[komali2]

Ah fuck, what a good idea and fun project this must have been.

How do people come up with awesome ideas like this? Whenever I have time for a personal project it'll be like... "guess I'll uh.... make this LED on a raspberry pi blink... wheee"

[pizza]

I would bet you probably come up with a really good idea about once a week, and that's being conservative.

The trick is just to store them in some always-accessible note taking app (e.g. Evernote, OneNote, Apple's Notes app) as soon as they come to you (i.e. in the middle of a totally unrelated lecture), and accumulate them over a long period of time (talking years here).

[danielsf]

OP here. This idea was from looking at this map. https://www.wearedorothy.com/collections/music/products/u-s-...

[schoen]

Huh, it looks like the author of that older map might not have realized that "Pennsylvania 6-5000" is about the telephone number of a hotel in New York City (whose telephone exchange was named after Pennsylvania Station, which was named after the Pennsylvania Railroad, which was named after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_6-5000_(song)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_Pennsylvania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Station_(1910%E2%...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad

[dsr_]

I'm amused that in the blowup of New York State, Canajoharie is called out.

I lived in upstate New York for about 15 years and would not have been able to identify the town -- until a few years ago when They Might Be Giants wrote a song with that title.

http://tmbw.net/wiki/Canajoharie

[dredmorbius]

And Wyoming, the state, is named for Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming_Valley

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyoming

[jen20]

This is also the reason the well known 1940 swing song of the same name recorded by the Glen Miller band - after the phone number of the Pennsylvania hotel on 8th Ave whose ballroom they regularly played.

[tashi]

"Washington Bullets" isn't about Washington state either, which seems like a thing he'd be likely to know, so maybe he wasn't trying to be that strict.

[dfxm12]

The map was designed to make money, not to be a historical record.

[jen729w]

It’s beautiful, and reminds me of an idea that I had ... hint ... hint.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Idle Googling led me to the discovery that someone had rated – as in on Maps, with stars – a tram stop. A municipal function, a concrete slab, a place you must necessarily and unavoidably go if you want a tram. Rated. People! Crazy.

So I want a map that, at the level of ‘Melbourne’, aggregates the Google review for everything in view and gives the entire city a score. Then as I zoom in, eventually to the tram stop, I see the ratings of individual things.

Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

[stirner]

> Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

“Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website.” [1]

[1] https://entertainment.theonion.com/pitchfork-gives-music-6-8...

[onychomys]

That would probably just end up being a map of economic conditions in any given section of town. The seedy parts will be lower rated overall (even if there's a highly rated ethnic food joint or whatever), while the swanky parts will have nicer things. That's my guess, although I think you should still do it, because I might be totally wrong. And interesting patterns might still appear even if I'm right.

[RandallBrown]

Even if it is just a map of economic conditions, that's a useful thing to have.

I could imagine it being a great way to find "diamonds in the rough" too where certain places are much higher rated than the places around them.

[komali2]

If it's based only on Google reviews I think it'll be static. For example, the taco Bell in my hometown has 4.5 stars on Google because it's one of the only restaurants in the area.

[mannykannot]

> Ultimately I suppose you’d be able to zoom out to the world and see its Google review score.

Mostly harmless?

[lfx]

Also, you need practice, write 5 ideas a day. Doesn't matter what ideas, things might exist or not exist. After a while, you will have a pile of garbage with some really good jewels between them.

PS. It was mentioned in the book, I don't recall which one.

[c0vfefe]

James Altucher's "Choose Yourself" mentions 10 a day, but I don't think it was original.

[paxys]

The real "trick" is to be able to execute on any one of those. Whenever people see some cool project they instantly go "wish I had thought of that", but 99% of the time it's overcoming all the implementation challenges which is the hard part, not coming up with the idea.

[pembrook]

This isn't a personal project, it's a piece of content from an actual media company (the pudding is awesome). It's a lot easier to do things like this when you it's literally your job and you have things like a budget and a team to make it happen.

[trollsund]

The creator of the Rockstar language was apparently inspired by a tweet he saw. So inspiriaton can come from all sorts of places, but cultivating it into something tangibale is a whole other beast.