map seems to more be like “We took the range maps of 238 species of fish and overlaid them. The red area is where practically all of those range maps of each 238 species of fish overlapped.” Of course there are other fish, but they were not included here because the map maker didn’t have the right kind of dataset for them. To me that seems to indicate that this map isn’t so much a map of actual biodiversity measured, but the potential for biodiversity of the region. Given that it’s fish, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that this area is somewhere between/near the northern continent’s biggest river, a large gulf, and ancient mountain range, and a coast with a strong warm current (for now…).









  • Next time you tape over it, try this. Cut an old credit card, hotel key card, or something similar to just larger than the switch’s recess. Tape only the top edge to the machine so that the stiff plastic or cardboard covers the switch, but can be lifted up and out of the way when you need to access it. I’ve used a similar trick to protect light switches I wanted to occasionally use, but not accidentally flip along with the other switches in the next gang over.











  • It says “not to scale”, which in the world of mapping means very specifically that the scale is inconsistent. An exaggerated vertical scale would not include the disclaimer for “not to scale” and is very common, as I already said. It’s common for maps showing vertical reliefs like profiles or cross sections to have a horizontal scale of something like 1:20 while the vertical dimension has a scale of 1:5 or 1:10, which would still be considered “to scale”. If you still can’t fit everything on a single sheet, you can add a break line or a jog to indicate a discontinuity, but the map would still be “to scale”. This map is “not to scale” because it says so, so the only real information we should be able to glean from it are the connections between things; size, angles, and lengths as are meaningless because that’s what “not to scale” is specifically warning us about.