I am a bit of a cartography nerd – this is known by some people. I have been spending some of my vacation time playing around with some pretty elaborate map-drawing software. The tools I'm using are JOSM on OSM files (OSM is from openstreetmap.org, but you can create offline map files using that format, which is transparently xml and open source). They have created a completely open-source world map that rivals google maps in quality, and being open-source, the data-sets are queryable and downloadable, which is fun for cartography nerds. OSM is a pretty elaborate scheme – there are whole websites dedicated to explicating the intricacies, including the official OSM wiki.
Most of what's on the wiki is strictly informational, and dry, reference-style prose, often evidently written by non-native-speakers of English (OSM's user-base seems to be in continental Europe and former Soviet bloc, as is true for many successful open-source platforms).
All of the preceeding, however, is merely by way of introduction. I ran across a very excellent bit of humor today in surfing the OSM wiki: a guy proposing a data standard for mapping clouds ("tagging" is the term of art for this type of data standard). His proposal begins as I quote below:
Tag:natural=cloud
Used to tag an area of clouds. Clouds are very prominent landmarks which can obscure the sky for people living underneath them. They also cause a loss of precision in the mapping of the area they cover, because they hide the surface of the earth on aerial imagery.
Under "related tags," he mentions:
rainy=yes/no – is used to indicate if the cloud can cause rainfalls.
My understanding, in perusing the comment threads attached to this entry, is that the author intended an April Fool's joke. In any event, it appealed to my sense of humor, especially to find it so well-done in such a normally dry and unhumorous context as a software reference website.
I guess I spent the day vegetating in front of the internet. Not really a way to feel I was using my time positively. I'm need to stick to my "no internet rule for Sundays" tomorrow, I think.
[daily log: walking, 13 m]