I love lists like this – combining space and nerdy things is one of my favorite things in the world! So check out Wired’s 9 Nerdy Film Locations You Need to Visit in Your Lifetime. It covers everything from Star Wars, to Lord of the Rings, to 12 Monkeys. If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll [...]
Kaggle is a website company that holds predictive modeling competitions for prize money. It’s premise is that there is a lot of data out there that needs to be analyzed and not enough skilled people to do it. They use crowd sourcing to attract smart competitors and interdisciplinary scientists from over 100 countries. Although they [...]
A recent article in The Guardian, “Your Moons are Rubbish, Astronomer tells Christmas Card Artists“, by science Ian Sample was entertaining but also raised several serious scientific questions. Peter Barthel from the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands wrote an article for the journal Communicating Astronomy with The Public on astronomical realism in [...]
Matthew Erickson, deputy graphics director at The New York Times, has a great post about ”When Maps Shouldn’t Be Maps” or how location can be represented by a broad range of geovisualizations. He discusses that while using a map is often the right choose when presenting information that geovisualizations can add to the story. He has [...]
A short article in this month’s National Geographic magazine gives me a chance to tell a funny kid’s joke about zebras. ”There were two chickens standing at crosswalk. One says to the other: Should we cross the road? The other one says: No Way! Look what happened to the zebra!” According to the National Geographic article,”Scanning [...]
Sometimes I think we can forget how beautiful the human built environment can become. The All That Is Interesting Blog had an interesting piece last week on the Eixample district of Barcelona. This district was famously built in the early 20th century specifically with a grid layout and rounded street corners. The idea behind the [...]
Halloween is a holiday that has often been associated with maps… treasure maps, spooky house plans, escape routes, and trick-or-treat routes. I think it is also the holiday with the most spatial app maps. Useful Halloween maps include the No Trick Treats interactive map to identify houses handing out treats for kids with dietary restrictions, [...]
You have probably already heard about the U.S. Center For Disease Control’s unique outreach effort to educate the public about being prepared for a large scale emergency. They used the public’s interest in zombie movies like Zombieland and books like World War Z to create a zombie comic based on actual preparedness training. The Preparedness [...]
I’m thrilled with any post that allows me to make a The Police reference. Harold Hackett has a rather unusual hobby – he puts messages in a bottle and throws them into the sea. If you’re thinking this is a big waste of time, you’d be wrong. He’s put out 4,800 messages and has gotten [...]
In the spirit of putting up maps this week, The Guardian has an article about a fun Zombie Map of the World created by the Oxford University’s Internet Institute. Class3Outbreak is an interactive game that uses Google Maps to create a zombie game based on your own zombie personalized game.
