Discussion: What is Not Happening?

Hello rest of the world.
As you can see there has been no activity on this part of AttackPoint for a couple of days.
That is what happens when, in one of the world's oldest democracies, it takes several days to count the votes to determine who will be their president for the next four years. Everyone is glued to their TV, computer or smartphone watching the painstakingly slow results play out.
No time for other stuff.

Getting out for exercise and fresh air doesn't require discussion.

+1 Janet. Beautiful sunny weather across much of the lower 48.

Half the world is coming into summer. Being outside is good on a number of counts.

I read, “what is not happening” as referring to COVID-19. I was thinking our end of the year orienteering party, which my orienteering organization send an email message this week stating it’s cancelled.

And yes then I thought what is happening. I just decided to try to run every trail on one of our orienteering maps—including all the unmapped trails—with the idea to update the map. I’m thinking something like half a dozen 10 km runs. Unfortunately today, my second day of run every trail, I aggravated a muscle.

What is not happening?
The opening of the US-Canada border any time soon.

Thankfully in my part of the world the WA-every state except Victoria and NSW border is about to open.

US election-watching is probably easier from Australia's time zone than it is from America's.

Makes a change from watching major orienteering races anyway. As well as being in the other hemisphere, they are always the opposite longitude. Funny that.

Norway just entered the second major shutdown, after a few record setting days for new (detected) infections. We almost certainly had far more in the spring, but now we test everyone who wants a test or who we think could have been exposed.
The result is that the race I should have run today have been cancelled, but Nydalens SK should have had a "home camp" this weekend, and all the training courses have been opened up for everyone.

The UK (well the English bit of the UK) went into Lockdown 2.0 on Thursday 5th.
All orienteering competitions (such that they were) suspended until 2nd December at least....

The US- Canada border is closed? Not so. The only part that is closed is personal non-essential (thanks for the correction Ralph) travel by land and in one direction. That is Canadians can travel by land to Canada and USA residents can travel by land to the USA.
Good points about getting out and getting out mapping. Personally at this time of year I am in Florida preparing for upwards of 10 orienteering events I'll stage in the next four months. This year, still in Florida, I get to catch up on an equal number of mapping and re-mapping projects.
But my original post was a comment on the decline in the number of posts on Attack Point. For the first few years of its existence I paid no attention to Attack Point. Now I'm more or less addicted to getting up in the very early morning to look for new content on Attack Point. You could say that AP has become my morning cup of coffee.

So it's closed then if it's not free to travel for everyone. Technically Australia's internal borders aren't closed under your definition but it's very hard to get into some states unless you have a very good reason.

OK, just for fun: what's your favorite university/college campus sprint orienteering map? 1. West Point 2. Dartmouth

Fave Uni campus sprint map: UBC

University of Florida

I've only run on two of them in the US: Stanford (boring) and Berkeley (fun).
The NTH/NTNU map/area can be quite interesting due to lots of altitude.

gordhum, the part you left out is that the border is also generally closed to non-Canadians flying or travelling by water to Canada. (And the wording for what is closed is non-essential travel rather than non-emergency travel. I was able to make one driving trip to the US based on it not being classified as personal non-essential travel.)

But you're correct that the border closure doesn't stop a Canadian from flying to an orienteering event in California, Florida or Arizona, flying back home, and then doing the two week quarantine once back.

@SherlockHolmes: The USMAOC campus sprint mapper appreciates your sentiments. Even though I can't get him to read AP regularly.

And if they would let us run through the cadet area? Oh, wow... (JLaughlin, can you help us out? ;-)

How about the Lehigh Univ campus map?

I enjoyed the Indiana University sprint a lot. But I grew up in Bloomington and had a summer job on campus one year.

Hogwarts would be great, of course...

Indiana was 3rd on my list.

Favorite sprint map: UBC
Favorite sprint terrain: UW

@gordhun: what about Florida State University or rather what´s the difference between FSU and University of Florida from an orienteers point of view ;-)?

@Claudia: both FSU and UF are great campuses for both sprint and regular orienteering. Speaking of Tallahassee so is FAMU. FLO has an orienteering map of UCF and Suncoast Orienteering has one of USF which we have used twice and one of Florida Atlantic which we have yet to use. I am working on one now at U of North Florida.
From a mapping standpoint it is much easier to make a regular orienteering map than a sprint map, at least in Florida as it sometimes look as if the universities have sent their geography students out to make the best Open Street Map of the campus they can. Those OSM maps give us a great head start.

it takes several days to count the votes to determine who will be their president

Josef Stalin put it well: Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes, decide everything..

Sitting here waiting for any type of actual proof of malfeasance.

