Boing Boing » geography

Artist finds the faces lurking in maps

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:00:53 +0000

Artist Ed Fairburn selective colors in maps, revealing faces lurking in potentia in their many lines, contours and shapes. He sells prints. These are gorgeous. Shown here: Paris.

Ed Fairburn (via Neatorama)

Realtime map of anonymous edits to Wikipedia

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 13 May 2013 20:59:25 +0000

Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi's "Wikipedia Recent Changes Map" plots anonymous edits to Wikipedia on a world-map in realtime, based on the location of the user (only anonymous users are identified by IP address, so they're the only ones whose locations can be estimated). It's a hypnotic view into Wikipedia's casual users and vandals, as well as unobservant users like (I often forget that I'm logged out until after my edit, and have to go back and add an attribution).

When an unregistered user makes a contribution to Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to the contributor’s approximate geographic location. A study by Fabian Kaelin in 2011 noted that unregistered users make approximately 20% of the edits on English Wikipedia [edit: likely closer to 15%, according to more recent statistics], so Wikipedia’s stream of recent changes includes many other edits that are not shown on this map.
You may see some users add non-productive or disruptive content to Wikipedia. A survey in 2007 indicated that unregistered users are less likely to make productive edits to the encyclopedia. Do not fear: improper edits can be removed or corrected by other users, including you!
This map listens to live feeds of Wikipedia revisions, broadcast using wikimon. We built the map using a few nice libraries and services, including d3, DataMaps, and freegeoip.net. This project was inspired by WikipediaVision’s (almost) real-time edit visualization.

Wikipedia Recent Changes Map

"Lost" continent found under Indian ocean

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:14:56 +0000

Lemuria found, reports Sid Perkins: "The drowned remnants of an ancient microcontinent may lie scattered beneath the waters between Madagascar and India, a new study suggests." [Nature]

Visit beautiful Cape Goodenough

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 22:31:19 +0000

Or as I like to call it, Cape Fuckthiswearegoinghome.

Sadly, Antarctica's Cape Goodenough (pictured here on National Geographic's Political Map of the World) was not named by a less-then-intrepid band of explorers who decided that seeing the coastline of Antarctica was plenty of adventure for them, thankyouverymuch.

Instead, it's named for William Goodenough, admiral in the British Royal Navy. Yes. Admiral Goodenough. I'm sure the troops were enthused.

But wait, there's more. In the 1930s and 1940s, the admiral was apparently involved in the creation of comfortable, dormitory-style housing for international post-graduate students in London. Today, the buildings are known as ... Goodenough College.

Pacific island does not exist

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 14:23:48 +0000

Sandy Island, a 20-mile strip of land in the Pacific between Australia and New Caledonia, easily found on Google Maps and many other charts, does not exist. The ocean at that point is in fact 4,620ft deep.

That's what they're saying, anyway.

LocalWiki Antarctica, a crowdsourced map of the icy southern continent

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 21:52:58 +0000

LocalWiki's Philip Neustrom says,

My non-profit, LocalWiki, has been working on this really incredible project to help document the continent of Antarctica. Most notable, at least right now, is this custom map we've pieced together from very-hard-to-find NASA aerial imagery and coastline datasets. It's probably the most beautiful thing I've ever worked on.

Check out the LocalWiki for Antarctica. The project "aims to document the full extent of human involvement on the continent," and for now is focused on a two-mile region surrounding Palmer Station.

Making Inaccessible Island a little more accessible

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:37:35 +0000

This is a detail from one of the regularly updated maps that researchers in Antarctica use when they want to leave McMurdo Station and travel across the continent's sea ice. It shows the well-traveled routes across McMurdo Sound, ice thickness measurements taken at various points along the road, and hazards like large cracks in the ice.

Towards the north end of the Sound, you can see an island labeled, "Inaccessible Island". I asked Henry Kaiser — a musician and filmmaker who has spent the last decade working with scientists on the frozen continent — about why that island was inaccessible. After all, I didn't see any major cracks or hazards around it. Seems like you could traverse the ice to the island just fine.

