VerySpatial » General

Foo Fighters Rock The Planet

Frank — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:58:22 +0000

Nice try Scorpions. Not good enough. The Foo Fighters ACTUALLY rocked us WITH earthquakes! Real, honest to goodness earthquakes! The band took the stage in New Zealand after Tenacious D for a 3 hour set that caused tremors a mile away. How do they know it was the band and not a freak occurrence? Science explains all – ‘There are lulls in the signal between the songs and peaks in signal intensity during the songs.’ Scientists believe the tremors came from the 50,000 fans dancing to songs. In fairness, Tenacious D actually started the tremors during their opening act (I like to think this kicked it off). But really, it was the Foo Fighters that took the tremors to the wall… possibly with this

Gall-Peters just doesn’t get any love

Frank — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:40:12 +0000

What Your Favorite Map Projection Says About You… don’t forget to read the info tag by hovering over the image!

From the always hilarious xkcd.com

How Long Is A Piece Of String?

Frank — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 13:46:52 +0000

It’s amazing what you can find if you slow down when you’re flipping through the channels. The other day I happened to stop at PBS and caught this wonderful documentary, “How Long Is A Piece Of String?”, published by the BBC. It features comedian Alan Davies attempting to accurately measure the length of a piece of string. Ultimately the documentary becomes an exploration of quantum physics, but along the way they cover a great bit of geography in the form of scale. In fact there’s a whole bit in the middle there where Davies attempts to measure a bit of coast line, which neatly demonstrates the coastline paradox. If you want to jump to the paradox bit, it can be found at around 2:15 through just over 5:00 in this smaller video.

And Another Great Tech Pioneer Leaves Us

Frank — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 14:36:31 +0000

The news around the Internet today is that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system, passed away over the weekend. I think it’s a mark of his impact that it might not be readily apparent exactly how important Ritchie was to our modern technology world. The fact of the matter is the majority of today’s Internet runs on some form of Unix. If I might steal a phrase from Steve Jobs, Unix largely ‘just works’. We don’t realize how much it’s humming along every single day. Arc was originally released on Unix, and I think it still impacts its current development. ERDAS’s Imagine feels like it still wants to be primarily a Unix program. Heck, even fundamental OS systems like Mac OS X and Android wouldn’t exist withouth Ritchie’s work.

On top of that, he invented arguably the most important programming language of all time. I’d bet dollars to doughnuts parts the upcoming Arc 10.1 was written in the language he invented. If programming languages were tracked like human languages, C would be the Latin of the programming world. C and it’s off shoots (C++, Objective-C, C#, and even Java) drive pretty much every technology device in the last 20 years or longer.

We lost Steve Jobs last week and his visionary designs will be sorely missed. Almost equally missed will be Ritchie’s visionary infrastructure designs. RIPC Dennis Ritchie…. RIPC.

A Story As A Map

Frank — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:10:57 +0000

I’m a pretty big fan boy of Wil Wheaton (although I still hate Wesley Crusher – SHUT UP Wesley!) I’ve never had a situation when the Venn diagram of my fan boy nerdness (it’s a pretty big chart) has overlapping circles in both ‘geo’ and ‘Wil Wheaton’… until today. In his blog, WWdN In Exile, Mr. Wheaton has a pretty neat post about how he mentally thinks of a story. Rather than try to describe the relevant bit, I’ll just quote it here (and hopefully not violate Wheaton’s Law in doing so):

When I write fiction, the first thing I do is break the story into acts, then into important things within those acts, and then into a few key scenes. Think of it like a map, with some pins pushed into it showing a route from beginning to end. It’s a zoomable map, so some of the pins are closer together on a well-defined path, while others are more general.

The whole thing struck me as rather Google Maps-esque way of thinking about story telling. It’s actually inspired me to pick up the pen a bit more in the future because it gives me a very accessible way to think about story telling. It seems like it’s a mental model that has applications even for those working on non-fiction, so I thought I’d pass it along!

