We've come a long way from "warning: 800x600 pixel gif here", this image is so big however that I think that a warning is suitable, if you are not on a machine with a lot of memory you should probably not click on the large version of that image unless you'd like to listen to your hard drive for the next half hour or so.
Cutting it into tiles and creating a custom Google Maps view of it would have been nice. It looks[1] reasonably simple to do, and means your users don't need to try and render a 15kpixel wide image. Even with 4G (ok, that's not all that much these days, but I still consider it reasonable) of RAM, it took down my browser.
RAM usage jumped about 280MB when viewing the full size image. No problems with my system choking with 4GB RAM and plenty of programs open (2.5GB used). (Tested in Firefox and Opera, Win7x64.)
Cute. But so much more could be learned from maps like this, if you could overlay a map of, well, pretty much anything else on top, and look for correlations. Population density, political boundaries, G3 support, economy, whatever.
Back in the day when Meebo was a web IM client, they had a similar heat map updated every few minutes.
I wrote a script that grabbed it and stitched the grabs together into a visualization of their traffic over a month or two. Never got around to publishing it anywhere though.
ha! you can see the main routes from santiago (chile) to the coast (valparaiso and vina del mar). when were the data taken? those roads would have been very busy this last weekend (independence day here).
Brave? Ones in the south are probably some tourists; One in Pyongyang must be kids of some very important parents, ones who travel and study abroad.
Neither demographic counts as very brave.
