It works in the endorheic basins in eastern Oregon pretty well. Although of course many of the "waterways" there are dry. It gets the paths correct, though.
In some places in California's Central Valley, the rivers are usually dry, for much of the year; and even when there is water in them, the dry up at some point well before the maps says it does. Just sayin'
I live in Northern WV and I'm fully aware that our rivers flow North, but for some reason, when I clicked on my area and saw the route run up to Pittsburgh before traveling South to the Gulf, I was taken aback.
I always keep in mind when I have my first cup of coffee in the morning that it might have a bit of the last breath of Elvis in it, or diarrhea from a T-Rexx.
Nit: I believe Elvis was buried, and not that long ago, so the likelihood that enough of him has decayed into atmosphere for you to be breathing him at even 1 molecule per breath is very low.
If you start with the same premise as your linked article, and say how much breath you share with Elvis's last breath, then you can probably assume an atmospheric distribution close enough to the Cesar one in the article.
Sounds like Charlie Brown talking to Pigpen in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
"Don't think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. You may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchadnezzar."
I tried to drop near the North American continental divide to sort of get a random path to the east or west, expecting pacific or to the Mississippi river to the Gulf of Mexico, and it wound up ending the the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
From the liquid sea, it evaporates back to vapour, floats up into lower pressure, and forms clouds!
And the clouds are in fact made of solid crystals of ice, which then melt to make rain.
It's all a cycle, with many sizes of feedback loop. By loving our neighbour the ocean and picking up litter on the street, we can change it. The butterfly effect means that even a little helps.
Is there a way to turn off the auto play of the fly through after you click, without having to click pause each time? I'm more interest in just clicking around and seeing how the route changes.
Hey! So the solution I've got in place was actually kind of a compromise solution originally. I had it jump right in at first and people asked to disable autoplay, so I tried completely shutting it off and a lot of people missed that you could run the path altogether. Settled on this 5 second timer, but I think some kind of option to disable it is a good idea. I'll work on adding that in. If you'd like, you can submit it that or other suggestions as an issue here: https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner
What is the general guidance on hinting to users that they should use a feature? It's always a shame when you design something really cool, and users miss it.
I think you are kind of right on this, for me the “really cool thing” is seeing the routs not the fly through. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the same for most people. I think it’s one of those cases (which I have done myself, multiple times) when you build something and you think the best thing is this clever thing you built, and you love it, but actually the basic functionality is the “cool bit” most people want.
If it were me I would not have an auto play at all but a really big fat arrow pointing at the play button saying “this fly though is really cool”. Might not seem “professional”, but it works from experience.
Ha, I don't want to tell you you're wrong, but having heard from a lot of people on this, I'm not sure this is right. The vast majority of people I hear from seem as or more interested in the flyover than the routing itself. And that's why I have to strike a balance here.
I agree that I mostly want to see which rivers the drop flows to but really enjoyed the flight down the Savannah river and seeing how winding it is. Spent a week canoeing it a long time ago.
Just implemented suggestion (b), sorry for the delay on that. I'm not sure about (a) yet, but will definitely at least add an option to disable autoplay and will consider that.
It doesn't seem to work near drainage divides. It looks like it uses a point in the Municipality (the center?) and then looks from there for the nearest river.
Oddly it seems to get the wrong name for a river in my hometown. If I drop a pin in Columbus, OH it should flow into a creek or whatever, then the Scioto River and down to the Ohio. But the listing shows the Scioto as "Paint Creek." This misnaming of the Scioto River holds true as I head South and try in Circleville or Chillocothe. Still really neat!
One of my side project ideas is to implement something like this for money. That way individuals and groups can be more transparent about how they spend money.
I have a hypothesis about health care, which is that the public health care systems are more efficient, simply because it's possible to find out where the money goes if it's all coming out of one checkbook. Our system is designed to hide the ultimate beneficiaries.
Indeed, and the "single hospital" is actually multiple business entities that are all billing one another for service and trying to maximize the return on their own capital investment.
Pretty neat! Not the most accurate near Chicago. When the Des Plains and Chicago river run perpendicular the "rain drop" would skip over the Des Plains and into the Chicago river. Also it would flow toward Lake Michigan, which isn't typically the case.
Yeah the tool struggles a lot with engineered features (dams, canals, etc.) and Chicago is really our quintessential example of this (issue documented a little here: https://ksonda.github.io/global-river-runner/). The US-only version of this tool (https://river-runner.samlearner.com/) is a lot better with the Chicago routes and is generally a little better with routes in the US.
That’s disappointing. I clicked in my backyard, but it started from a point about 20 miles south of my house. I tried a number of different times with the same results. I even have a creek at the bottom of the hill in my backyard that I assumed it would start with.
