April 2011
- Southeast U.S. Tornado Maps and Images
- NASA’s Earth Observatory has satellite images and animations of the weather system that spawned so many tornadoes this week. Google Maps’s collection of tornado maps and images. The Wall Street Journal’s map of storm reports. Another map of storm…
- Tornado Deaths Since 1950
- Nearly 300 people were killed in storms and ensuing tornadoes across the southern U.S. on Wednesday. To provide some context, the New York Times maps annual deaths by tornado in the United States since 1950….
- Review: Infinite City
- Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit University of California Press, 2010. Hardcover and paperback, 164 pp. ISBN 978-0-520-26249-2 (hardcover); 978-0-520-26250-8 (paperback) Not every city has a soul: some are decidedly soulless. But while I’ve never been to…
- How iPhones Get a Location Fix in Seconds
- Glenn Fleischman’s article on Macworld.com, How the iPhone knows where you are, explains in great detail how an iPhone — or anything else using assisted GPS — can figure out where it is far more quickly than it could using…
- TomTom Apologizes for Customer Data Being Used to Set Speed Traps
- TomTom has apologized after customer driving data collected from their GPS units was used by Dutch police to set speed traps where the average speed exceeded the posted speed limits (AP, El Reg). From their CEO’s official statement: “We are…
- Man Arrested for Using GPS on Aircraft
- I wasn’t aware that using a GPS during flight presented a hazard to navigation, but a 73-year-old passenger was arrested in Winnipeg after refusing to turn his off during a flight from Minneapolis. (But then refusing to do what you’re…
- Lutetia’s Features Named
- Even asteroids get place names: 36 features on the asteroid Lutetia have been assigned names. Lutetia is only 130 km across along the major axis, but it was visited by the Rosetta probe last year. Via The Planetary Society Blog….
- An Update on Apple’s Location Data Tracking
- Some developments on the iPhone/iPad tracking story since I last posted. For now, I’ll just refer you to the links. First, Peter Batty’s must-read posts on the subject: So actually, Apple isn’t recording your (accurate) iPhone location; More on Apple…
- Mapping Long-Term Radiation Exposure at Fukushima
- The U.S. National Nuclear Safety Administration has produced a map (as part of a presentation) showing the estimated first-year, long-term radiation dose in and around the Fukushima nuclear plant. “In the red swath of land northwest of the plant…
- Google’s Maps of Rio: Fewer Favelas, More Whitewash
- Google will be revising its maps of Rio de Janeiro after city officials complained that its labels gave too much prominence to Rio’s favelas — hundreds of shanty towns that surround the city and make up nearly a fifth of…
- Satellite Images of Prairie Flooding
- NASA’s Earth Observatory has a number of satellite images of the spring flooding in the Canadian Prairie Provinces and the U.S. Upper Midwest. The most recent image, above, is a MODIS image combining visual and infrared views of the…
- Game of Thrones Opening Credits
- How about those opening credits to Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series? It’s a fantasy map with gears, which is somehow appropriate. (The map will apparently change…
- MapQuest at 15
- The MapQuest Blog notes — belatedly, I think — that MapQuest has reached its 15th anniversary. Previously: MapQuest at 10….
- Where 2.0 2011
- The 2011 edition of the Where 2.0 conference was last week. Google Earth Blog had reports for day one and day two. Meanwhile, O’Reilly has put together a YouTube playlist of talks at Where 2.0 2011 — 47 videos and…
- Uncle Rod Looks at Cartes du Ciel
- “Uncle” Rod Mollise takes a close look at free star chart software Cartes du Ciel, “a classic of astronomy software, and thanks to the selfless and tireless efforts of its author it’s still as up-to-date and as wonderful as ever.”…
- CNN Travel on Trusting Your GPS
- CNN Travel’s Jeffrey Weiss: Why your trusty GPS sometimes fails you. “GPS navigation systems aren’t perfect. Most of them are pretty good, but blind acceptance of their advice can become a traveler’s nightmare. … The bottom line: GPS is an…
- The Speed Atlas Online
- John Speed’s atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, first published 400 years ago, has been digitized and put online by the Cambridge University Library, which possesses one of only five sets of proof maps. (Zoomify format;…
- Oil Production, 1960-2010
- An interactive map showing oil production by country from 1960 to 2010. Flash required. Via @spatialanalysis….
