Looking for validation (20090302)

Uploading atlas validation data. Then rerunning the atlas validation data generation, as the original only had around 2000 cities in it. And once I discovered that I hadn't been able to update the original atlas data correctly, I managed to get that done, and re-run the validation data generation. Definitely the last time. Perhaps.

Working out the best way to combine a set of date spans, given a set L of date spans: L[(s1,e1), (s2,e2) ... (sn,en)], I need to cycle through the set and merge them down into the smallest set of spans.

I also need to keep track of how many times each portion of a date span occurred within the original set. This is so that the weighting of each date span can be calculated. The simplest way may be to use a sparse array of all possible dates, the largest size is pretty much 80*365 (80 being the maximum age we look at.) Then increment all the dates that are covered by a span.

I need to work on some way to speed up the condition matching. Those that involved a progressed midheaven and ascendant are quite slow/inefficient, mostly because it needs to step through a large number of dates (365*80 on average) checking for a match on each date.

Ended up running the atlas validation just one more time after some tweaking to make sure that we extract the correct county data every time (it seems to be handled differently for different countries)