always thought that mapophilia was a lonely affliction until I started my blog, Strange Maps, in 2006. I remember the first map I posted – it was a map of the location of asylums for the insane in Pennsylvania. It provided a bizarre geography of insanity, and it interested me because it was not the kind of map that would have a place in mainstream cartography. Equally, the map didn’t tell us much about mental health. I loved it because it was such an interesting juxtaposition of a condition that is so difficult to define with something as cool, rational and delineated as cartography.
I’d find strange maps online – I don’t draw my own – and then categorise them, describe them and link them to other maps. I have more obvious categories such as history, science and tech, and politics, as well as unusual ones: love, sex and happiness, life and death, truth and justice. One type is the allegorical map. In the 19th century, symbolic maps were very popular, especially during prohibition in America. Prohibitionists would draw moral maps. They’d describe the country of drunkenness and how to travel from it to the continent of sobriety. The road to success was drawn across chasms of despondency and mountains of procrastination.
Category: Technology
Dynamist Blog: The Chart Every Journalist Covering the Fukushima Plant Should Read
For the past week, I’ve been complaining that journalists covering possible radiation dangers from Fukushima plant have abandoned the old convention of putting radiation exposures in context (usually by comparing them to chest x-rays). The result is that all “radiation” sounds equally dangerous, and people in Plano, Texas, start stocking up on potassium iodine.
David Hockney’s friends in art: the iPad and iPhone
David Hockney may be pretty isolated here in Yorkshire, some four hours by train from London, but that’s the way he likes it. Ensconced near the quiet rural landscape he’s immortalized in paintings and watercolors, he has more time not only to draw but to experiment with new ways of making art.
“We think we’re way ahead here,” he confides. “We need this little remote place to be observant about the medium.”
The art-making medium he’s using most often these days is the iPad, brother to the iPhone, which he took up earlier. Whether he’s lying in bed or driving through snow-covered woods, his ever-ready iPhone and iPad are instant drawing pads, always by his side. The electronic duo keeps him in touch with not only his craft but a small group of friends and colleagues who regularly receive his colorful missives of landscapes, flowers, cap or ashtray.
GPS Follies
GPS Follies
“Ha, Ha, Ha, GPS, GPS!” – a senior Florentine citizen standing outside my rented car’s window, pointing at our TomTom GPS.
We followed the TomTom’s instructions from Fiesole through Florence to our evening destination: Central Bologna. However, the TomTom directed us to a dead end: impassable train tracks were straight ahead and we had no nearby alternatives.
After providing the elderly man his GPS humor, I completed a U-Turn and drove east toward an intersection. The TomTom protested, but later “recalculated” the route and we were on our way to Bologna, via the Autostrada.
We had a few more odd navigation moments, one in Lyon and another in Parma. All in all, the TomTom performed well. TomTom sells a GPS receiver that contains both North American and European maps.
** A side note. I used the maps app on my iPhone to augment the TomTom (European iPhone data plans are quite expensive for visiting Americans). Xcom Global provides a useful alternative for on-the go connectivity: unlimited use mifi devices. I highly recommend Xcom.
Jean-Louis Gassee’s recent GPS experiences inspired this note.
The AI Revolution Is On
Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence–except maybe a random number generator–had a hand in determining what went where.
But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might–by placing like products next to one another, for instance–Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.
E-book pioneer sees future of reading as a shared activity
In 1992, virtual eons before the Kindle and the iPad, Bob Stein created software that let a reader flip through an electronic book on a laptop computer.
To demonstrate the program at conferences, Stein would lie down on stage as if reading in bed.
“Publishers would see this and they would think it was cute, but they didn’t think it had anything to do with them,” he recalls.
Now that the revolution is here, Stein says publishers should embrace what he sees as the inevitable result: the evolution of reading from a solitary pursuit into a communal, electronically networked activity – something he calls social reading and writing.
