ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World(orbis.stanford.edu)

38 pointsby bpierre12 anni fa13 comments

orbis.stanford.edu

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World

http://orbis.stanford.edu//

6 comments

'Conventional maps that represent this world as it appears from space signally fail to capture the severe environmental constraints that governed the flows of people, goods and information. Cost, rather than distance, is the principal determinant of connectivity.

For the first time, ORBIS allows us to express Roman communication costs in terms of both time and expense. By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity.'

bane12 anni fa

I like how I posted this earlier, but the repost with the messed up URL gets the votes ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8001507

anigbrowl12 anni fa

Most interesting. I picked up The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in a used bookstore recently and this seems like it will be a useful study aid.

tempodox12 anni fa

Too bad, it doesn't seem to work in Safari. I find what I see incomprehensible and unusable. Some shapes seem to be drawn much too large.

In Chrome, it looks better.

elijahmeeks12 anni fa

I'd love to see a screenshot, if you want to tweet or email me. I never had any problems testing it on Safari.

coldcode12 anni fa

This would make the core of an interesting game.

javajosh12 anni fa

Yes. The mechanic could be a variant of "ticket to ride" where instead of different color trains you get donkey, ship, and horse cards.

maaku12 anni fa

> ORBIS is designed for modern browsers and uses technology that works best in Chrome or Safari.

This is on latest Firefox. Really? The only truly open browser is not "modern"?

aptwebapps12 anni fa

Doesn't work all that well on Chrome, either. Make the window narrow and the text goes below the fold but is unscrollable.

Edit: Just on the first page, it seems.

elijahmeeks12 anni fa

SVG performance on Firefox is abysmal. Even MSIE10/11 handles it much better. Start a petition to get Firefox to handle SVG as well as all the other browsers.

codezero12 anni fa

Does it not work properly on Firefox? If so, I bet they'd probably appreciate the feedback on what is broken so they can try to fix it.

jordanb12 anni fa

For me, on Firefox it immediately displays a splash screen recommending I switch to Chrome or Safari.

hackuser12 anni fa

All the other websites work well for me on Firefox. Either I'll have to switch browsers for one site, or switch websites ...