All Capitals on Earth: Beautiful & Instructive!

[t00fri]

Hi all,

over the weekend, I found some time to assemble a neat locations file
that contains all capitals on earth, 232 in total! It was
quite a bit of fiddling with Perl and various data files (containing
also plenty of typos). The main tool was, of course, as usual:
Perl;-).

I have sent the first version of the locations for further testing to
Grant and the other developers...


Here are a few images, to give you a flavor.
Throughout, I used a 32k Nightlights VT texture, in order to
control the positions of the capitals and also for enjoying, of course.

1600x1200 full sized images after clicking on the "thumb's"...

My favoured images are numbers 1) & 4); go have a click:lol:

Bye Fridger

1) A caribean 'Pe(a)rl' chain of capitals!


2) A nice view of some arabic capitals


3) Even the tiny capital of Bhutan (Thimphu) 7000 ft high in the Himalaya is dimly visible!


4) Europe at night!

[DBrady]

No belfast, cardiff or Edinburgh?
Are Saint Peters Port, Saint Helier and Douglas capitols? I've never heard them referred to as capitals before.

[granthutchison]

No belfast, cardiff or Edinburgh?
Are Saint Peters Port, Saint Helier and Douglas capitols? I've never heard them referred to as capitals before.

Since Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all still integral parts of the UK, despite the devolution of some powers to regional assemblies, they're not usually included in officially maintained capital lists, like this one by the UN - it would be like including all the state capitals for the USA.
Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are British Crown Dependencies with their own administrations, and the London government can intrude only in matters of defence and international relations - so their capitals generally do appear in official lists.

Grant

[JackHiggins]

And you didn't include the People's Republic?!!!

Any idea when we'll be able to d/l it? Actually- if you don't mind, would you email me a copy? Thanks!

[t00fri]

And you didn't include the People's Republic?!!!

Any idea when we'll be able to d/l it? Actually- if you don't mind, would you email me a copy? Thanks!

Sure, I'll send you the file tomorrow. It's being intensively tested by Grant and myself. So further help is always welcome!

Bye Fridger

[mk]

Prague (Czech Republic) is missing...

[t00fri]

Prague (Czech Republic) is missing...

That was one of the various typos in the CIA Factbook sources, it is long corrected...

Grant --who spotted the Prague misplacement first-- will remember, where Prague was actually "mislocated";-). Reykjavik/Island first appeared near California, for example...Frequent typos were E<->W and/or N<->S in the long-lat coordinates.

In general, the accuracy is quite impressive, and we are really approaching "completeness" after quite a few iterations with Grant!

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

I didn't know that Israel has two capitals... as far as I know(and I really know) Israel's capital is Jerusalem.
The only country with two capitals that I know about is Bolivia...

[granthutchison]

I didn't know that Israel has two capitals... as far as I know(and I really know) Israel's capital is Jerusalem.

This is a tricky one - while Israel gives its capital as Jerusalem, this is not recognized by the UN (because of the divided nature of the city). Therefore, most countries with embassies maintain them in Tel Aviv, and Israel is therefore obliged to keep its international administrative activity in that city, too. So Israel effectively has two capitals, one of its own devising and one that has been forced upon it.

The only country with two capitals that I know about is Bolivia...

There are several other countries with multiple capitals. Most notably South Africa, with three ...

Grant

[DBrady]

Since Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are all still integral parts of the UK, despite the devolution of some powers to regional assemblies, they're not usually included in officially maintained capital lists, like this one by the UN - it would be like including all the state capitals for the USA.
Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man are British Crown Dependencies with their own administrations, and the London government can intrude only in matters of defence and international relations - so their capitals generally do appear in official lists.

Thanks for clearing that up Grant. I wasnt sure if Belfast etc.. were official capitals but i had no idea about jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of man capitals. Thats some great pub trivia - cheers.

[don]

So further help is always welcome!

Especially from folks (unlike me) who have good geographical knowledge and can verify positioning.

Thank you Fridger, for your intense effort this past weekend to generate this file!

It might also be mentioned that the final file will probably contain either Size or Importance data that will reduce any text overlap you may see now.

Cheers,

-Don G.

[t00fri]

So further help is always welcome!

Especially from folks (unlike me) who have good geographical knowledge and can verify positioning.

Thank you Fridger, for your intense effort this past weekend to generate this file!

It might also be mentioned that the final file will probably contain either Size or Importance data that will reduce any text overlap you may see now.

Cheers,

-Don G.

Don,

thanks for your encouragement. I must confess, the more I work with the capital list the more I like it.

