Another Quadtree Map Rendering

This will be a quick post: I've got another population-based map rendering to
share, based on the work described in this post.

The Rendering #

This rendering uses tiles at Google Maps zoom level 14:

I decided to experiment with solid shading rather than wireframe for the tiles. This cuts down on the Moiré effect in densely populated areas.

The original is a whopping 1 gigapixels, so I had to resize it using ImageMagick before uploading it to Picasa:

$ convert tiles14.jpg -sample 2048x2048 tiles14.2048.jpg

A few more random tidbits of information:

Computing the tile subdivision took one CPU-hour on my laptop, a fairly new MacBook Air.
At zoom level 14, tiles near the equator are roughly 1.5 miles to a side. (Tiles further north or south are shorter in the north-south direction due to distortion in the Mercator projection.)
The Nile is clearly visible between the Nile Delta and Aswan.

In my next post, I'll dive into six months of journal entries from a six-month bike trip that Valkyrie Savage and I took back in 2010.