- iPhones and 3G iPads Track Their Locations
- This could be interesting. Alasdair Allan and Pete Warden report today at Where 2.0 that they’ve discovered that iPhones and 3G iPads have been recording their positions and storing them in one large — unencrypted — tracklog file, and are…
- Fujifilm FinePix XP30 Reviewed
- Photography Blog has a review of the Fujifilm FinePix XP30, a rugged pocket digital camera with built-in GPS. The review cites some problems with both the camera’s ruggedness and its GPS. “Putting GPS on the camera is a great…
- Morphing Tube Map
- A Flash animation that morphs between the Beck tube map, the modern variant thereof, and a geographical map of the London Underground, previously on the Transport for London website, has resurfaced on its designer’s home page. No idea when it…
- A Google Map Maker Roundup
- Google announced today that Map Maker is now available for the United States; the tool that allows users to add contributions to Google Maps had, I thought, been targeted at countries where Google lacked map data, but it appears that…
- Essays About Fantasy Maps
- Nicholas Tam has written a very long essay on maps in fantasy novels — their design, their relationship to the text, their use to the reader. It’s definitely worth reading in full; here’s a piece: So when we open up…
- ‘The Hobbit’ Remapped
- I don’t often post links to (or via) Strange Maps — not because I have anything against Frank, but because I assume that you’re already reading it. But I’m making an exception in this case for Frank’s post about…
- Hand-Drawn Map Exhibit Opens Thursday in London
- A small exhibition of 11 hand-drawn maps of London (really, only 11?) at the Museum of London opens this Thursday. Done in partnership with Londonist, which has been soliciting such maps for some time, the free exhibition runs until…
- Map Pillows
- Hand-made map pillows from designer Robbi Lindeman’s Saltlabs studio, costing up to $44 apiece. Via @redgeographics….
- Prairie Flood Maps
- Manitoba Floods and Saskatchewan Floods are Ushaidi-powered “citizen flood maps” that aggregate reports about the spring floods in each province. Via @map_maker….
- The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees
- The April 2011 issue of online science-fiction magazine Clarkesworld features a story by E. Lily Yu called “The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees,” which is exactly about what it sounds like it’s about. It’s set in reasonably contemporary China,…
- When Terrain Layers Get Weird
- Clement Valla collects instances where Google Earth’s 3D terrain layer doesn’t play well with the satellite and aerial imagery — elevated highways and bridges, for the most part. The effect is redolent of Dali — and it’s what happens…
- Coming Soon to the Bodleian Library
- A couple of events taking place at Oxford’s Bodleian Library in the near future. The Gough Map (previously) will go on display in an exhibition called Linguistic Geographies: Three Centuries of Language, Script and Cartography in the Gough Map of…
- 2008 Canadian Election Results: B.C. Intensity Maps
- More maps showing results from the 2008 federal election in Canada; interesting that they’re coming into view now, as context for the current election campaign, rather than immediately after the vote they map. Here are a series of intensity maps…
- Time Zone Globe
- BBC News’ interactive virtual globe of the world’s time zones isn’t the most informative or even the best time zone map I’ve ever seen (it misses Newfoundland), but it’s certainly an interesting interface. Flash required. Via @mrgeog….
- 2008 Canadian Election Results
- La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, has put poll-by-poll election results from the 2008 Canadian federal election onto a Google Maps interface. (Kudos to them for doing it for the entire country, and in English as well — not something I’d…
- London Mapping Festival
- Oh, hello there, London Mapping Festival — “an 18 month programme of activities designed to promote the unique range of mapping, innovative technologies and applications that exist for the Capital. The festival will showcase all mapping-related disciplines including cartography, surveying,…
- Free Geography Tools Reviews the GPSMAP 62s
- As part of an ongoing effort to find an ideal GPS receiver for field work, Leszek Pawlowicz has a three-part review of the Garmin GPSMAP 62s up on Free Geography Tools: part one, part two, and part three. The…
- France’s High-Speed Rail Network
- Cameron Booth has previously done an Amtrak route map and a map of the U.S. Interstates in the style of a subway diagram; more recently, he’s done a system map of the French high-speed rail network — “all the…
- Maps of Post-Election Ivory Coast
- Via Catholicgauze, links to this and other maps of the post-election conflict in Ivory Coast (Côte d’Ivoire). See also this blog dedicated to maps of Ivory Coast during the crisis….
- A Better Class of Fantasy Map
- Fantasy novelist Saladin Ahmed has put out a request for a high-quality map for his upcoming series. “Now. DAW’s in-house person can provide a very serviceable, basic, black-and-white line map. I love my publisher to death and have zero complaints…
- T. S. Spivet Comes to the iPad
- Reif Larsen’s 2009 novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, about a precocious 12-year-old cartographer, is now available as an iPad app (iTunes link). Unfortunately not available in Canada, so I can’t say more than that. Via @HodderGeography….
- Treasure Hunters
- My friend Zaid is a hardcore geocacher; he’s working on a TV show about geocaching for the Arabic-language Middle Eastern media market. It’s called Treasure Hunters. So far there’s a two-minute teaser video and a Facebook page….
- Big Map Blog
- Big Map Blog is, well, a new map blog. The curator explains the premise behind it: “there’s always been two things I wanted from a map blog, and rarely got: A.) enormous maps, and B.) access to the full-resolution file….
