There aren’t too many things to be proud about as a Minnesotan. We are a small state population wise.

There’s Bob Dylan – but he ditched us for the East Coast at a young age. There is Prince, but let’s be honest: few people pulled out Prince albums the decade leading up to his premature death.

There are US ice hockey players, stellar Nordic skiers, Olympic curling champions, but Canada (deservedly) gets more credit for winter sports things – even though its close as to whether a majority of Minnesotans live further north than a majority of Canadians.

So imagine my surprise and glee when I saw National Cellophane Tape Day on my calendar for this week. Cellophane tape was invented, patented, and produced by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M). (The same company that invented and dispersed forever chemicals around the world, thereby ensuring Minnesota is truly never forgotten!)

Yes, you can still use staples. I met one renowned academic cartographer who still only uses staples to this day. But 3M Scotch tape is so much more practical. (Beware: Amazon Basics cellophane tape does not stand up by comparison in my personal experience. Buy name brand or suffer the consequences. It never pays to be frugal when buying cellophane!)

Today’s map tries to mend the world with cellophane. It was a bit of an experiment. If you unwind the roll (angling it and changing the latitude) you’ll see what happens. The roll lass a full minute. Good luck!

View map here

Web Mapper GPT Prompt

Hi there,

I’d like to make a silly map for National Cellaphane Tape Day.

What I’m picturing:
– an orthographic, 3D globe-like Earth with natural earth-esque hillshading and landcover or similar
– a giant roll of tape that the user can move up and down vertically to the right side of the earth
– an earth that begins to spin and get covered in the tape, which is automatically applied, based on where the user has moved the tape roll vertically. It’s mostly see through, but overlapping layers will make it slightly less transparent. After 20 – 30 seconds of coating, the map spinning stops and the roll runs out of tape.
– Fixing the world’s problems: more tape than there is in the galaxy.
– For everything else, there is 3M Scotch (i.e., Celluphane) Tape (use correct spellings).

Can you come up with a map that does this and an animation and create a simple (barely interactive) tape roll to make my vision become reality?

One of the first recorded longest paper airplane flights was in the 1980s. It took place in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Had I known when I I was a professor at UW-La Crosse, I may have celebrated this day with the family earlier. Alas… should’ve, could’ve. Maybe, if I don’t die penniless, I will leave money to build a monument in celebration or something. (If I remember…)

It’s hard to follow Towel Day. That day actually means something. I was pleased to see Paper Airplane Day, however, as I remember fondly building many of these things in the 1980s. I had a Scholastic book on how to build different types of paper airplanes, and since there was no internet, and northern Minnesota was frozen 10 months a year, I made 100s and tested them out in our house.

So this day made me happy. And I didn’t feel like making another satirical or straight-up sarcastic map. Rather, I thought I’d just make a cute little, harmless info graphic showing how the record keeps getting stretched further and further.

And here it is.

No Aviation Mechanic Technicians required.

View Map Here

ChatGPT 5.5 Straight-Up

I would like to make an animated info graphic concerning paper airplanes.

My thought is:
– we create a dataset of paper airplane record throws/lengths in the 20th century or whenever such competitions and records started being recorded.
– I would like a simple, modern looking animation showing a plane take off from the left-side of the window and land. It should make a mark where it lands, and fade away. Leaving behind a tick mark and a distance in meters.
– Then another plane, which will go slightly farther.
– Then another…
– They should go in chronological order.
– When it’s done, there should be a scatterplot of sorts, but with just a zone one starting at 0 and 0. The Y axis should represent years proportionally and the X axis distance in meters.

Make the points interactive including the name of the plane thrower, the year, and the distance in meters.

Style the planes as a cute, polished plane graphic that floats through the air in a slightly up and down motion like a real paper airplane flying until it gradually lands softly.

Keep the visualization minimalist. No axis values, etc. Just simples but styled and modern.

At the top, provide a title that is kind of direct, similar: “Temporal Atlas of Record Paper Airplane Flights”

Visually, focus on the paper airplanes looking stellar adn their flight motion. Thanks!

