Posts Tagged ‘maps’
“I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.”*…
Aaron Becker‘s Mapped.Earth is an extraordinary resource…
mapped.earth is maps and geography as a way to see the planet — by Aaron Becker. The Earth rendered as data: winds, currents, terrain, borders, populations, the shapes underneath the numbers. The through-line is wonder plus clarity — here is a way of looking at the world you haven’t seen before, and here is what it means…
The living globe — a real-time 3D Earth: live winds and ocean currents from the latest forecast cycles, active fires, population as terrain, and a Time Machine that scrubs eight decades of climate history.
Map films — short, narrated films built from geographic data: unfamiliar projections, seasonal winds, shipping lanes, the way a country’s people are actually arranged on its land.
Field notes — writing that backs the maps: where the data comes from, why a projection was chosen, what the pattern means.
And now (as illustrated above), the lighthouses of the world: every charted maritime navigational light on the planet, sweeping to its actual reach, on its actual arc, and on its real cycle.
Via Jason Kottke, who recorded this short video sampler:
“Lighthouses of the World,” from @aaronjbecker.bsky.social (via @kottke.org)
* George Bernard Shaw
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As we illuminate, many will recall that this is the anniversary of the outbreak, on this date in 1871, of the Great Chicago Fire, famously blamed on Mrs. Kate O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lamp. (Though in 1997 the Chicago City Council looked into the evidence, both new and old, and passed a resolution exonerating Mrs. O’Leary and her cow.)
What many fewer remember is that on that date 37 separate fires broke out in the Great Lakes region, three were massive: the Great Chicago fire killed 300; the Great Michigan fire, 300-500.
But the Wisconsin Peshtigo fire—history’s deadliest—killed least 1,200– though data gathered from mass graves, both those already exhumed and those still being discovered, suggest that the death toll of the blaze was most likely greater than that of the 1889 Johnstown flood death toll of 2,200 people or more. The fire razed 1.2 million acres– and destroyed the Peshtigo Lighthouse, a key navigational aid in the Great Lakes region.
“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters in the end”*…
C. J. Moran (peter-guillam123 on Github) maps the classics…
The short version: PlotLines plays classic books as journeys, on maps of their own era… PlotLines takes out-of-copyright classics and draws their characters’ journeys on a period map. Pick a book, press play, and the whole cast moves at once – or follow one person and let the map travel with them. Hover any stop and you get the place as the text itself names it, with the line that puts them there.
It began with Dracula, because Stoker wrote what is probably the best travel itinerary in Victorian fiction – a clerk crossing Europe by train, a ghost ship rounding Gibraltar with her captain lashed to the wheel, a three-pronged chase up a Romanian river at the end.
There are forty-three books now, and they are no longer all novels, or all set in Europe. A walk at Hardy’s pace across Wessex; a single London day of near-misses; a raft the length of the Mississippi; a stolen dog’s road from a Californian orchard to the Klondike ice; a two-town comedy running between Tokyo and Shikoku; a 120-chapter Chinese epic that needs five threads moving at once before it makes any sense at all; and a family driven out of a Southern town that is never once named. The shelf has turned out wider than I expected when I started, and more will follow…
Each book opens with a choice: watch the story or explore its places. A shelf of journeys: “PlotLines.”
See also: “Reading Maps“– more “journeys from fiction drawn on the real world”
* Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
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As we trace steps (and think about the ways in which travel has changed), we might recall that it was on this date in 1891 that The Hotel Hauffe in Leipzig, Germany became the first establishment to honor an American Express Travelers Cheque. Travelers cheques were first issued in 1772 by the London Credit Exchange Company for use in 90 European cities; and in 1874, Thomas Cook was issuing “circular notes” that operated in the manner of travelers cheques. But until the late 19th century, well-off travelers relied mostly on letters of credit… and less wealthy travelers risked carrying cash. American Express’ was the first system of significant scale and global scope, and offered cheques in relatively small denominations, making them available to many more travelers.