It is

-- a small file
-- most informative (few people would know all 240 capitals by heart;-)
-- not too dense

At least my knowledge about the world's capitals has already significantly increased during the last few days;-)

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

Hi all,

after quite a few debugging rounds thanks to Grant's well familiar scrutiny, my earth-all-capitals file is now already in a fairly "solid" stage. You can best enjoy it with really hires Nightlight tiles (32k!). Perhaps some of you might have fun playing with it, give further comments or find additional hidden bugs.

I have therefore uploaded it to my TextureFoundry site:

http://www.shatters.net/~t00fri/earth-CIA.ssc.zip

The file is not long and meanwhile comprises (all) 240 capitals of the world (including most exotic ones;-)). Please let me know your opinions about the need to incorporate 'variable importance weights' in order to avoid overlaps of labels. For the time being, all importance weights are equal and = 1000. This means that all labels vanish/appear at a distance of about 90000 km from earth with default FOV.

In principle the incorporation of 'variable importance weights' is straightforward and would induce a 'hierarchy' as to the appearance of the labels. But I think that every user should also not be deprived of the opportunity to display all capitals, independent of the size of the earth texture used. Enjoying the complete display of the world's capitals is just a basic aspect and most informative at that!

Bye Fridger

[ElPelado]

I didn't know that Israel has two capitals... as far as I know(and I really know) Israel's capital is Jerusalem.

This is a tricky one - while Israel gives its capital as Jerusalem, this is not recognized by the UN (because of the divided nature of the city). Therefore, most countries with embassies maintain them in Tel Aviv, and Israel is therefore obliged to keep its international administrative activity in that city, too. So Israel effectively has two capitals, one of its own devising and one that has been forced upon it.

The only country with two capitals that I know about is Bolivia...

There are several other countries with multiple capitals. Most notably South Africa, with three ...

Grant

Are you sure that Israel keeps "its international administrative activity in" Tel-Aviv. Where did you get that info?(I am really asking you, I want to know...)

[granthutchison]

Are you sure that Israel keeps "its international administrative activity in" Tel-Aviv. Where did you get that info?(I am really asking you, I want to know...)

El Pelado, if you do a web search you will find a wide range of different portrayals of day-to-day diplomatic life in Israel - ranging from one extreme in which the entire foreign diplomatic community drives to Jerusalem every day, to the other in which Israel maintains most of its civil service in Tel Aviv. Both these extremes appear frequently on websites with clear political agendas.
But I find that in life, and especially in diplomacy, the extensive middle ground usually encompasses the truth, and that's what I was trying to convey in my last post - a necessary gathering of specialist Israeli civil servants in Tel Aviv to service the embassy community, while contact with political leaders takes place in Jerusalem.
And if you'll forgive me, I think that any further discussion on this theme can only involve political judgements on the accuracy or otherwise of individual sources, and I have no wish to get involved in such a discussion.

Grant

[Hugo Rune]

To get totally off topic here, I would just like to say that I think that t00fri has done a very good job, regardless of omissions and/or errors.

Keep working on it fella!

Greg

[t00fri]

To get totally off topic here, I would just like to say that I think that t00fri has done a very good job, regardless of omissions and/or errors.

Keep working on it fella!

Greg

Thanks Greg,

I have just submitted an improved earth-CIA.ssc file into the 'developer channel' for further testing. For the first time, it includes 'varying importance weights' as calculated from another list of inhabitants for the world's capitals by means of Perl (of course;-)

I want 'Importance' to scale essentially like a [length] i.e. a 'Size' parameter in the locations file.

Assuming crudely that the population density in capitals is roughly constant, i.e.

Code: Select all

     inhabitants/length^2 = density ~ constant

     sqrt( inhabitants/density) ~ [length].

Hence I took the formula:

    Importance = sqrt(inhabitants)/3.,


which indeed gives a neat scaling law with smaller capitals, popping up just in the right instance without overlapping!

At 69000 km distance from earth (with default FoV) just a few labels of 'monster capitals' remain visible!




Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

And here is another amazing perspective with locations for cities and towns on earth:

Today I have found a (reliable) file in the net, containing 50000 cities & towns along with quite precise long-lat coordinates and number of inhabitants!

There is only one problem preventing an immediate exploitation via Perl into a super locations file:

The lack of truly international font support in Celestia. What is needed is support of unicode encoding, of course...

Bye Fridger

[Darkmiss]

Thank you Fridger, this is a very nice file

I did have a go at doing just the capitals myself
But it wasnt anywhere this complete or accurate.

So thanks once again.