[HN Gopher] I cycled to all the villages in alphabetical order
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I cycled to all the villages in alphabetical order
Author : pabs3
Score : 93 points
Date : 2023-08-25 07:11 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (diziet.dreamwidth.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (diziet.dreamwidth.org)
| tpmx wrote:
| That's certainly ... an approach to the travelling salesman
| problem.
| matsemann wrote:
| If you like to do challenges like these, a couple of fun ones:
|
| - bike/walk/run every street in your city. Can use for instance
| https://wandrer.earth/ with Strava to track it. It's quite nice,
| discover all kinds of things in my own neighborhood I didn't know
| of. By habit you always take the same routes. This makes me take
| a new road on my way back home and see new stuff.
|
| - Draw art on the maps using gps. I've done multiple. Takes
| planning and often a few attempts executing when you realize that
| road is closed, that path was flooded or whatever. I've even
| gotten in the news a few times from this. For instance when I ran
| this pest doctor during lock downs https://imgur.com/a/qRkB5QN
|
| - Bike the longest distance using the smallest area. Basically
| find a roundabout and see how long you can take it. Or the
| opposite, the largest area in your city, basically bike its
| border.
| bdamm wrote:
| What I really want is "nice" cycling routes, and then doing the
| longest paths. Many times I've tried to find the longest path
| that doesn't repeat from my house where I do not intersect with
| automobile traffic, or taking low-traffic streets without any
| major intersections. It's tough to get far this way, but
| competing for space with cars is just so stressful, so it's why
| I don't do things like ride the perimeter of my city. It's just
| not very conducive to keeping my bones intact.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > competing for space with cars is just so stressful, so it's
| why I don't do things like ride the perimeter of my city
|
| In my city (Denver) there's an independent group that keeps a
| map of low-stress streets to ride on (which they share as a
| google map plus phone apps), which is different than the
| official bike routes map put out by the city.
|
| https://www.bikestreets.com/maps It includes some off-street
| routes outside to the city limits but just looking at the
| ones within the city, there might be a nice route to try out
| for me.
| angarg12 wrote:
| Bit offtopic, but if live in a big city, you don't even need to
| visit every street, just visiting every neighborhood might be
| insighful.
|
| My wife and I are looking to move back to my home town possibly
| next year after 10 years abroad, and we are checking all kind
| of online resources about the city.
|
| Is wild to me that a random expat on Youtube is teaching me all
| kind of things that I didn't know about my own city. I guess
| the almost 30 years I spent there I really only frequented a
| very small section of it, and entire sections of the city are
| complete blind spots.
| timfsu wrote:
| Very impressive! Since it wasn't immediately clear, the author is
| based in Cambridge, UK.
| mperham wrote:
| This fact should be in the first sentence. I had no idea where
| they were talking about.
| melx wrote:
| Especially when they specified a radius in km(!).
| NeoTar wrote:
| There is a big tension in the UK between people who use
| kilometres by default, and those who miles.
|
| Although road-signs are all in miles, it's not unknown for
| other distance markers (e.g. on walking / cycling trails)
| to be in kilometres. When I was studying in Birmingham in
| 2006-2010 the signs on the canal network were in
| kilometres.
|
| For me, my default unit is kilometeres (although I am one
| of those awful Bremoaners
| [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bremoaner] who even moved
| to Berlin after the vote).
| tialaramex wrote:
| Right, the law mostly says to use metric units, _except_
| it has specific derogations for some of the road signs to
| be in miles. So the canal and walking route signs should
| - especially if put up by some authority rather than
| informally - be metric, whereas road signs mustn 't be in
| the same circumstances.
|
| Same for booze. It's illegal to sell most booze in
| imperial units (e.g. a shot of whiskey _must_ be either
| 25ml or 35ml, no other values, and the choice between
| 25ml and 35ml shot size is for an entire bar, they can 't
| be like house vodka is 35ml but this expensive Scotch is
| 25ml), but, it's _mandatory_ to sell beer and cider by
| the pint.
