Topic
maps
- Flexport Atlas
Flexport built a slick app for visualizing global shipping and rail traffic.
- Topographic Beauty
"Topographic beauties straight from old geography books", @egeberkina.
- New York And Erie Railroad
New York and Erie Railroad diagram, 1855.
- Bell Telephone System
Map of the Bell Telephone System , 1909.
- Yukon River Delta
The Yukon River delta , Alaska.
- Map Of Paris
Map of Paris by Michel-Ćtienne Turgot. 1739.
- Switzerland
The beautifully rendered topography of Switzerland. (full resolution)
- James Niehues
James Niehuesās famous ski resort maps.
- Heliopolis
Heliopolis , from Description de l'Ćgypte , 1809.
- The Island Of Hispaniola
The island of Hispaniola , from the ISS. (full resolution version)
- Birds Eye View Of Cairo
Birdās eye view of Cairo , 1882.
- The Central Pangean Mountains
TheCentral Pangean Mountains. If you go back to the Permian, youād find the Appalachians, Massif Central, Atlas Mountains, and Scottish Highlands were all part of a single range cutting through the Pangean supercontinā¦
- Europe And Its Fragmented City State Landscape Of
Europe and its fragmented city-state landscape of 1444. See the full, zoomable hi-res version.
- Aladaghlar
The Aladaghlar Mountains of northwest Iran.
- Centuripe A Sicilian Town That Looks Like A
Centuripe ā a Sicilian town that looks like a person. Browsing maps is my favorite way into new rabbit holes. Now central Sicily is on the travel wishlist.
- Nearbywiki Wikipedia Places Nearby
Neat tool for the curious when traveling.
- Open Buildings
Google has released a massive dataset of building footprints, extracted from high resolution satellite imagery: The dataset contains 1.8 billion building detections, across an inference area of 58M km2 within Africa,ā¦
- The Spread of Writing
The spread of written language around the world, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to today.
- The Challenge of High-Capital Startups
Geospatial analytics company Descartes Labs recently sold to private equity, in what former CEO Mark Johnson calls a "fire sale." This post is his perspective on the nature of the business over time, their missteps alā¦
- Map of Notable People
One of the neatest data visualization projects I've seen lately is Topi Tjukanov's "Map of Notable People." It takes a database of birthplaces of notable people and maps them to cities on a global interactive map. Surā¦
- Subterranean Trees of Magma
From the world of geophysics, a massive-scale seismic research project has been happening surrounding the island of RĆ©union, a shield volcanic dome over an Indian Ocean hotspot. Researchers have been using a stream ofā¦
- Intro to Areography
The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere. Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.
- Weekend Reading: Digital Librarians, Tech Trees, and Alternate Histories in Maps
š Chief Notion Officer Julian Lehr is onto something here. All modern organizations are plagued with a problem of managing internal documentations. We have ample tools and keep squishing the problem from one place toā¦
- OpenStreetMap is Having a Moment
My friend Joe Morrison wrote an excellent piece on the current state of corporate investment in OpenStreetMap: The four companies in the inner circle ā Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft ā have a combined market cā¦
- Why Maps Are Civilization's Greatest Tool
A review of some of the most important mapmaking achievements in history, from the ancient to the modern.
