the World according to GARP

Also available as a BlackBerry PlayBook App. Check out here for more screenshots. click on map to continue What is GARP Garp is the main person in John Irvings book "The world according to Garp" (recommendable reading!). But GARP is also Geographical Atlas using Radial Projections, a map projection method (officially named Azimuthal Equidistant) used to find the shortest route between two points on earth. For each point on earth, you can draw a map that shows in which direction to depart for other points on earth and how far it will be to reach that destination. GARP will draw circular maps that become more distorted, when you get further from the centre point. The extreme is the point at the opposite side of the globe, which will become the full outer boundary of your circular map. But given that, airline routes, normally drawn as bended curves are now straight lines. And you will see why a plane from London to Los Angelos should fly over Greenland. Another purpose for these maps is the direction antennas should point to when used by radio amateurs. In the past, Garp was implemented as a CGI application. However, with my current service provider I'm not able to run programs on the web-server anymore. Therefore I have ported Garp into a Java applet. Click on the circular map above to get the Garp map for latitude 0 and longitude 0. From there simply click on the map to set new center coordinates.

  Willem van Schaik, Holland, November 1998     http://www.schaik.com/wwwillem.html