I would assume there's a floor on the size of waterway it starts with. I have the same situation (well, less so) in that my backyard is 3 blocks from a named creek on the map, but it started me several miles away on the larger creek that my local one flows into.
Edit: also seems to generalize your location - pretty sure it's just figuring out the town I clicked in, then going from there.
It seems to be missing some smaller rivers in the UK, where I live we have both the River Welland and River Gwash (technically a tributary to the River Welland), it completely misses the Gwash and always routs with the Welland (sometimes miles away) even if you click on it.
It's quite interesting as the River Gwash both feeds and runs out of the Rutland Water which is the largest reservoir in England. Even if you click on Rutland Water the rout jumps about 10 mile to the south to the River Welland.
Immediately visited Snow Dome on the Alberta/British Columbia border and was pleased to find that depending on where you click, you indeed get three very different answers:
I grew up skiing Sunshine Village along the Alberta/British Columbia border. There's a lift called the "Great Divide" where the rider apparently starts in Alberta, crosses into BC, and then returns back to Alberta before reaching the top.
As you ride up, you're greeted by a sign that reads "Welcome to beautiful British Columbia", and then "Welcome back to sunny Alberta". My Dad used to always joke about the snow melt either traveling to the Hudson Bay, or the Pacific Ocean depending on where you are along the lift line.
Had to test it out for myself. Unfortunately the lift doesn't quite carve across the watershed boundary as I hoped, but it's very close, and it was fun to wonder about as a kid.
My late friend's house in Oak Park, Illinois sat on the divide, rain on the east side ran to Lake Michigan, and then to the Saint Lawrence. Rain the west side, to the Calumet Sanitary Channel, the eventually down the Mississippi.
I tried to find his house, but clicks run the animation before I can find it.
We used to do this kind of analysis when I worked in Civil Engineering. For large landfill designs the drainage before should be the same as after. We used a tool called TR55 to model the flow depending on the type of surface, to design diversion swales (channels) to move the rain runoff.
I remember the last time this was posted, it was only for the contiguous 48 states of the US. Excited to try it for Alaska and worldwide, now we can do the seven summits!
They should add place markers for hydrological apexes like Snow Dome in Canada. Fun to see single pixel shifts result in water traveling to a whole other ocean :)
Working on adding some ability to view upstream paths, but there are a lot of complications with that and it would probably be limited to the US for now. That's the next major item on the to-do list, though.
Hey everyone, glad you all are enjoying the project!
To address some of the points I'm seeing, it's not perfect right now, which is why we've considered this a beta release. In particular, there are some issues around name coverage abroad and around engineered features (dams, canals, etc.). A lot of known issues are documented at the top of this page: https://ksonda.github.io/global-river-runner/. Ultimately, we made as much progress as we could, including a lot of manual name suggestions before launching, and decided to publish the tool in beta, with an understanding that we'd take suggestions and otherwise work to improve the tool/data over time.
To the points about the distance the paths are starting from a click, it does round coordinates to some extent. As much as I'd like to be more exact, we're stuck with a limited number of "flowlines" in our dataset and it will look for the closest one, which isn't always as close as we'd like. It's most useful for understanding watersheds in broad strokes, but often falls a little short when it comes to the novelty of literally tracing from your address.
For both specificity and some of the canal issues, the US-only version of this tool is better than this one (https://river-runner.samlearner.com/) with the obvious limitation that the paths are only within the US.
If you have any issues/feedback/suggestions regarding the UI and have a minute, would really appreciate if you're able to submit them as issues in the project repo on Github: https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner If you're experiencing routing/naming issues, you can submit issues in this repo: https://github.com/ksonda/global-river-runner
It looks like the whole length of the Chattahoochee River is labeled Apalachicola River, which only starts at Lake Seminole. Click the squiggly part of the Georgia-Alabama border to check.
Very nice tool! However, I think it is not always correct. For example, lake Trasimeno, in Italy, is endorheic (or maybe cryptorheic), but seems to discharge into river Arno from this website: https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/?lng=12.098864773....
I am pretty sure that path is not possible: it seems that the water would flow out of Trasimeno through the Anguillara torrent, but according to the Italian Wikipedia the torrent flows into the Trasimeno (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguillara_(torrente)). According to the English Wikipedia it might be that Trasimeno has an outflowing canal, but that should flow into river Tevere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Trasimeno), so their data is wrong anyway.
118 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadSahara has endorheic basins (aka closed or terminal basins) without outflow to sea.
I didn't realize that Lake Tahoe drained to Pyramid Lake - pretty fun tool.
https://futurism.com/estimating-how-many-molecules-you-breat...
If you start with the same premise as your linked article, and say how much breath you share with Elvis's last breath, then you can probably assume an atmospheric distribution close enough to the Cesar one in the article.