Biden won, what more proof could you ask for? ;p

1. West Point 2. Dartmouth

Was super impressed by both of these over the past few years. Great courses as well.

Please don't do that Gswede - pretty sure forever is long enough to cause the negative health effects of sitting too much science has been telling us about for years. Also, we'd miss you out and about.

Like most of Europe, including my daughter who is a US citizen, I was hoping to get rid of Trump, but I'm still extremely saddened that the US has turned into such a sharply polarized society.

Here in Norway, even though we cannot point to one single member of parliament as "my representative", I still believe that the need for coalitions between multiple parties in order to generate a majority tend to reduce the amount of animosity.

Until the Tea Party took over the Republican party, both sides in the US would lean in towards the middle in order to get elected, now you pretty much have to be a rabid right-winger in order to win the nomination, and the same goes at least partly for the Democrats, but without (so far) the worst excesses we've seen from the other side.

The one thing I will _never_ understand is how ~70 million "Christian Evangelicals" could vote for a guy who breaks most of the "10 Commandments" as well as several of the "7 Deadly Sins" every month?

Facebook and Fox News, that's how.

We have plenty of paradoxes. Many of the Christian Evangelicals have as one of their primary issues the need to be heavily armed. What sort of gun would Jesus carry?

@Becks Fox News isn't even radical enough these days. Many are migrating to OANN and Newsmax because those channels only tell them the stories they want to hear and how they want to hear them, regardless of the obvious failure to verify facts.

I also blame all social media, not just Facebook, for allowing massive distribution of misinformation and disinformation packaged as confirmed facts.

I've spoken with quite a few people in NEPA who voted twice for Obama, but now strongly support Trump. When I ask them for their reasons, they invariably cite something they read on Facebook or a video they saw on Youtube. Many of these people are also QANON supporters. It appears to be more widespread than many have estimated.

Finding a way to limit the spread of misinformation must be one of our primary goals over the coming years because, as Voltaire said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Attackpoint is not an appropriate place for these discussions, imo, but I've decided to no longer be quiet on this issue that I honestly see as an existential threat to our country.

You cite unsubstantiated or misleading facts, you're getting called out on it.

Thank you, Gwsede.

Terje,

and the same goes at least partly for the Democrats, but without (so far) the worst excesses

That has changed lately, with democrat party hijacked by radical leftists.
They largely abandoned core American culture and values, embraced globalism, multiculturalism, nihilism. This is aggravated by MSM (WaPo, NYT, NPR, CNN etc) spewing non-stop communist propaganda and disinformation.

Multiculturalism? In the USA? Oh, the horror!

(As Steve Martin once said, I believe the United States should allow all foreigners in this country, provided they can speak our native language... Apache.)

I suspect that radio is more powerful than cable TV.

Interesting opinion piece, yurets

I should close my FB account. Every time I go on there I feel like telling people to stop being so misled or asking pointless questions the answers to which can be easily found with a five second search (I get the feeling many FB users learned how to use FB but their knowledge of the internet ends there). I don't get that on this site.

My observations from afar are that Donald Trump is by no means a unique character in the democratic political world - indeed we have someone in Australia (Clive Palmer) who has a great deal in common with Trump, right down to the frequency of his bankruptcies. (Arguably, the pioneer for this type of politics was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).

What is largely unique in the US (in the Western world, at least) is the combination of a deeply entrenched two-party system (itself partly the result of an electoral system which uses first-past-the-post single-member electorates almost everywhere, even at local level), and a primary election system which allows an outsider to effectively launch a hostile takeover of one of those two parties.

(By way of contrast, Clive Palmer formed his own party, and was elected once to Parliament in his local district but got no further; more recently he's influenced election results through spending vast amounts of money on negative advertising, without getting many votes of his own).

Don’t make the mistake of asserting those who disagree with you are misinformed. You will frustrate yourself before you enlighten them.

I am not asserting they're misinformed and I'm certainly not trying to enlighten them. I'm asking them to back up claims with substantiated proof.

If they can back it up, that is wonderful.

@ yurets: the US is one of the most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations. It's large corporations all support and practice globalism. It could do with a little nihiilsm, as jj pointed out above many of it's god-botherers are most unchristianlike.

I'm sure the mainstream media would be quite surprised to learn that they have communist leanings. Isn't it Trump who is loved by Putin, Xi Jin Ping and Kim Jong Un?

AP has largely been politic-free. Orienteering politics aside, which is fair game. I'd much rather it remain a haven from the worldly stuff.

Simmo, I suppose it depends on which gods they fancy bothering. I reckon Thor could wake things up a bit.