“Don’t look away. Look straight at everything. Look it all in the eye, good and bad.”*…
Frustrated by fragmented war news, Elie Habib built World Monitor, a platform that fuses global data– everything from military activity and intel hotspots to climate events and cyber threats– to track trouble as it unfolds. Lilian Wagdy reports…
Elie Habib doesn’t work in the defense or intelligence industries. Instead, he runs Anghami, one of the Middle East’s largest music streaming platforms. But as missiles began flying across the region, a side project he coded earlier this year suddenly became something bigger: an open-source dashboard people around the world were using to track the war in real time…
… The idea emerged as headlines began colliding in ways that felt impossible to follow. “The news became genuinely hard to parse,” he says. “Iran, Trump’s decisions, financial markets, critical minerals, tensions compounding from every direction simultaneously.”
Traditional media wasn’t solving the problem he had in mind. “I didn’t need a news aggregator,” he says. “I needed something that showed me how these events connect to each other in real time. The existing OSINT tools that did this cost governments and large enterprises tens of thousands of dollars annually.”…
… The platform processes a messy stream of global data, bypassing social media noise to pull facts directly from the source.
“The system ingests 100-plus data streams simultaneously,” Habib notes. The result is a constantly updating map of global tensions: conflict zones with escalation scores, military aircraft broadcasting positions through ADS-B transponders, ship movements tracked through AIS signals, nuclear installations, submarine cables, internet outages and satellite fire detections.
“Everything is normalized, geolocated and rendered on a WebGL globe capable of displaying thousands of markers without frame drops,” Habib says.
The underlying architecture wasn’t built from scratch. Much of it draws on the same principles used to process massive volumes of streaming data…
… Processing hundreds of live data streams during a military conflict raises a question: How do you verify information fast enough to keep the system moving?
Habib’s answer was to remove human editors entirely. “Zero editorializing,” he says. “No human editor makes a call.”
Instead, Habib says the platform relies on a strict source hierarchy. Wire services and official channels such as Reuters, AP, the Pentagon and the UN sit at the top tier. Major broadcasters including the BBC and Al Jazeera follow, along with specialist investigative outlets such as Bellingcat. In total, he says the system processes about 190 sources, assigning higher confidence scores to more reliable ones.
Software then scans incoming reports for major events and emerging patterns. If multiple credible sources report the same development within minutes, the system flags it as a breaking alert. But headlines alone are not enough.
Because online claims can be unreliable, the platform also looks for physical signals on the ground. It tracks disruptions such as internet blackouts, diverted military flights, halted cargo ships and satellite-detected fires. “A convergence algorithm then checks how many distinct signal types activate in the same geography simultaneously,” Habib says.
“One signal is noise. Three or four converging in the same location is the signal worth surfacing,” Habib says. If an internet outage coincides with diverted aircraft and a satellite heat signature in the same area, the map flags a potential escalation.
Habib acknowledges that removing humans from the loop carries risks. “The multi-tier source-credibility system and convergence algorithm [are a] substitute for editorial judgment,” he says. “Whether that creates blind spots in genuinely novel scenarios, an event with no historical baseline, is a real architectural question the system doesn’t fully resolve.”…
… Habib does not plan for the platform to become a business. “World Monitor started as a personal learning project,” he says. But the experiment quickly grew beyond that. Developers from around the world began contributing code and ideas, helping expand the system’s capabilities.
Now the project is shifting toward a broader goal. “The direction shifts from pure conflict tracking toward broader world signal understanding and acting on these signals,” Habib says.
Instead of simply mapping events after they happen, the platform is increasingly designed to detect patterns before they become headlines, Habib says. “The architecture is moving toward predicting where signals converge before events become news.”…
More at: “How a Music Streaming CEO Built an Open-Source Global Threat Map in His Spare Time,” from @lilianwagdy81.bsky.social and @wired.com. (JIC of paywall trouble, here is an archived link.)
Then, try out World Monitor yourself.