"Don't think of it as dust. Think of it as maybe the soil of some great past civilization. Maybe the soil of ancient Babylon. It staggers the imagination. You may be carrying soil that was trod upon by Solomon, or even Nebuchadnezzar."
I tried to drop near the North American continental divide to sort of get a random path to the east or west, expecting pacific or to the Mississippi river to the Gulf of Mexico, and it wound up ending the the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
TIL... thanks!
And the clouds are in fact made of solid crystals of ice, which then melt to make rain.
It's all a cycle, with many sizes of feedback loop. By loving our neighbour the ocean and picking up litter on the street, we can change it. The butterfly effect means that even a little helps.
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution
As a (possibly misheard) lyric, about clouds in the sea:
Rhythm you have it or you don't
That's a fallacy, I'm in them
Every spiralling tree, every child of peace
Every cloud in the sea you see with your eyes
Gorillaz - Clint Eastwood
https://youtu.be/1V_xRb0x9aw?list=PLfNF8TQij08oma_987vYrzswd...
If it were me I would not have an auto play at all but a really big fat arrow pointing at the play button saying “this fly though is really cool”. Might not seem “professional”, but it works from experience.
Love it BTW!
(b) should take a few minutes to implement, and would be a big quality of life boost.
Oddly it seems to get the wrong name for a river in my hometown. If I drop a pin in Columbus, OH it should flow into a creek or whatever, then the Scioto River and down to the Ohio. But the listing shows the Scioto as "Paint Creek." This misnaming of the Scioto River holds true as I head South and try in Circleville or Chillocothe. Still really neat!
Edit: also seems to generalize your location - pretty sure it's just figuring out the town I clicked in, then going from there.
It's quite interesting as the River Gwash both feeds and runs out of the Rutland Water which is the largest reservoir in England. Even if you click on Rutland Water the rout jumps about 10 mile to the south to the River Welland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutland_Water
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Gwash
- https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/?lng=-117.2588549...
- https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/?lng=-117.2130275...
- https://river-runner-global.samlearner.com/?lng=-117.4424101...
As you ride up, you're greeted by a sign that reads "Welcome to beautiful British Columbia", and then "Welcome back to sunny Alberta". My Dad used to always joke about the snow melt either traveling to the Hudson Bay, or the Pacific Ocean depending on where you are along the lift line.
Had to test it out for myself. Unfortunately the lift doesn't quite carve across the watershed boundary as I hoped, but it's very close, and it was fun to wonder about as a kid.
I tried to find his house, but clicks run the animation before I can find it.
Still available for DOS...
https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detailfull/nationa...
O_O
The apparent author (@samlearner) also joined HN to chip in[1] some comments/react to feedback.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27297689 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=samlearner
To address some of the points I'm seeing, it's not perfect right now, which is why we've considered this a beta release. In particular, there are some issues around name coverage abroad and around engineered features (dams, canals, etc.). A lot of known issues are documented at the top of this page: https://ksonda.github.io/global-river-runner/. Ultimately, we made as much progress as we could, including a lot of manual name suggestions before launching, and decided to publish the tool in beta, with an understanding that we'd take suggestions and otherwise work to improve the tool/data over time.
To the points about the distance the paths are starting from a click, it does round coordinates to some extent. As much as I'd like to be more exact, we're stuck with a limited number of "flowlines" in our dataset and it will look for the closest one, which isn't always as close as we'd like. It's most useful for understanding watersheds in broad strokes, but often falls a little short when it comes to the novelty of literally tracing from your address.
For both specificity and some of the canal issues, the US-only version of this tool is better than this one (https://river-runner.samlearner.com/) with the obvious limitation that the paths are only within the US.
If you have any issues/feedback/suggestions regarding the UI and have a minute, would really appreciate if you're able to submit them as issues in the project repo on Github: https://github.com/sdl60660/river-runner If you're experiencing routing/naming issues, you can submit issues in this repo: https://github.com/ksonda/global-river-runner
Again, thanks for giving the project a look! You can check out some of my other work here: https://www.samlearner.com/ or on my Github (https://github.com/sdl60660).
I'd also like to shout out other other people who worked to make this happen: Dave Blodgett (https://github.com/dblodgett-usgs), Kyle Onda (https://github.com/ksonda), and Ben Webb (https://github.com/webb-ben).
I am pretty sure that path is not possible: it seems that the water would flow out of Trasimeno through the Anguillara torrent, but according to the Italian Wikipedia the torrent flows into the Trasimeno (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anguillara_(torrente)). According to the English Wikipedia it might be that Trasimeno has an outflowing canal, but that should flow into river Tevere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Trasimeno), so their data is wrong anyway.