- Places: The English Channel
This image from Landsat 8 shows the western end of the English Channel off the coast of Cornwall. A phytoplankton bloom spreads for dozens of miles, filling the St. Austell Bay. The only time I was on the Channel wasā¦
- Weekend Reading: Children of Men, Google Earth at 15, and Slate Star Codex is Gone
š½ How Children of Men Became a Dystopian Masterpiece I didnāt realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, andā¦
- Weekend Reading: Optionality, Pangaea, and Regulatory Disappointment
āļø The Trouble with Optionality A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities: Iāve lost count of the number of stā¦
- Weekend Reading: Cloud Services, Cities After the Virus, and Corona Care Map
āļø Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts. š Cities After Coronavirus I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier thiā¦
- Weekend Reading: LightSpeed, Kubernetes, and a Car-Free Market Street
š± Project LightSpeed: Rewriting the Messenger Codebase A technical piece describing the goals for Facebookās rewrite of the Messenger app. Interesting to see them avoiding their own React Native for this, and doing tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Figma's Typography, Xerox Alto, and a Timeline of CoVID
āØļø I Pressed āB, You Wouldn't Believe What Happened Next An entertaining talk about the complexity of typography, from Marcin Wichary at Figma's recent Config conference. š„ Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto An techā¦
- Google Maps at 15
Google Maps just had its 15th birthday. This post from one of the original team on Maps back in 2005, Elizabeth Reid, reflects on a history of the product from its first iteration. On Feb 8, 2005, Google Maps was firsā¦
- The Roads of Planned Cities
Mike Bostock published this cool Observable notebook that generates snapshots showing road networks of centrally-planned cities. Brasilia as an example: It uses a combo of D3 and OpenStreetMap data to generate vectorā¦
- Running Map 2019
I finally got around to updating my local tracks database with all of the 2019 Strava data. I've been lax about updating it since I completed the Shore Acres project in the summer. Here are some fun snapshots: This onā¦
- Weekend Reading: MiLB, Naming Public Transit, and Soccer Playing Styles
ā¾ Mapping the New MiLB Landscape Combining baseball and maps? Sign me up. The MLB has a plan to āimproveā the MiLB system costs, standards, compensation, and other things through shuttering 42 ball clubs around the coā¦
- Weekend Reading: Darwinian Gastronomy, Humboldt, and Taxes
š¶ Darwinian Gastronomy Turns out cultures from warmer climates evolved a taste for spicy foods to combat the presence of more diverse bacteria: Alas, nothing in nature turns out to be that simple. Researchers now sugā¦
- Weekend Reading: Blot, Hand-Drawn Visualizations, and Megafire Detection
š Blot.im Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML ā just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages.ā¦
- Weekend Reading: Strasburg Tipping, RapiD, and TikTok Investigation
ā¾ļø How the Nationals Fixed Stephen Strasburg and Saved Their Season Strasburg tipping his pitches almost ended the Natsā run: He remembered the game Strasburg pitched in Arizona on August 3. The Diamondbacks pounded Sā¦
- How PG+E's Aging Equipment Puts California at Risk
This is a great narrative story from the Wall Street Journal about the current situation in California with PG&E, the rolling blackouts, and the wildfires ravaging the state. Drone video, maps, data on fire risk and iā¦
- All of the Worldās Borders by Age
In preparation for this yearās Geography 2050 theme (āborders in a borderless worldā), this map gives a helpful sense of how relatively young most of the worldās international boundaries are. Outside of Europe, most bā¦
- mapwith.ai
In a conversation yesterday I learned about this project called RapiD, led by Facebook to use computer vision technology to detect features for mapping in OpenStreetMap. Theyāre working on a fork of the iD editor thatā¦
- Weekend Reading: Ted Chiang, Renewable Energy, and ColorBox
āš¼ Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition I enjoyed this interview with author Ted Chiang. It covers his recent short story collection Exhalation: Stories with nice context and background on the idā¦
- Tracking Fear: Measuring Safety Perceptions in Saskatoon
This is a cool post on a study done by a research team in the City of Saskatoon, looking at the perceptions of safety in a downtown area. They used Fulcrum to collect survey data using a safety audit developed to captā¦
- Weekend Reading: Observable Edition
This week's links are all interactive notebooks on Observable. Their Explore section always highlights interesting things people are creating. A great learning tool for playing with data and code to see how it works.ā¦
- Team Rubicon Leverages Fulcrum in Cyclone Idai Response
This is the kind of stuff that gets you out of bed in the morning and really gets the motivators up to do things like Fulcrum Community to support disaster relief efforts. When Cyclones Idai and Kenneth steamrolled inā¦
- Imaging the Earth, Every Day
Most people don't know how earth imaging satellites work. All they know is a camera is flying overhead snapping photos. This visualization gives you an animated picture of how Planet's satellite constellation can coveā¦
- Weekend Reading: Brain MRI, Flash Cards, and Movie Maps
š§ 7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images. šØš»āš« Anki Anki is an open source frā¦
- Weekend Reading: Rhythmic Breathing, Drowned Lands, and Fulcrum SSO
šš»āāļø Everything You Need to Know About Rhythmic Breathing I tried this out the other night on a run. The technique makes some intiutive sense that it'd reduce impact (or level it out side to side anyway). Surely toā¦
- MapSCII
I love that people out in the open source world still build things like this. It's an xterm-compatible renderer for accessing interactive map from a terminal console. I even tried it from a console on an EC2 instanceā¦
- Weekend Reading: Atlas of Moons, Opendoor and Redfin, and Thinking While Walking
š The Atlas of Moons This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we've gathered aā¦