Transportation… OF THE FUTURE!

Frank — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 20:37:40 +0000

If you’ve ever heard me chatting with Elvin of the ArcPad team, you’ll know that I can wax poetic about cars almost more easily than I can about GIS. I think an awful lot about transportation (mostly old cars, but still…) It always fascinates me to think how well all get around in the future. How we move about our urban and suburban spaces has a large impact on our cultural and social development, so keeping tabs on this sort of thing could be important. Luckily people who actually have the power to make things happen share this same fascination.

Two European car companies have recently tossed their hat into the ring for personal transportation of the future. Last week Volkswagen showed their NILS single seat electric car. Obviously it’s just a prototype, but I can get behind any moving vehicle that features gull wing doors. Neither the speed or range is anything to write home about, but it might be attractive to those with relatively short commutes. Volkswagen says it could actually go into production. Renault has launched a slightly sexier (at least to my eye) vehicle that has no doors at all! The Twizy will come in two different models, what I’m going to call the ‘slow’ model and the ‘SUPER slow’ one. Unlike the VW, this isn’t a prototype – it’s going on sale in Europe in the not too distant future. One interesting feature of the Twizy is you won’t own your batteries; you’ll rent them from Renault instead at the price of $68/month. At European gas prices, that’s probably a pretty good deal.

VW and Renault aren’t the only one’s exploring this market, as you’d imagine. Check out a slightly old but still interesting video from the British series Top Gear where they explore Toyota’s concept vehicle iReal. Of course if you really want a historical perspective, check out this other Top Gear video showing the smallest car……… in the world!

XKCD Gets It Right Again

Frank — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:00:06 +0000

AND makes me feel like a slacker… If the artist wasn’t so great at this comic, I’d say he should become a geographer

Kansas Flatter Than A Pancake

Frank — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 12:43:12 +0000

Don’t let anyone tell you that geographers aren’t cool! A group of three geographers from Texas State University and Arizona State University decided to test the old adage, “Kansas is flat as a pancake”. To quote the authors: “To the authors, this adage seems to qualitatively capture some characteristic of a topographic geodetic survey 2. This obvious question “how flat is a pancake” spurned our analytical interest, and we set out to find the ‘flatness’ of both a pancake and one particular state: Kansas.” Their method is reasonably sound and deliciously geographic! The results clearly show that a pancake has a flatness quotient of .957, whereas Kansas has a quotient of .9997 – what the authors call “damn flat”.

Man I love geography!

On The Line

Jeff — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 02:44:26 +0000

I’ve been fortunate enough to look over the shoulders of a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The project titled “On The Line” is an online, interactive history of schooling, housing and civil rights in the city of Hartford, Connecticut that was created by Jack Dougherty of Trinity College. What makes this online text ‘spatial’ is the series of interactive Google Maps linked to historical redlining documents, as well as view historical photos in Historypin, and examine historical data in linked map viewers.

The site also provides a series of excellent lesson plans ready for educators to use in the classroom.

Getting rid of all Left Turns

Frank — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:46:26 +0000

Some transportation engineers at NS State University have published a new study that shows left turns aren’t needed. We can create what are called “superstreets” that allow only right hand turns. This improves both travel times and safety, not to mention fuel economy. This isn’t exactly a new idea. Michigan already has this type of system (hence the “Michigan left” nickname) and it seems to invoke a love/hate relationship with drivers. UPS implemented a virtual system of no left turns years ago to save fuel and increase safety. There are a couple of things left out of the news reports on this, however. A system like this would take more land for roads, not less. Also, crossing 2-3 lanes of traffic to get to the U-turn can be problematic, I’d imagine, especially in rush hour. I’d also imagine the British would suggest this problem can be fixed with a good old ’round about’, although they’ve not really caught on in the US.

What do you guys think? Should left turns be a thing of the past we tell our grandkids about, like Atari and TV tubes, or do left turns make the most sense if you’re going left?