Is it possible that today’s global positioning systems and smartphones are affecting our basic ability to navigate? Will technology alter forever how we get around?
Most certainly—because it already has. Three thousand years ago, our ancestors began a long experiment in figuring out how they fit into the world, by inventing a bold new tool: the map.
Today Esri is proud to announce that we are making our own global collection of satellite imagery available to the OSM community directly through our existing World Imagery Service. This regularly updated resource provides one meter or better satellite and aerial photography in many parts of the world, 15m TerraColor imagery at small and mid-scales (~1:591M down to ~1:72k), 2.5m SPOT Imagery (~1:288k to ~1:72k), 1 meter or better NAIP in the US and many other curated sources, so we know it will make a welcome addition to OSM’s growing catalog of reference layers.
OSM editors have been able to trace maps from satellite imagery for years; other sources of such imagery have included Bing and Yahoo (back when Yahoo Maps was a thing). Different sources have different strengths, so this can only help the project. (Esri’s imagery makes no difference where I am, but that’s not a surprise.)
Hurricane Harvey on 26 Aug at 5:45 PM CDT (2245 UTC), as captured by NOAA’s GOES-East satellite. Credits: NASA/NOAA GOES Project.
NASA’s page on Hurricane Harvey has been updated many times, sometimes several times a day, since Harvey began its life as Tropical Depression 9 on 17 August. It includes plenty of satellite imagery of the storm, as well as temperature and rainfall maps.
Blog posts prior to January 2016 are offline for the time being, the result of my changing this site to a new FTP user account on the same server without taking into account some of the hard links in the PHP code of my legacy pages. Sorry about that. I think I have some idea how to get them back up and running; I’ll let you know when I do.
I meant to post this before today’s solar eclipse, but I spent a good chunk of the past few days dealing with basic site maintenance; during the eclipse itself I was, well, observing and photographing it. But while the iron may not be as red-hot as it was even eight hours ago, it’s still glowing a bit, so how about I clear out some bookmarks:
In the runup to the eclipse there have been some seriously weird and quirky eclipse maps, many of which correlating the path of the eclipse to utterly unrelated things. The first one I saw was this one: the path of the eclipse versus bigfoot sightings.
Earlier this month, the Washington Post’s Wonkblog noted the eerie correlation between Google searches about the eclipse and the path of the eclipse itself:
For Geographical magazine, cartogrammer extraordinaire Benjamin Hennig maps the geography of hate groups in America, with a set of cartograms that show where each category of hate group—anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and so forth—is located.
Richard Kirwan, a former director of Ordnance Survey Ireland, published a memoir in 2010 called If Maps Could Speak (Londubh). That memoir is now available in an ebook edition—or at least it is for the Kindle; I couldn’t find it in other ebook stores. [WMS]
Science fiction/fantasy novelist Alex Acks, a geologist by training, has some issues with Middle-earth’s mountain ranges. “Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.” Basically it comes down to how Tolkien’s mountain ranges intersect at right angles—and mountains don’t do that.
And Mordor? Oh, I don’t even want to talk about Mordor.
Tectonic plates don’t tend to collide at neat right angles, let alone in some configuration as to create a nearly perfect box of mountains in the middle of a continent. […]
To be fair to J.R.R. Tolkien, while continental drift was a theory making headway in the world of geology from 1910 onwards, plate tectonics didn’t arrive on the scene until the mid-50s, and then it took a little while to become accepted science. (Though goodness, plate tectonics came down—I have it on good authority from geologists who were alive and in school at the time that it was like the holy light of understanding shining forth. Suddenly, so many things made sense.) Fantasy maps drawn after the 1960s don’t get even that overly generous pass.
And here I thought Tolkien’s mountains were better than most—but then I’m no geologist, and also than most may not be saying that much.
An online map has been launched that marks the locations of at least 150 massacres of Aboriginal populations during the frontier wars in eastern Australia between 1788 and 1872. ABC News (Australia) has more information and talks with the project lead, Prof. Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle.
It’s like Uncharted Atlas, but for cities: the Medieval Fantasy City Generator is a web application that “generates a random medieval city layout of a requested size. The generation method is rather arbitrary, the goal is to produce a nice looking map, not an accurate model of a city.” As was the case with Uncharted Atlas, the effect is accidentally damning: if an algorithm can create a fantasy setting indistinguishable from a human-made product, what does that say about the human-made product? [Ada Palmer]
Another tale of a traditional map publisher surviving in the face of Google Maps, GPS and smartphones from the Star Tribune, which profiled Minneapolis mapmaker Tom Hedberg earlier this month. Hedberg Maps’s traditional map products sell a fraction of what they used to, and they have fewer employees than they used to, but the company survives, the article says, by focusing on niche publications, like college and sports maps, and custom mapmaking, though their online store still has plenty of street maps. [MAPS-L]
First published in June 2015, Thrillist’s Real D.C. Subway Map replaces Washington’s Metro station names with “an accurate depiction of what you’ll encounter when you exit the train.” It’s about what you’d expect. [Curbed DC]
