If you poured water over the terrain somewhere in the world, where would it go? That’s perhaps one way to think of the thing that distracted me in the evenings this week.<\/p>\n
[Edit: an interactive map should appear here, but there are some unresolved issues. Check out the GitHub-hosted version<\/a> for something at least partly functional!]<\/em><\/p>\n What we have here is more or less an animated flowy map of drainage, although it’s not a serious attempt at an accurate map. It’s just something that turned out to be kind of pretty.<\/p>\n Apologies for its clunkiness; I’m not that<\/em> good at code. This is another episode in my habit of messing around with terrain mapping in the browser on canvas elements. See for example shaded relief<\/a> and grassy sketchy thingies<\/a>. (Side note: calculation of aspect turns out to be poor in those; this way<\/a> works better and I’ll fix them at some point.) None of this ever turns out zippy, but it’s always a good learning experience and is occasionally art-worthy.<\/p>\n