Social Media, Part 1: The Internet and the Auto Industry
Twenty-two years ago, during a slow period at a dealership where I worked, I found an old Apple II computer. It had been set up to calculate leases, but I quickly discovered that it could do all sorts of things. It wasn’t like I hadn’t used a computer before; in 1985, using my Compaq portable as a letter-writing machine had led to my biggest sales year ever in the auto industry. But only three years later, my appreciation for the coming Information Age was to change dramatically.
One of the first things I did on this old Apple machine was hook it up online. Subscribing to the original StarText news wire that the Star-Telegram was then selling, I saw from this quaint beginning that the Information Age was starting to broaden. It wasn’t long before I subscribed to CompuServe. That’s when I realized I would need not just a more powerful computer, but also one capable of showing graphics to take advantage of what was coming our way.
Shortly thereafter I had discovered that others were working on creating what would be called the Internet, connecting everybody in the world to one another.
Change is hard….
In the life of the Foxconn young workers
Under the Christmas tree, some of us will hopefully find a great Iphone 4 32G, an amazing 9.7 inch Ipad 3G, a Dell netbook, a Sony PSP® or a Nokia N8 smartphone. On the user manual, it shall be written how to handle it but certainly not how it has been made. Today, La Vie French magazine publishes a long story (including side boxes here and here) about life at Foxconn, main Apple’s supplier. Sorry, it’s only in French but let me propose you my comment in English.
Despite tragic suicides (14 officially – one last November, yet much lower than in others fims like France Telecom but when it comes to very young people in such a guarded area, it raises questions) and several promises for pay rises, Foxconn is still compared by Hong-kong ngo Sacom, as a “labour camp”. How come?
So I went there in May and then back again lately, to check what really changed during this 6 months period of time. Salary is now high, better than any other factory around, but happiness is still not here, whatever swimming pool or tennis court you might have seen on tv, owing to Foxconn p.r. Is it due to Foxconn’s military discipline (typically taiwanese, i have been told) ? to a rather hostile environnement (huge dorms, huge factory) that doesn’t match with young workers expectations?
Accessing the e-book revolution
In 1467, Peter Schöffer and Johann Fust published a translation of St Augustine’s The Art Of Preaching. They were old colleagues of Johannes Gutenberg, the pioneer of modern printing. But their true claim to fame is that they were the first commercially successful printers, and this success stemmed in part from their relentless innovation with the world’s newest communications technology: the book.
One such innovation appeared in the 1467 edition, which was the first printed book to include an alphabetical index. Schöffer and Fust were not only competing by releasing new titles. They were changing what it meant to use and read a book.
Some of the first book advertisements – and indeed some of the first modern adverts anywhere – talked up their “better arranged indexes” as a selling point. The publishers of the The Art of Preaching claimed that their indexes, along with other new cross-referencing features, were “alone worth the whole price, because they make it much easier to use”.
The phrase sounds like it could be from an advert for some 21st-century gadget: “Our books aren’t just informative. They’re also user-friendly!” The echo of today’s marketing language is no accident. Thanks to a series of interrelated technologies – but especially the web, the Kindle and the iPad – we are living through a radical reinvention of the tools and techniques of reading.
New Interest in Turning Gas to Diesel
Diesel and jet fuel are usually made from crude oil. But with oil prices rising even as a glut of natural gas keeps prices for that fuel extraordinarily cheap, a bit of expensive alchemy is suddenly starting to look financially appealing: turning natural gas into liquid fuels.
A South African firm, Sasol, announced Monday that it would spend just over 1 billion Canadian dollars to buy a half-interest in a Canadian shale gas field, so it can explore turning natural gas into diesel and other liquids. Sasol’s proprietary conversion technology was developed decades ago to help the apartheid government of South Africa survive an international oil embargo, and it is a refinement of the ones used by the Germans to make fuel for the Wehrmacht during World War II.
The technology takes “a lot of money and a lot of effort,” said Michael E. Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, Austin. “You wouldn’t do this if you could find easy oil,” he said.