A real no-where man?

From a letter to the London Times, June 17, 1978:

Some years ago I was bringing a Destroyer home from the Far East and was required to report my position twice a day.

One evening, I saw that we would be passing close to where the Greenwich Meridian cuts the Equator so arranged to arrive there dead on midnight. Once there I altered course to due North and stopped engines so my position signal read:

At 00:00 my position Latitude 00°00′N, Longitude 00°00′E. Course 000°. Speed 0.

I had considered saying I was Nowhere but thought (probably correctly) that Their Lordships would not be amused.

Where in the world is ....?

“The world is not dangerous because of those who do harm but because of those who look at it without doing anything”

-Albert Einstein quotes

Each year the TED conference hands out TED prizes to individuals with an idea that can change the world. One winner talked about tracking disease epidemics world-wide with data from Google and other sources. Now it appears that that dream is alive and well.

Check out HealthMap at http://healthmap.org/en/. 

"HealthMap brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization)."

The home page is a bit overwhelming with all outbreaks from the past three days. Hover the mouse over any pin to see the name of the disease.

I find the display more interesting when a single disease is searched. The default is the past 3-days but you can change this up to one month with the Advanced search options. I selected Typhoid in the past month and found cases in Algeria, China and Kyrgyzstan.

Bottom Line

This is a great resource for keeping an eye on swine flu or any other illness that you are concerned about.

Africa

"The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it."
-George Kimble, Geographer

In a post last year I looked at different ways to flatten the globe onto a flat map in World Maps. The standard Mercator maps that everyone uses exaggerates the size of the Northern Hemisphere so America and Europe look much larger than they really are. So ingrained is the Mercator map in our mental image of the world that we fail to recognize how large Africa is. Here is a great graphic showing Africa's true size - bigger than the US, China, India and Europe combined.

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The full size of the graphic can be found at http://static02.mediaite.com/geekosystem/uploads/2010/10/true-size-of-africa.jpg

Google Earth

The letter A

"I'd like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony
I'd like to hold it in my arms
And keep it company."
-Coca Cola ad song from 1971

If you like maps, you'll love the web application, Google Earth. It allows you a bird's eye view of much of the planet from various heights (some regions are more detailed than others.) The app has been put to many uses.

• Searching the earth for items that look like letters of the alphabet (so you can spell with geography?)
  (in Australia) (Netherlands) (British hedgerows)
• A cousin of my commented on Facebook about using Google Earth flight simulator to "fly" through canyons. Not easy, he said.
• The town of Riverhead in Long Island uses Google Earth to locate residents who have pools but have not paid for a pool permit. They have collected $75,000 in fees so far.
• Looking for undiscovered meteor craters (like deep in the Sahara Desert).

Bottom Line

As with all technology, it can be used for good or evil. Security officials fear that terrorists will use Google Earth to scout out a location and plan an attack with accurate images. For this reason some locations on Earth are deliberately blurred by Google Earth.

Presidential Landslides

"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson

French cartographer, Frédéric Salmon, has collected/created voting maps of all US presidential elections. The collage below was assembled from Salmon's maps by RealClearPolitics.com. It shows the county voting patterns of presidential landslides for Roosevelt in 1932 and 1936, Eisenhower in 1952, Johnson in 1964, Reagan in 1980, and Obama in 2008. Democrats are yellow/brown; Republicans are blue. The color darkens as the win margin increases.

There are many interesting points that I see.

1. In past landslides, when you won the election most of the land area of America supported you. Look at the majority of yellow/brown for Roosevelt and Johnson, the vast amounts of blue for Eisenhower and Regan.

2. The Obama victory is quite different. A naive look at the map would make blue the winner. But compare 2008 to 1980. Obama won the large cities on both coasts and the greater Chicago area. He lost the rural vote.

3. Take a look at the Bush 2004 win which evenly split the country. The map looks amazing similar to the 2008 "landslide". It takes few moments to see the differences. Obama took a few extra counties in California but the real difference is the Rust Belt, the Great Lakes region that remains seriously depressed with the failure of the US automotive industry and steel industry. During bad economic times, people will switch their vote in hope of "Change". Obama was very clever to use "Change" as his theme.

4. On a historical note: note the erosion of the Dixie Land Democrats. The south is VERY Democrat in 1932 and 1936, starting to drift away in 1952 and divided in 1964. From the 2008 map it's hard to tell if Obama won or lost the south. Did he win enough city votes to take the southern states?

