2013-04-29
post/49209513875
Two images from the United States Government Accountability Office, showing the Air Force Satellite Control Network and Selected Shared and Dedicated Antennas at Locations Around the World.
2013-03-27
post/46384359354
Remember the ISS photography maps from Nathan Bergey? The ones where he asked “Draw a dot for the location of every photo of Earth taken from space what do we see?” Well, everyone loves an animated gif, so here’s the final “mission mapped separately” image rejigged as an animation.
It’s a little janky, because despite being a developer not a designer I ended up wrangling this in Photoshop, but hopefully you like it anyway.
2013-03-25
post/46259014268
Visualisations of all the (geotagged) photos taken from the International Space Station, by Nathan Bergey.
The full article is well worth looking at.
2013-03-22
post/46021483736
Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong.
Axonometric maps revealing Hong Kong’s multi-layered elevated walkways, ramps, elevators and infrastructure interchanges. Definitely enbiggen.
(read more on the guardian and randomwire)
I love highwalks and axonometric diagrams, so of course I like this.
2012-11-29
post/36837422986
Pacific Ocean. G9230-1908. Sandy Island. (by Auckland Museum)
Sandy Is, Velocity, 1876. The source of the island that isn’t there? (See also.)
2012-11-25
post/36537674051
Top: China Basin parking lot, near AT&T Park, San Francisco.
Bottom: roughly half of Soho, from Soho Square south and west, London.
The two screenshots of Google Maps were taken at the same zoom level (17). Due to them being at different latitudes, the full size London image has more pixels, but covers the same width (about 460m). (Unzoomed, the two images have the same distance per pixel.)
2012-11-05
post/35037615896
An animated GIF composed from the New York MTA hurricane recovery maps from the first to the fourth of November, most obviously showing the restoration of service in Lower Manhattan and across the East River to Brooklyn. Full size version (1.3MB).
The map format changed on the third to not include the parks or some other details, but I neither have the software nor skill to remove them from the first two PDFs. If you do and want to do better, please go ahead.
Source PDFs: Nov 1, Nov 2, Nov 3, Nov 4 (midday); Nov 4 (evening).
2012-09-29
post/32489854090
Raging Thunderbolt, in John Gruber Is A Smart Guy (Or, Maps).
He’s not wrong to state this, but a little historical perspective: at this point five years ago, the only phone that came with a mapping application installed was the iPhone, with its Maps application (coded by Apple, data from Google). Nokia at this point had begun to offer mapping applications (and built-in GPS), but my memory of trying to install one on an N73 (after they’d stopped charging for the app) was one of failing repeatedly.
If you go back just another five years, the state of the art was Streetmap and Mapquest, both of which had interfaces with what seems now to be startlingly primitive indirect manipulation: if you wanted to look a tile to the right, you clicked on the little arrow to the right of the maps. If you were very lucky you had a big enough screen to expand to a 5x5 view, instead of the default 3x3.
Nonetheless, maps are now essential. It doesn’t matter that this is a change that took less than five years; whether or not we deserve to feel entitled to them, we definitely miss it when they’re not there.
2012-09-26
post/32334176088
2012-08-30
post/30535517556
From jocochrane, the cover of g2 containing Oliver Burkeman’s excellent article on how Google and Apple’s digital mapping is mapping us. Some choice quotes:
In an era of previously unimagined opportunities for exploring the far-off and strange, we want mainly to stare at ourselves.
It’s hard to interpret the occasional aerial snapshot of your garden as a big issue when the phone in your pocket is assembling a real-time picture of your movements, preferences and behaviour.
What happens when we come to see the world, to a significant extent, through the eyes of a handful of big companies based in California?