Turns out, I was misunderstanding. Inaccessible isn't a designation. Inaccessible is the island's official name. Even though it's not. Inaccessible, I mean. Named by Robert Scott, it's part of a chain of islands that all represent the remains of an ancient volcanic crater. The name apparently comes from the fact that Inaccessible Island is incredibly steep, so while you can reach it, getting onto the damn thing seems to be a lot harder.

Inaccessible Island in McMurdo Sound is not to be confused with the Inaccessible Island that is located in the south Atlantic about halfway between South America and Africa; nor with the Inaccessible Islands, an entire group of islands located between the tip of South America and tip of the Antarctic peninsula; nor with Inexpressible Island, an Antarctic island where part of Scott's crew on his second expedition was forced to spend the winter of 1912 living in a cave and eating penguins.

• Read about Inaccessible Island (the one in McMurdo Sound) in the report of Robert Scott's first expedition to Antarctica, published in 1907.

Martian Mt. Sharp vs. Mt. McKinley

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 20:54:23 +0000

Philip Bump put together this great comparison of Earth's Mt. McKinley and Mars' Mt. Sharp (as photographed by the Curiosity rover).

Officially, it's Aeolis Mons, and it stands 18,000 feet above the crater floor. Here's how that compares to Mount McKinley, America's tallest peak at 20,320 feet. The sea levels / floor levels are roughly comparable. But this is just an approximation. Do not make wagers based on this.

Via pbump.net

Vote for your favorite "Earth as Art" satellite photo, in U.S. Geological Survey poll

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 18:44:41 +0000

Today is the final day for voting in the USGS "Earth as Art" image project. To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the Landsat Program on July 23, 2012, the federal agency seeks your help in selecting the 5 coolest images from more than 120 scenes.

For 40 years Landsat satellites have been acquiring images of the land cover of the planet. The satellites have given us spectacular views of mountains, valleys, coastal areas, islands, volcanic fields, forests, and patterns on the landscape. By highlighting some of those features and creatively crafting the colors we have developed a series of "Earth as Art" perspectives that reveal the artistic side of Landsat. The Top 5 "Earth as Art" images will be announced on July 23 in Washington, D.C., at a special event commemorating the launch of the first Landsat satellite.

Vote here, by end of day today.

Image above, from the Landsat collection: Akpatok Island lies in Ungava Bay in northern Quebec, Canada. Accessible only by air, Akpatok Island rises out of the water as sheer cliffs that soar 500 to 800 feet (150 to 243m) above the sea surface. The island is an important sanctuary for cliff-nesting seabirds. Numerous ice floes around the island attract walrus and whales, making Akpatok a traditional hunting ground for native Inuit people.

(Thanks, Miles O'Brien!)

Dull town and Boring town find common cause

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 10:51:36 +0000

The town of Dull, Scotland has become a sister community with the Oregon town of Boring. They have joined forces to promote their inherent interestingness. Alexandra Topping writes in The Guardian:

Before long Dull and Weem community council was in – presumably interminable – talks with Steve Bates, chairman of the Boring community planning organisation, to discuss the possibility of twinning the communities. But while Dull – thought to have derived its name from the Pictish word for fields – has a mere 84 residents, Boring – named after William H Boring, an early resident of the area – has a population of more than 10,000, scuppering chances of the two being officially twinned.
Determined to cement the links forged by the two names, the places have now become "sister communities", and could carry signs such as "Dull, in association with Boring" or "Dull, in sisterhood with Boring". Residents of both places wait with bated breath as officials in Boring, which is six hours behind the UK, voted on whether they could be officially linked. Any fears were quickly assuaged though as the Boring Community Planning Organisation in Oregon voted to make the two communities "a pair for the ages".

