re. Creating random (but believable) geographies
...snip
That's an idea, but someone *might* recognise their state boundaries, even shifted into the Atlantic and maybe even rotated and given a silly name. I just like the idea of creating totally fictitious regions! That's another interesting problem - creating fake names for regions. I suppose you could have a set of prefixes and suffixes and join them randomly...
using names of disease vectors to generate prefix/suffixes (mosquito, nematode .....)? Can then use family, genus, species etc already nicely arranged into different strata?
Reminds me of the time a few years ago I did a quiz round by printing country and UK county outlines onto paper and cutting the paper into circles so nobody knew where north was. It did confuse people... Barry