* Henry Miller
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As we pay attention, we might recall that today is the anniversary of an event that would surely have made Wolrd Monitor’s map if that tool hasd been around back then: on the this date in 2011, Tōhoku earthquake (a 9.0–9.1 undersea megathrust earthquake occurred in the Pacific Ocean, 45 mi east of the Oshika Peninsula of the Tōhoku region— the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake recorded in the world since modern seismography began in 1900.
The quake was followed by a tsunami that killed thousands and caused the devastation of whole cities. Together, they did damage estimated to have cost well into the tens of billions of US dollars. Famously, the quake and subsequent tsunami caused the shutdown of eleven nuclear reactors in power plants in the region. The Fukushima reactors were especially heavily damaged, and leaked radioactive waste water, leading to radiation levels outside the plant that were up to eight times normal levels.
“If geometry is dressed in a suit coat, topology dons jeans and a T-shirt”*…
Paulina Rowińska on how, in the mid-19th century, Bernhard Riemann conceived of a new way to think about mathematical spaces, providing the foundation for modern geometry and physics…
Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat.
The world is full of such shapes — ones that look flat to an ant living on them, even though they might have a more complicated global structure. Mathematicians call these shapes manifolds. Introduced by Bernhard Riemann in the mid-19th century, manifolds transformed how mathematicians think about space. It was no longer just a physical setting for other mathematical objects, but rather an abstract, well-defined object worth studying in its own right.
This new perspective allowed mathematicians to rigorously explore higher-dimensional spaces — leading to the birth of modern topology, a field dedicated to the study of mathematical spaces like manifolds. Manifolds have also come to occupy a central role in fields such as geometry, dynamical systems, data analysis and physics.
Today, they give mathematicians a common vocabulary for solving all sorts of problems. They’re as fundamental to mathematics as the alphabet is to language. “If I know Cyrillic, do I know Russian?” said Fabrizio Bianchi, a mathematician at the University of Pisa in Italy. “No. But try to learn Russian without learning Cyrillic.”
So what are manifolds, and what kind of vocabulary do they provide?…
[Rowińska explains manifolds and the history of the development of our understanding of them, concentrating on the pivotal role of Riemann…]
… Manifolds are crucial to our understanding of the universe… In his general theory of relativity, Einstein described space-time as a four-dimensional manifold, and gravity as that manifold’s curvature. And the three-dimensional space we see around us is also a manifold — one that, as manifolds do, appears Euclidean to those of us living within it, even though we’re still trying to figure out its global shape.
Even in cases where manifolds don’t seem to be present, mathematicians and physicists try to rewrite their problems in the language of manifolds to make use of their helpful properties. “So much of physics comes down to understanding geometry,” said Jonathan Sorce, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. “And often in surprising ways.”
Consider a double pendulum, which consists of one pendulum hanging from the end of another. Small changes in the double pendulum’s initial conditions lead it to carve out very different trajectories through space, making its behavior hard to predict and understand. But if you represent the configuration of the pendulum with just two angles (one describing the position of each of its arms), then the space of all possible configurations looks like a doughnut, or torus — a manifold. Each point on this torus represents one possible state of the pendulum; paths on the torus represent the trajectories the pendulum might follow through space. This allows researchers to translate their physical questions about the pendulum into geometric ones, making them more intuitive and easier to solve. This is also how they study the movements of fluids, robots, quantum particles and more.
Similarly, mathematicians often view the solutions to complicated algebraic equations as a manifold to better understand their properties. And they analyze high-dimensional datasets — such as those recording the activity of thousands of neurons in the brain — by looking at how those data points might sit on a lower-dimensional manifold.
Asking how scientists use manifolds is akin to asking how they use numbers, Sorce said. “They are at the foundation of everything.”…
“What Is a Manifold?” from @quantamagazine.bsky.social.
Apposite: Rowińska in conversation with Ira Flatow on Science Friday: “How Math Helps Us Map The World.”
