Type Brewer

From Marek. Perhaps borrowing a bit of the name from the famous ColorBrewer (snap at right) project comes the TypeBrewer project (snap at left) to help us pick fonts on our maps. TypeBrewer is a free help tool that gives non-specialist mapmakers a chance to explore typography in a semi-structured environment. I confess I could spend some time playing with font type, spacing, density on a map of Italy.

Tracking people and crime

This article describes how the LAPD online crime map mistakenly geocoded 1,380 crimes to a spot directly in front of the LA Times Office because it was the default location for unmatched geocodes. This mistake then lead to the popular site EveryBlock to rank that ZIP code as one of the most dangerous in the city. Lesson learned: don't believe every dot on a map is the absolute truth.

Another interesting article describes how analysis of an FBI database links long-haul truckers to serial killings. This shows that local data linked together can change the scale of analysis to reveal a "mobile crime scene".

Nice Photos of the Jesusita Fire in Santa Barbara

Yes, yet another fire in Santa Barbara. This one started out looking harmless, and has since been called "out of control". Here are some pics compiled by my friend Seth Peterson who is in the Dar Roberts lab at UCSB. Some pretty good amateur photos here...

http://trattoriascorpacciata.blogspot.com/2009/05/yet-another-fire-in-sb.html

The Michelle Obama Bounce: Organic farms

Retail sales of organic produce have reached $20 billion; 5% of veggies sold are now organic; and 1% of milk comes from organic dairy farms. And Michael Pollan (on last week's forum program) says there is a new form of organic conservative calling themselves "crunchycons".  It is a new world.  To illuminate these trends, NYTimes' map department turns to organic farms, and produces these useful maps.

Manhattan in San Francisco Bay

 I love this scale comparison work by Bill Rankin, as posted on Radical Cartography.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/?manhattan

Useful Delta Documents

Some delta resources for us out there:

Delta Vision Status and Trends Report
General website
Report PDF

DRMS Phase 1 Report
http://www.water.ca.gov/floodmgmt/dsmo/sab/drmsp/phase1_information.cfm

DRMS Technical Memoranda
http://www.water.ca.gov/floodmgmt/dsmo/sab/drmsp/techmemos.cfm

Envisioning Futures for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (BOOK) By Jay R Lund 2007
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HR9A--fs2qoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP14&dq=lund+2007+delta&ots=toBkES8aSl&sig=xafR0-lAYR1tPBp0H37xN6D3T5E#PPP1,M1

Delta Protection Commission Annual Reports
http://www.delta.ca.gov/annual/default.asp

Delta Protection Commission Background Reports
http://www.delta.ca.gov/plan/background.asp

Delta Atlas
http://baydeltaoffice.water.ca.gov/DeltaAtlas/index.cfm

Other Interesting Links
http://www.ppic.org/main/mapdetail.asp?i=858
http://www.ppic.org/main/mapdetail.asp?i=853

A downside to sharing historical maps

From the SF Chron: When Google Earth added historical maps of Japan to its online collection last year, the search giant didn't expect a backlash. The finely detailed woodblock prints have been around for centuries, but they show the locations of former low-caste communities. The maps date back to the country's feudal era, when shoguns ruled and a strict caste system was in place. Some surveys have shown that such neighborhoods have lower property values than surrounding areas, and residents have been the target of racial taunts and graffiti. But the modern locations of the old villages are largely unknown to the general public, until these maps were overlain on current street maps.

Soul of the new machine conference next week

Kevin and I will be presenting at this conference next week. Looks to be a very interesting collection of topics.

AfricaMap

Nice mapping project out of Harvard: AfricaMap. AfricaMap is based on the Harvard University Geospatial Infrastructure (HUG) platform, and was developed by the Center for Geographic Analysis to make spatial data on Africa easier for researchers to discover and explore.

Repro ancient boats

I've been a sucker for these stories of people re-building sailing and exploring craft based on 1,000-year old plans ever since my parents gave me  Kon-Tiki to read as an impressionable youth. Maybe it is why I love such riduculous Hollywood tripe like the 13th Warrior.

Now comes this news item: A replica 16th Century junk has sunk off Taiwan, one day short of completing an epic voyage to the US and back (see article). One day short of finishing! And you know why? They were, in BBC lingo, "rammed in two" by a freighter (there is a photograph). The 54ft-long (16.5m) Princess Taiping, powered only by cotton sails on three masts, was designed according to ancient specifications. Like the original Kon-Tiki, the raft used by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl in his 1947 expedition across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands. (Amazingly, there is a you tube video). Both expeditions set out to prove that folks other than the usual suspects could have made it here and back earlier than we thought.

There was another, similar, high-profile event with the building and sailing of the "Sea Stallion" Viking ship, which made the journey from Denmark to Ireland in 2007, fully blogged. The entries started with hopeful titles like "Building a Viking warship" and "the ship is launched", and quickly turned shorter and grimmer, with "a rough first night" and "hypothermia strikes" and "hampered by the weather" and "false hope"... suggesting 1) that Vikings were, perhaps not surprisingly, very hardy, and 2) reasons why they didn't have time to leave detailed on-voyage journals.

Still, I guess this stuff appeals to the same part of me that loves old maps, and that is the purported link to the blog.