|
| It's a temporary fudge that then politicians are
| reluctant to actually follow through and do the clean-up
| later because that's only going to annoy the handful of
| strong opponents and makes little real difference to
| ordinary punters for whom this isn't a priority.
|
| Sometimes this works out OK in politics, e.g. in Britain
| it was never strictly made illegal to sell leaded fuel
| only new cars which need such fuel - but it soon made no
| economic sense to make such fuel as a fuel refinery, so
| the ban was unnecessary. Politicians could go from
| telling the niche of pro-lead constituents they'll still
| be able to buy the fuel they want to commiserating them
| that it's no longer for sale, never having actually
| banned it.
| samwillis wrote:
| I quite liked the fact they he didn't, it was fun to
| construct a location in my head. But then I know the area
| fairly well.
|
| It's a good location for this as it's quite flat, very few
| hill, and those that exist are more like a hump.
| tlholaday wrote:
| Bowerick Wowbagger?
| beardyw wrote:
| Given the location I'm guessing there was very little change of
| elevation.
| ozim wrote:
| Everyone is praising bikes and as example they give NL or
| Amsterdam.
|
| It just never is Norway or Switzerland.
|
| If you have flat land and mild winters, mild summers, sure you
| are going to get load of cycling, making infra is no brainer.
| drivers99 wrote:
| Ah the old "we're not Amsterdam" excuse.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIcwzqRlZ68 "Are Dutch Cities
| Really that Different? Debunking Cycling Myths"
| rez9x wrote:
| The rides are cool and it sounds like a fun project. I was a bit
| caught by surprise at the mention of being told not to go far
| from your house during COVID. Different parts of the world
| handled that very differently.
| smokel wrote:
| Back when I was into programming contests, I wrote a program to
| find the smallest selection of cities, the letters of which would
| cover the alphabet in correct order.
|
| I even felt a small urge to take pictures of the place name signs
| of those cities and turn it into art. Soon after that stroke of
| genius thought, I stumbled upon an exhibition by a Dutch artist
| [1] who visited nearly every city in The Netherlands, took a
| picture of himself, his car, and the place name sign, and I lost
| interest.
|
| Obviously I got the inspiration in an Amsterdam metro line that
| stops at ABCOUDE [2].
|
| It might be interesting to retry this with the entire
| OpenStreetMap database.
|
| [1] Forgot his name, can't find it on the internet, ChatGPT has
| no clue.
|
| [2] https://www.abcoude.nl/
| Dunedan wrote:
| related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34168284
| ella-hashir wrote:
| why not share your full story?
| acqbu wrote:
| fully agree - I'd like to know all the details
| kazinator wrote:
| OK, next challenge: all villages in Japan in I, RO, HA, NI, HO,
| HE, TO .... order.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| Happy to see Diziet has published this after our discussion in
| the pub a couple of nights ago. The only thing that surprises me
| is that it wasn't fanf2 who submitted it. :-)
| ben_w wrote:
| One thing I didn't appreciate until too late when moving out of
| the UK post-Brexit was quite how unusually densely packed the
| Cambridge geek circles are; seeing this username again, yours
| as well I think, fanf of course, and honestly half the people
| who used to go to The Carlton before the fire...
|
| I was expecting it to be _that_ easy to surround myself with
| similar people here, but apparently not.
|
| Still, should be seeing Calamarain next weekend.
| aardvark179 wrote:
| There are definitely other circles of people round the world,
| but they generally don't have that same element of, "you can
| turn up at this place on this evening and probably meet
| somebody you want to talk to."
|
| I think it's an intrinsic thing with British pub culture, the
| same can be applied to various genres of literature, game
| design, films, and so many other things.
| adw wrote:
| Me too. (I miss the Carlton.)
| diziet wrote:
| Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8i5SABqwU
|
| (not same person as cyclist)
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(page generated 2023-08-25 23:00 UTC)