* David S. Richeson, Euler’s Gem: The Polyhedron Formula and the Birth of Topology (Riemann’s work was an advance on the foundation that Euler laid in his 1736 paper on the Seven Bridges of Königsberg, which led to his polyhedron formula)
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As we get down with geometry, we might spare a thought for John Wallis; he died on this date in 1703. A clergyman and mathematician, he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament (decoding Royalist messages during the Civil War) and, later (as Savilian Chair of geometry at Oxford after the hostilities), for the the royal court. Wallis is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity, and used 1/∞ for an infinitesimal… which earned him (along with his contemporaries Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz) a share of the credit for the development of infinitesimal calculus. He was a founding member of the Royal Society and one of its first Fellows.
“It’s a matter of perspective”*…
A map’s most basic assumption is a question of orientation (or persective, if you will). For most of us, “up” on a map is north… but it needn’t be– and in Australia, it often isn’t…
Perhaps more impactfully, there’s another matter of perspective: the question of a map’s projection (of areas on a sphere onto a plane). A couple of years ago, (R)D featured The True Size (source of the image at the top), which noted that…
It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a “projection” to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.
Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger…
Maps are in the news again, and for exactly that reason. As the estimable Frank Jacobs reports in Big Think, The African Union is arguing that the Mercator projection distorts the continent, both in size and global attention…
On a world map in the Mercator projection, Russia appears larger than Africa. In fact, Africa (11.7 million sq mi, 30.4 million km2) is nearly twice as large as Russia (6.6 million sq mi, 17.1 million km2). Africa has finally had enough.
“(Mercator) is the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop,” Moky Makura, executive director of advocacy group Africa No Filter, told Reuters. The group champions the introduction of the Equal Earth projection, which aims to give Africa its magnitudinal due.
The African Union (AU) — the association bringing together all of Africa’s 55 countries — has joined Correct the Map, a campaign that urges national governments and international organizations such as the UN or the World Bank to replace Mercator with Equal Earth [here]…
… “Maps are not neutral,” Fara Ndiaye, the co-founder of Speak Up Africa, told The Washington Post. “They were never meant to be. They shape how we learn, how we imagine power, how we see ourselves.”
But, as Jacobs notes, the switch could be tricky…
In 1569, Flemish mapmaker Geert De Cremer — known by his Latinized name as Gerardus Mercator — introduced a map projection that revolutionized navigation. Simply put: a straight line on a Mercator map is a straight line at sea.
That’s not as obvious as it might seem. If you flatten a three-dimensional object, such as the Earth, onto a two-dimensional surface, like a map, you’ll inevitably create some distortion.
Mercator’s radical solution was to reduce directional distortion to zero: His projection maintains accurate angles and directions. That so-called conformal map projection made life (a little bit) easier for the ships swarming out all over the world in the Age of Sail.
But that decision came with a trade-off: It grossly inflated the size of land masses closer to the poles…
… traditions are hard to break. Case in point: The AU itself is still using Mercator for some of the maps on its websites. But secondly, and most importantly, maps aren’t about fairness; they’re about function. Despite its advanced age, the Mercator projection has an in-built advantage over most others.
Mercator’s rectangular grid wasn’t just instrumental for 19th-century whaling vessels tracking their prey; it’s just as useful for 21st-century digital cartography. All those straight angles make Mercator the projection of choice for zoomable maps…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Africa wants its true size on the world map,” from @bigthink.com.
See also: “The True Size of Africa” (an inspiration for The True Size)
* popular idiom
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As we scrutinize scale, we might spare a thought for Joseph Nicollet; he died on this date in 1843. A geographer, cartographer, astronomer, and mathematician, he is best known for mapping the Upper Mississippi River basin during the 1830s.
Nicollet’s maps were among the most accurate of the time, correcting errors made by Zebulon Pike, and they provided the basis for all subsequent maps of the American interior. They were also among the first to depict elevation by hachuring and the only maps to use regional Native American placenames.
Nicollet is memorialized in the names of several places in the region he explored, including Nicollet Island, Nicollet Avenue in Minneapolis, Nicollet County, and the city of Nicollet, all located in Minnesota.
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