Bottom Line

Today's political division is not North-South, regional or state based. It's rural vs city.

Getting away from it all?

Sometimes as the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1000 words. The image above is part of a series available on NewScientist.com that depicts the accessibility of places around world. The brighter the color, the faster that spot can reach a city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel. The world's most remote place is the Tibetan plateau - it is a three-week trip to the cities of Lhasa or Korla - one day by car and the remaining 20 on foot.

The rest of the world now is very connected with less than 10% of the land surface MORE than 48 hours from the nearest city. Most of the map depict hours of travel: white-yellow is 0-4 hours, orange is 4-8 hours, red is 9-24 hours, with black over 1 day. Naturally this is the best possible time assuming you're not lost and head for the closest city.

One reason the world is so connected in an amazing system of roads, pictured here:

The map of global river travel is nearly as dense as the road map.

Bottom Line

One thing the human race excels at is travel. Be it by plane, train, car, boat, horse, bike or on foot. Yet travel speed is quite variable as the chart here shows. A car can travel one kilometer in just 30 seconds. But the same distance on foot in a deciduous forest can take an hour. 48 minutes if trekking through snow or ice on foot. 24 minutes under favorable hiking conditions.

It pays to know the terrain when traveling. For example, a car trip can be delayed by dirt roads. Last summer our GPS put us several dirt roads as we crossed the country. Fortunately we have a new GPS for Christmas which gives us the option of excluding dirt roads from route planning.

Update

A GPS leads a couple over a remote forest road where they get stuck in a snow bank. Three days later a signal from the GPS allows rescuers to find them.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_stranded_motorists

World Maps

“A road map always tells you everything except how to refold it”- anon

What’s the “best” way to flatten a globe into a map? This question has haunted Cartographers (map makers) for centuries. The worldview most of us have grown up with is called the Mercator projection from 1569. It has conformal properties that make it perfect for sea voyages by preserving scale and angles for small regions. However there are large distortions near the poles. Greenland and Antarctica are inflated. So are Canada and Russia, making the northern hemisphere continents appear much bigger than the southern.

A different map, the Gall-Peters projection is popular with scholars but not a big seller with the public. James Gall proposed the idea in 1855 of a map which preserves the true size of continents at the expense of their shape. In 1973 Arno Peters created a new version of this projection and popularized the idea that this map corrected for northern bias and displayed the true size of Africa and South America. North America and Europe look so tiny on this map (and rightly so).

The "Dymaxion Map" was created by architect Buckminster Fuller over the years 1927-1954. This map preserves the shape AND size of the continents by cleverly cutting across the oceans. The image shown here uses hundreds of images acquired from the NOAA weather satellites to fill in the continents. Notice how small Greenland is here. (Don't confuse it with the much bigger Arctic ice sheet right next to it!)

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Why bring this up now? Because there is a series of new world maps that look great. See the video Clever folds in a globe give new perspectives on Earth. The "Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. His algorithm divides the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares. Earlier map makers have used this technique with a few dozen polygons (like the "Dymaxion” map above.) van Wijk uses thousands of polygons and a computer to calculate thousands of cut lines based upon parameters like “preserve the continents” or “separate the continents from the ocean as far as possible”. The image shown here was weighted for “preserve the oceans”.

Traveling with a good map

"I have an existential map. It has 'You are here' written all over it."
- Steven Wright

This morning while leaving a grocery at the main exit of the parking lot. It turns out a van had been in an accident and flipped over on its side right in the middle of the intersection. Naturally every road feeding into the intersection was closed by the emergency responders. We had to exit the parking lot via a side road that sent us in the opposite direction of where we wanted to go on local town roads.
We made a few wrong turns and a short cut through a neighborhood that didn't work out before we found a way around the accident and back to a major road. And we were not the only "lost" drivers. Others diverted from the accident were making confused turns and illegal turns (like the wrong way on a traffic circle!)
Since we carry maps in the car we didn't have to be lost - we just thought we knew the neighboring town better than we did and never considered consulting our maps. We carry several atlases in the trunk of our car - detailed county maps, state maps for NY, NJ and CT and even a national road map.

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Always travel with road maps. We like the Hagstrom county maps which show every road. We recently tried finding a friend's house in NJ with just the state map and of course it lacked the detail we needed for local roads. We buy maps that are a year old and discounted at book stores - not much changes in a year.
Also useful when you have a destination in mind is one of the many free online mapping services: http://www.map.google.com/, http://www.mapquest.com/ and http://www.maps.yahoo.com/.