Douglas Adams. Enough said. Brilliant author. Brilliant free-thinker. And I guarantee you he brought a towel with him to the afterlife… wherever that may be.

Today is Towel Day. If you don’t know what that is, it’s okay. I recommend reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” It will save your life. As will a towel.

Standard ChatGPT Prompt

Please create a world map to celebrate Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It should be about International Towel Day and all the things a towel can be use to do. Please make the map a static image and funny… a kind of Wimmelwelt style pastiche of towls being used to a ton of different things around the world. Feel free to include some aliens and spaceship art too to tie it into the Hitchhiker’s theme (e.g., dolphins flying to space or something? LOL). Whatever comes to mind from the books. Perhaps give the map a witty name like “Mostly Harmless: Towel not Included” or something similar that makes even more sense. Thanks!

The Towel Map

My previous boss was professional aerospace engineer. She had worked for one of the two major airplane manufacturers and a satellite company before joining academia.

It was always interesting going to meetings across the US with her, because she refused to get on a plane. Often she would have to leave a few days before me (e.g., to get to Boston) due to taking a train or driving.

Why wouldn’t she take a plane? I’ll let her quote stand out:

“If you know how those things are designed and built, you wouldn’t ever get on one again either,” she would say, not joking. She said every plane is literally riddled with human error.

I believe her. (It’s one reason I trust LLM output more than my own, often times. Humans hallucinate more than LLMs and certainly can’t hold attention as long – in my experience.

And that’s why I’m always grateful when I’m on a plane that we have amazing airplane maintenance technicians. (It helps that my uncle used to work as an on-call maintenance troubleshooter for flights in duress while in air, and would talk the crew about things they could try to fix midflight to not crash and die. Yeah, he retired early… it was stressful.)

So happy Aviation Maintenance Technician Day! These people deserve to be celebrated far more than odometers in my opinion.

Ignorance is bliss, and one reason we can all be so ignorant about how just precarious commercial flight is comes down to our maintenance technicians. So let’s celebrate this day and be grateful that overall, things are pretty safe in the air. Phew!

Play Map Here

NOTE: The first Version of this was to be a Euro-style card game with a map board of international flight routes. But wow, was it a snooze to play. I love Euro-style board games, and I couldn’t even stomach it. So I started over. The prompt below are the revision directions I used to create the final app.

New Prompt Web Mapper GPT

Can you refashion this concept entirely. Let’s ditch the board game idea. Let’s come up with a new idea, based on this theme, and refashion it as a simple 16-bit-style videogame where there are 1-5 flights circling around an airport and you have to click on things or solve simple little puzzles (with a mouse and keyboard) to help flights land. Should have a map of planes flying around an airport.

Please come up with a simple puzzle videogame overview, plan, synopsis, and structured JSON. The game should last about five minutes total. It should have little puzzles where you have to order shapes in certain patterns within a certain amount of seconds. Or you need to find airplane-based words in a word search. Etc. Something fun and simple to celebrate Aviation Mechanical Technicians. Thanks.

I’m a big taffy fan, so I hate to admit it, but this did not turn out as I envisioned.

And given it’s a holiday weekend here in the US, and it was merely a conceptual attempt to create a stretchy, pully, tacky map about taffy, I’ve decided to leave well enough alone and post it as is.

It was an idea I had. The LLM implemented it coding wise, but I can’t seem to get it to fix the CSS enough to make it compelling. And that’s where I”ll leave it.

Static Image Version

Better than the interactive screen capture below but still… distasteful.

Interactive Sticky Version
Get Stuck Here

Original Prompt

# Intention
Make a silly map for National Taffy Day.

I would like a map of the United States. When the user clicks anywhere on it, and then moves the mouse, a stretchy taffy-looking animation should stretch from the place they clicked to where the pointer goes, eventually (randomly but after a significant distance) disconnecting and laying on top of the map. If the taffy is still stretching when the user clicks somewhere else on the map, the original stretch stops and stays where it is, and a new stretch begins. With more clicks and drags the map will become indecipherable adn covered in taffy. Each state should be colored one of five Laffy-Taffy style colors. The stretching and taffy smearing should be the color of the state the user originally clicked in.

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