To get back to Sprint O maps: Possibly the most interesting map near where I grew up is the one in Brevik near Porsgrunn on the southern coast of Telemark. It was used for our national championship in 2009.
Here's a race my brother Magne did in 2014:
https://www.mwm.name/qr/show_map.php?user=magne&am...
Here's a better & more recent (2017) copy of the most interesting part of this old shipping town, please note the _very_ significant altitude changes!
http://freidig.idrett.no/o/doma/show_map.php?user=...

With apologies to the apolitical...

Paraphrased j-man: people who disagree with Gswede are generally incapable of admitting they might be wrong about anything so there's no point in trying to reason with them.

With similar apologies...

I'd be interested to hear about the Norwegian experience (Terje?, others?) with Quislings.
What % of the population were they, and how were they incorporated back into Norwegian society?

For ease of clicking--here is the area corresponding to the above maps: https://www.google.com/maps/place/3950+Brevik,+Nor...

@j-man: Another clickable option: https://mapant.no/?#9/59.0571/9.7025
The industrial buildings north of Brevik is the Norcem process plant, located here because these cliffs are mostly limestone which they could quarry.

@EricW: Besides having the canonical traitor (Quisling) we ended up repatriating most of the war criminals who didn't get shot in the first year or two, the worst treatment was probably reserved for those young women who had fallen in love with and/or gotten pregnant with a German soldier: They and their innocent kids were abused for a generation. :-(

Eric. There is a good Norwegian movie available on some US streaming service - The King's Decision, I think is the title.- It mentions Quisling. It also shows some well-known Norwegian orienteering locales. The movie contains a good example of how fake (or twisted) news can be used to manipulate public policy.

@gordhun: I believe that is the movie about King Haakon VII who got the labor party prime minister and cabinet to grow a spine instead of capitulating to the German occupiers, he basically told them that he would resign as King if they did give in.

I think it's "The King's Choice"

@tRicky - do it! Quit Facebook over two years ago now, haven't regretted it at all. Everyone person who takes their information off that goddamn platform is contributing in a miniscule way towards their eventual downfall.

@gswede I think Facebook is so bad because of the ability to make groups secret and invite only. So information passes freely with no oversight and no opportunity to be challenged. Unlike twitter, where everything except DMs is in the open. (Should caveat this with don't really like any social media, but that's why I think Facebook is the worst - also because of what someone said above that for a bunch of late adopters Facebook IS the internet, so that's all they ever see).

Our best sprint map: www.mapsport.co.nz/hvoc/pball04omax.pdf

Is a paintball venue on an overgrown gravel production site. Features a maze in the vegetation, shapes are oil drum groups and car tire piles, shipping containers make an indoor section. Yes of course the map is not IOF compliant. Actually I can see us discovering more detailed sprint terrains than can be mapped at 1:4000, the typical school offers multiple routes at the building level as opposed to the city block level. We will go down the same path that forest map scale has.

What's the deal with the oversized control circles ( / ellipses) on that map, gruver? Were F and J just 'somewhere in the circle, seek and ye shall find'?

Becks yes Facebook has its political wannabee pundits and young people who think that simply by insulting someone you win an argument but they can be pushed aside.
I find Facebook a good medium for my very small orienteering club. For exchanging graphics Facebook groups such as Orienteering mapper and Orienteering Community are far easier than Attack Point. Without Facebook I would not have been sent this photo of an Ottawa young lady joining with two others to win the Finnish ladies' orienteering relay championship.
Or post this story as few years ago in honour of my younger sisters' 65th birthdays.

Yes Feet, I think this particular course was a bit of fun, though we have used it for a national league event. (We dont have slavish adherence to the IOF round here:-)) The use of letters rather than numbers comes from an event style where, with one map edition, competitors starting side by side are given a different looping order. But it was the map I was promoting rather than the course. And the scale heh heh.

Actually, in the forest 1:10,000 is the norm in NZ even for elites. Justification: laser printing, and plethora of detail (sand-dunes, mining terrain). But its strange that we dont generally produce sprint maps of school/uni campuses at 1:2666 or larger, when the same considerations apply. With some exceptions as for this example.

Gord, that's a cool birthday tribute to your sisters.

Yes there should be more flexibility on scale in ISSprOM (as there should be in ISOM). In the days of PWT 1:3000 was common in very detailed areas.

There is an IOF norm for school maps but it is aimed at school orienteering not sprint events:

https://orienteering.sport/symbol-set-for-school-m...

(when you click on the "here" link you have to scroll right down to the very last document to find the school map symbols.)

It is basically ISSprOM with symbols enlarged by 125% and a few extra symbols and scale 1:1000.

