2013-01-15
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Every time I see a ‘trig point’, I can’t resist the urge to photograph it.
Something about trig points makes me want to try and visit them all. This would probably be a ridiculously tall challenge. I bet someone’s done it though.
Geographical Magazine, March 2009:
Rob Woodall, 48, is attempting to become the first person to visit all 6,100 surviving Ordnance Survey triangulation pillars in Britain. For this exploratory challenge he now has fewer than 200 to visit.
2012-11-29
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Pacific Ocean. G9230-1908. Sandy Island. (by Auckland Museum)
Sandy Is, Velocity, 1876. The source of the island that isn’t there? (See also.)
2012-11-05
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U.S. Electoral College – Graphic of the Day | The Knowledge Effect at Thompson Reuters.
Most images of the electoral college that decides the US presidential election are geographical, like the ones on Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight blog. The above graphic scales the states by the number of electors, rather than area, and the vast red states of the south and plains look rather smaller in it than they do in a standard map - and give a better idea of the fact that the race is closer than you’d think from looking at most visualisations.
(Note that the original post was in April, so the colours of “toss up states” are more than a little out of date.)
2012-09-26
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2012-03-02
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A world map of magnetic field inclination created by the National Geophysical Data Center, NOAA. More from Wikipedia on the magnetic dip. (The strange lines near South Africa are due to the South Atlantic Anomaly, where the Van Allen belt comes closest to the Earth’s surface.)
The green line is the aclinic line, where the magnetic field is balanced between the north and south poles; you could think of it as the magnetic equator. It’s clearly not exactly aligned with the geographic equator. (The south magnetic pole is marked on the map at the far bottom right corner.)
2012-02-23
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Metrography, by Benedikt Groß & Bertrand Clerc:
the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.
‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.
There’s a 150cm x 100cm lambda print, as well as a slippy-map interactive version, and videos of the deformation.
See also Matt Webb, in 2009:
Consider a true map of London. Now consider crumpling this map so that it’s all scrunched up, but a top down view is the same as the tube map, but on a different scale. Leaving aside whether this transform is possible, this yields what we’re after. As long as the crumpled true map only bends on a station (ie no peaks or trough on a line between nearest stations), then we could say 0% colour intensity was at the lowest point of the crumpled map and 100% was at the top, and show this on the tube map. Task achieved.
2012-01-20
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Geologic Map of the North Side of the Moon by Desiree E. Stuart-Alexander (1978)
2012-01-03
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2011-09-15
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London’s geohashes, seen on Geohash Explorer, “a small toy to explore geohashes” (via)
