HW: U.S. Tour, VENUES (Dallas)

[Stephen Lindsey]

>

Kieth H said:

> Yeah, great, is anyone here an expert in GIS??

Well actually that would be me I suppose,

> This would make a great
> Arc/Info project,

Now go and wash your mouth out with soap, Kieth. ArcBlerrgh Indeed !

I'd say a little more about what GIS is except Kieth answered a question
of that sort with the followup:

>>
GIS stands for Geographical Information Systems, which is a computer-based
'science' used most often for city planning, zoning, public utilities, etc. but
also for certain natural resource/environmental monitoring.  It combines
computer-based cartography/geodetics with 'attribute' data (like demographics,
population density, land use/land cover) in order to do things like decide
where to put a new highway, or build a new shopping mall.  My comment about
using this to plan out a successful Hawkwind tour was sort of tongue-in-cheek,
but I'm sure that it really could be helpful if you knew what specific things
to plan for.  Like, you could plan a route that would be cheapest based not
just on mileage, but also on hotel fees, tolls, gas prices, rental vehicles,
border crossings, if you could parameterize each of these things correctly.
>>>>

Well said, GIS does get used for automated route planning, where an intrinsic
part is often network analysis, where here the network is the geographic
road network. We could of course apply a separate pass for optimal site
 selection, and then do a second pass for the optimal route. The tricky
part is deciding what parameters you want to use (correspondance with
-ahem- vegetation patterns, avoiding hurricanes, good coverage of likely
alien encounter areas, easy access to Indian reservations).  This is what
we GIS system developers call "application work"  ;-)  ie we give you the tools,
you figure out what you want to do with it !

> assuming you could come up with a good algorithm for
> determining Hawkwind demographics.  I think we could perhaps apply some of the
> 'Tap' factors to the general population of the US to determine who might likely
> be interested in attending a HW show.
>
> Keith H. (FAA)
>

Hmm, average male hair length as correlated to
sales of psychedelic music by region  that would help. Anybody ?

I'd redo my last attempt at an optimal route projection, but I suspect
a bias in my algorithm. Last time it seemed to suggest 25 successive
nights in Toronto................

Cheers,
Steve L.

[Unisys GIS Division]