We've recently adopted the school symbol set except the footprints for some of the new symbols (tables, hydrant) are massive so I tend not to use them. Mind you the problem with the last map I drew was that I did it at 1:4000 then converted it to 1:2500 afterwards, which is what I should have done at the start.

@robplow: IOF and ISSprOM allows/encourages the exact same enlargements for sprint maps as for forest maps, at least for the older competitors. I.e. getting 1:3K or 1:2.5K instead of 1:4K as a 60+ runner would be totally OK.

Tricky - yes the tables and hydrant symbols are way too big - I just make them smaller. I think i reduced the playground equipment symbol a bit too.

Terje - I am well aware of the ISOM and ISSprOM rules on enlargements for older competitors. Allowing larger scales with corresponding symbols enlargements for older competitor is not the sort of "flexibility on scale" I am talking about - it is just enlarging a 1:4000 map. The sort of flexibility I am talking about is allowing larger scales without symbol enlargement in order to better map very detailed areas.

If you were to map an area at say 1:3000 with no symbol enlargement you would then logically want to give the older classes an enlarged map - say 1:2000 or 1:1500.

[Similarly in ISOM there is no flexibility on scale - all maps have to be made to 1:15000 standard . You can give older classes 1:10000, or 1:7500, but you cannot make a map at 1:10000 without symbol enlargement.

Perhaps to to be really clear and pedantic I should replace the phrase "flexibility on scale" with "flexibility on the relationship between scale and symbol sizes".

tRicky our Mapping chief has developed a template for school maps which allows you to choose a suitable scale and symbols will all be 125% enlargement of ISSprOM. Pretty sure you've been sent that.

Yes I have but I got it after I drew my last school (I was meant to be the test subject with the 125% enlargement) so the one I had was for me to test the procedures - whereby I promptly did exactly the opposite of what I mentioned to the MC and changed the scale only after drawing the school! Would have been so much easier to fit stuff in had I done it before.

Thanks robplow for highlighting the difference between a larger scale for elites for terrain and laser printing reasons, and a FURTHER scale enlargement to recognise older orienteers eyesight. These address two quite different threats to legibility.

isn't it Trump who is loved by Putin, Xi Jin Ping and Kim Jong Un?

But then he is hated by HRC, BHO, Justin Trudeau...which totally redeems him

@robplow: I did an internal experiment last year, mostly limited to members of the Norwegian mapping commission, where I took that extremely detailed cliff labyrinth near Larvik (Vestmarka) which was used for O-Festivalen 2019, and made a series of both enlargements and symbol size adjustments:

Going all the way to 1:10K scale with 1:15K symbols, then enlarging that, caused a map which was in consensus too hard to read. Most preferred a significantly smaller step, similar to your suggestion of using 1:3K for a 1:4K sprint map while keeping the symbol sizes, this is effectively the same as moving from 1:10K to 1:7500 while keeping the symbols.

BHO sounds like something that Trump, all his supporters, and yurets are all on (look it up!).

Terje
In the late 80's when I was running and mapping in Sweden there was a guy who was advocating mapping at 12500 - he was generally dismissed as a fool.

But maybe that would be a good comprise for what you describe - do the map at 10000 with 125% enlargement (which is the same as making a map at 12500). And then make 7500 map for the oldies.

I have tried a couple of 10000 maps with 125% symbols - no one noticed unless I told them.

Ivar Helgesen has advocated, and produced a number of maps at 12,500. Mostly norrth Norway?
I'm not sold on the concept. but will say it was well-suited to the maps I saw.

@simmo: I was referring to a known radical activist, an Alinsky follower

There have been a few 12.5k maps in Norway, but over the last few decades any map not according to the IISOM norm would probably not get any government lottery money, which normally covers 1/3 of the costs.

I just don't understand this compulsion to regiment standards. Why should all maps be the same when all terrain is not the same. I understand the advantages of symbol standards and control description standards but why a standard map scale?
Just now I'm working on a new map. When finished and printed I would have to go to 11x 17 paper with a lot of waste around the edges but at 1:12,500 the whole area fits well on 8.5x11. It looks fine and because of the nature of the terrain it is still very read-able and more importantly the smaller piece of paper cuts our printing costs virtually in half. And yes it is important to have definitive boundaries for this map.

OK, that is just bizarre and getting quite silly - government is deciding on map standards in Norway?? Do they use an algorithm to check whether a map is compliant with "IISOM" sic (or is that ISOM and ISSOM)?
Or is that Norwegian humour??

