The Long and Winding … Map
How a simple quest to tweak a map is turning into a book
Update: 2025-07-12.
Any damn fool can make things complicated, son. It takes a smart guy to make them simple. Dad
Lessons delivered and unlearned. Turns out there is a simpler way to do what I was struggling with. <insert ironicon here>
There are strange things done in the midnight sun, and not only for the secret trails that have their secret tales.
It begins with taking all the plotting defaults.
There’s lots wrong here. Parts of the Aleutians cross longitude 180º West and wind on on the other side of the map. Plus, for most mapping purposes, Alaska is essentially empty. Hawaii is scrunched down in the corner.
So, what I wanted to do was something similar to a standard U.S. cartographic standard, like this.
Many hours later, I manage to come up with this.
A lot of that time was spent on a futile search for example code in my current language, Julia. A whole lot more went into long, long conversations with my AI collaborators, especially Claude with pinch hitting by ChatGPT and Perplexity. In the final push, I blew through my daily allowance of tokens. Fortunately, it was only a couple of hours before the odometer rolled over. If it had been in the morning, I probably would have had to sign up for the Max plan to avoid going mad.
If this sort of thing jingles your bells, you can inspect the final product in its grandeur at my technical site.
I don’t know which was more: moles whacked, snipe hunted, rabbit holes dived into, dead ends encountered or false dawns. But I came away impressed anew with the primacy of questions when dealing with AI.
In one adventure, it was taking my very generously provisioned desktop a full five minutes to produce a plotting object and another five to render it. That made no sense because without Alaska and Hawaii it was to quick to bother benchmarking. In surveying the debris field I notice something odd. The longitude and latitude are expressed in meters and they were way out there beyond the observable universe—10^32 meters or almost 10^16 freaking light years. When I pointed that out, I got some better service before moving on to the next wrinkle.
In the law I learned to pay more attention to the questions than the answers. The answers are fact dependent and always changing. The questions to be put to the facts do change, but much more slowly.
Another day, another mass murder of electrons.
Anyway, I’m up to about 150 pages with the book that this is in aid of. I haven’t got a commitment from the publisher yet. It’s summer in the UK, so it may be a while. But, strangely, this experience may well mark the high point and the rest of what I have to do is ground game.