Neat! There's a notable omission though--none of the earth globes look like earth does from space, with true color AND clouds. A while ago I got really into making paper globes because I wanted one like that and I couldn't find one I liked. I asked Claude to write a script to generate a net out of this: https://web.archive.org/web/20250316112538/https://visibleea... Instead of an isocahedron, I used gores like a real globe. This approximates a sphere using intersecting cylindrical surfaces (not sure what the term for that solid is!) I made a bunch but usually they came out pretty lumpy, here's the best one: https://imgur.com/a/eikGrTW
I do find it interesting that while modern map apps do a great job of replacing road atlases, and we can get satellite and photogrammetry overlays that give us immense insight into how maps relate to the context on the ground, and we do have pretty good topographic mapping apps (though sadly not built in to the big map apps like Google or Apple), but one kind of map that we used to get in paper atlases but can’t explore so easily online are political maps. Google Maps is also not great as a physical map in that it is bad at labelling and naming geographic features - Apple Maps does a better job at this. But neither offers a good way to hide all the roads and just look at borders.
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