The reason for standards is so that people can get something that they can train for. You show up in Elbonia, and you find out that their maps are 1:12345, and you're trying to figure out how many paces for a centimeter on the map, and making a custom scale with adhesive tape and a sharpie on the edge of your compass, but you're still thrown off because things don't appear when you expect them to.

Personally, I'm pretty much immune to this, because I almost never pace count (sometimes in the dark), and I've had cases where I finished a course with no problem, and only realized after I finished that the scale wasn't what I thought (1:15000 vs 1:10000). But having all sorts of scales is just an invitation for chaos. This is, in my opinion, one of the dubious benefits of our modern digital age. In the days of ink drafting, it was a pretty big and irreversible decision to pick the map scale. Now it's all too easy to get weird.

(And I'm guilty of this. I think on more than one occasion (for fairly high-profile meets) I've printed maps at a slightly smaller scale than what was listed, in order to fit onto the available paper. If you checked the graphic scale or the north line spacing with a ruler, the truth would be revealed.)

If larger paper is available, bear in mind that the amount of paper that would be wasted is insignificant compared to the unsolicited advertisements that arrive in the mailbox every day. (Printing costs for the larger paper may be an issue, though.)

I don't know how I'd pace count in a country comprised entirely of mud anyway so scale wouldn't be much of an issue.

Personally, I've always felt that part of being a truly great orienteer (I am not) is being able to adapt to whatever scale you are given. Last night, I ran in a score-O on the bizarre scale of 1:6500. It was a bit challenging getting used to the different scale, but still fun, and an appropriate navigational challenge. I didn't even notice until after I had finished that the map had no contour interval indicated - not sure what it was, but it definitely seemed like a fairly subtle interval of 2.5 meters or possibly less.

Around here we often use a scale of "whatever fits onto an A4 sheet". At yesterday's training which was a print-your-own-map, some people turned up with "whatever-fits-times-1.41" having printed onto A3. Always good to be able to see the map.

Are you sure you are talking about same thing? Printing out 1 :8765 as enlargement is common. Making 1:8765 scale map using symbols not enlarged with the same factor is not that common. I think what Terje wrote is making 1:7000 map with non standard symbol sizes (like 1:7000 using symbols sizes of 15 000 scale) may not make your map qualify as an O map, so you may also risk getting funding meant for making O maps.

In addituion, adaptation is easy (or not much needed) and can be learned, if symbols are enlarged with the same factor as the map. Much harder when symbols size / scale factor is far from the usual strict enlargement.

What Jagge said. If you print your map at a scale different from 1:15000, enlarge your symbols (including control circles) accordingly. In forest orienteering, the diameter of the control circle should always represent 75 m. In that case adaption to any unusual scale is really easy.

I once ran an event on a 1:15000 map without noticing it wasn't 1:10000 until the race was over (which shows how much one scales one's mental picture of the terrain to the symbol sizes).

@Jagge & @WR: Exactly right! Pure enlargements, i.e. both map and course objects, have been OK for a long time.
What the national funding rules specify is that any sports stadium/equipment (which is what an O map is classified as) has to be built according to the proper standards as defined by the international federation competition rules, so ISOM/SSprOM for lottery funded O maps. BTW, it is up to the county mapping commission to verify and provide the official stamp of approval for all new maps.
My own experimental sprint map over Asmaløy outside Fredrikstad have never applied for any public funds, so there I can do whatever I like, which still meant trying to follow ISSOM rules originally, now converting to ISSprOM. My main exception to the rules is that I ignore the minimum size/width rules for both open (yellow) and bare rock (grey), because I have used LiDAR to generate all the yellow, and then another semi-automated process whereby all naked rock is identified on aerial photos, converted to a B&W bitmap and then I wrote another program to vectorize this raster image. The result is clearly not according to the rules but very readable as a gestalt, showing clearly that some directions and some routes provide more bare rock than others:
https://tmsw.no/o/asmaloy_bare_rock.PNG

Printing a map at a scale different than what is indicated seems insane to me. Get different paper or edit the layout. Otherwise, it’s a dereliction of duty.

Producing a map at anything other than 1:10 seems extremely suboptimal. Wasn’t it affirmed here that imperial measurements were an unfortunate artifact, not to be used? Who wants to convert feet into meters? Who wants to do math with their cm compass scale to some ratio besides 1:10? Orienteering racing isn’t a math exercise while running.

I'll point out here that at a Billygoat a few years ago, on a 1:10000 map, j-man was one of the few who took the 1:15000 option.

I actually also prefer Billygoats and longs at 1:15 because of how easy it is to see the entire range of route choices.

Gord to answer your implicit question, life is back to normal. People are talking about those mapping issues.