
A road map collection that could help researchers - Thevet
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/robert-berlo-map-collection/
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mysterypie
> “He could read them while driving and fold them back up while driving.”

For maps from the 80's or older, that's actually a feat.

Most recent maps fold up in an accordion-like or zig zag pattern. But not
older maps! The folding patterns were inscrutable. You made a horrible mess
unless you remembered the exact steps with which you unfolded it.

Given the diversity of people on Hacker News, I'm hoping there's a printing
press operator who can explain why paper folding machines of the olden days
didn't use a logical folding pattern.

~~~
Stratoscope
I wonder if the machines back then were just as capable of using an accordion
pattern, but mapmakers and printers thought there were advantages to the
patterns they used, either practical or aesthetic?

When I was a kid, family and friends marveled at my uncanny ability to fold up
a map perfectly. The secret was simple: I let the map fold itself.

I'd find the one fold that went the same direction all the way across the
page, and start there. Then the one fold that went in one direction across the
folded map, and fold it next. And so on.

As long as no one had mis-folded the map before, it seemed pretty easy. But
I'd see everyone else ignoring what the map was telling them, just going at it
arbitrarily and making a mess.

Later I got into ham radio and applied the same principle to my wiring,
especially when I wound my own transformers. Instead of pulling and twisting
the wire every which way, I'd let the wire show me where it wanted to go. And
instead of holding the transformer core still and forcing the wire around it,
I would rotate the core like a spool to take up the wire.

This principle still serves me today, as I seem to be one of the rare people
who never has any trouble with MacBook Pro power supply cords!

I cringed when I watched a colleague wind up the cord for a brand new MBPR. He
opened the ears on the charger, grabbed the cord and pulled it hard around
them all the way. So he was not only stressing the wire from the extra force,
he was putting a twist into it through its whole length.

Instead, I wind it the way I used to wind transformers: I let the wire dangle
loosely, and then I rotate the power block like a spool with one hand, gently
guiding the wire with the other so it wraps loosely and without any
longitudinal twist.

So that's how map-folding saved my power cords.

~~~
lostlogin
I winced at your description of your colleague - and am reading this on a
phone with an attached power cable that is frayed, taped up and then re-frayed
with exposed wires. I still maintain that strain reducers would help.

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sverige
I would love to be able to see the data on the population of unincorporated
towns. Stories of boom and bust, or something else?

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spraak
The kind of thing a lot of people around him while living likely dismissed as
"having too much time on his hands". (I'm not saying that, but it often
frustrates me when I hear that)

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njharman
My thought for people who say that is "Sad that you either don't have any or
are unable to pursue your passion(s) and instead waste your time, on what?
Being productive?"