Dull and Boring? Not any more for Scottish village and US town

Why your camera's GPS won't work in China (maybe)

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 25 May 2012 03:00:54 +0000

If you've got a major-brand camera with a built-in GPS, don't plan on taking any geotagged photos in China. Chinese law prohibits mapmaking without a license, and most of the large camera manufacturers have complied with this regulation by quietly slipping a censorship function into the GPS -- when you take a picture, the camera checks to see if it's presently in China, and if it is, it throws away its GPS data, rather than embedding it in the photo's metadata. On Ogle Earth, Stefan Geens looks at how several different manufacturers handle this weirdness -- how they phrase it in their manuals, and what their cameras do when they run up against this limitation. It's a fascinating look at the interface between consumer electronics, user interface, and the edicts of totalitarian regimes. In some Nikon cameras, for example, the GPS does work, but all its measurements are shifted about 500m to the west (!).

Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.
For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app.
The risk to consumers in freer countries is that personal electronics brands might be tempted to simplify their manufacturing processes by building just one device for the global market, catering to the lowest common denominator of freedom — especially if the more restrictive legal jurisdictions contain some of the most attractive markets, such as mainland China.
Still, in the absence of more information from Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Nikon and Samsung, I can’t decisively say whether this is the business logic behind their decision to cripple the GPS in their cameras. And yet uncrippled GPS cameras from Sony and others are freely available for sale in China, for example on Taobao, China’s eBay...

Why do Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Samsung and Nikon censor their GPS cameras? (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

Geology geeks: Time for a shopping spree

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:20:20 +0000

The United States Geological Survey is having a great big spring sale, with lots of maps, charts, and publications—some of them mid-century vintage—discounted to $1. Yes, $1. At that price, you can't afford to not own entirely too many USGS maps. (Via Travis Weller)

Your land, my land, island

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 17:02:12 +0000

Uninhabited Market Island in the Baltic Sea is home to an international border between Sweden and Finland that is shaped, convolutedly, like the number 2. The New York Times explains the history behind this, one of the strangest borders in the world. (Via Doug Mack)

Places with single-letter names (including seven places in Norway called Å)

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 14:57:49 +0000

TheWorldGeography has a list of six places whose names are a single character: seven villages in Norway called Å and another in Sweden called Å, a river in Oregon called D and another in Scotland called E, Denmark's Ø hills, and a village in France called Y. Why not?

Å is a village in the municipality of Moskenes, in Lofoten, Norway. This village is traditionally a fishing village, specialising in stockfish, but now also features tourism. The town contains the Lofoten Stockfish Museum and the Norwegian Fishing Village Museum. The place is sometimes referred to as Å i Lofoten ("i" means "in") to distinguish it from other places named Å (seven villages in Norway have the name Å). In Scandinavian languages, "Å" means "river".

6 Geographical Terms With Shortest Names in the World (Thanks, Bosko!)

(Image: File:Å i Lofoten.jpg , Matthew Mayer/Wikimedia Commons)

XKCD's "Lakes and Oceans" chart of the other 70% of the planet

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:34:02 +0000

Randall Munroe's produced another in his series of his spectacular, gigantic charts of unimaginably large and complex things compared and rendered tractable by the human imagination. "Lakes and Oceans" has everything you need to cultivate an appreciation for the vasty depths and the ocean blue. Plus, a snarfworthy punchline at the deepest depths.

Lake and Oceans

Voice of Yakko Warner performs "Yakko's World"

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:32:02 +0000

Here's a 2005 video of Rob Paulsen, who was the voice of Yakko Warner on the amazing Animaniacs cartoon, performing "Yakko's World," a fiendishly difficult and delightful Gilbert & Sullivanesque recital of the nations of the world set to the tune of the "Mexican Hat Dance." The song is from a 1993 episode of the show, and Paulsen's got near-perfect recall of it 12 years later.

Rob Paulsen- Nations of the World (via Reddit)

Kaleidoscopic maps: Rorschmap

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:57:31 +0000

James Bridle created Rorschmap, which kaleidoscopes the satellite views of your favorite spots (shown here, the center of Manhattan).

Rorschmap (via Waxy)