A Good Life Metaphor

Johan Holmber­gThe Prob­ab­il­ist has a very inter­est­ing way of look­ing at one’s life­path. He describes a way in which we can <a href=“http://www.theprobabilist.com/topography-of-self-growth/ target=“_blank”>envision our self-improvement as a topo­graphic map, or as he pos­its a topo­graphy of exist­ence. His blog “links prob­ab­il­ity cal­cu­lus with per­sonal devel­op­ment,” and seems to do much more at times. The …

Speaking of Visualisation…

As Google offi­cially released new ver­sions of SketchUp! and SketchUP! Pro, bring­ing them to a 6.0 release, it reminds me to recom­mend these to those intrigued by spa­tial visu­al­isa­tion. I have been using SketchUp for the last few years and when Google acquired <a href=“http://web.archive.org/web/20060429100556/http://www.atlastsoftware.com/” target=_blank”>@Last Soft­ware, there was the usual con­cern over how the …

Pulling Places from the Pages

One of the soft­ware engin­eers at Google Book Search has pos­ted examples from his group’s exper­i­ence in cre­at­ing their own mashups. They cre­ated mashups from the places men­tioned in par­tic­u­lar books. As he states, he moved to New York and was in the gradual phase of get­ting his bear­ings and made a con­nec­tion between what …

Geotagging Just Keeps on Getting Better

The release of Google Earth 4.0 fea­tures the addi­tion of Pan­or­amio to their geor­e­fer­ence layer. I was using a com­pet­ing product for geot­ag­ging, but the seam­less flow between Google Earth and Pan­or­amio intrigued me. After tag­ging a few pic­tures in the product, I am reminded of the fun. This is one more won­der­ful time sink, …

A Fascinating Constellation

This con­stel­la­tion of research­ers work­ing in over­lap­ping fields of know­ledge, inform­a­tion, soft­ware and data visu­al­iz­a­tion is a great jump­ing off spot. <a href=“http://www.visual-literacy.org/” target=“_blank””>Visual-Literacy.org is a col­lect­ive course span­ning sev­eral insti­tu­tions and involving a num­ber of lead­ers in the field of visu­al­isa­tion. Sounds rather cool. As part of their pro­spectus they have con­struc­ted ‘maps’ of …

The Middle East Redrawn

Every­body talks about the great arti­fi­ci­al­ity of the exist­ing bor­ders in the Middle East…remnants of early 20thC colo­ni­al­ism. Now I am not sure that I would expect any­thing tre­mend­ously thought­ful from the US Armed Forces Journal, but there is some inter­est­ing points raised in this art­icle. It strongly sup­ports the par­ti­tion of Iraq and condemns …

Mapping Imperial Pretensions

Build­ing a little index of some of my maps over time today reminded me of one of my longest pro­jects. Back in the mid 90s, I star­ted design­ing a map (a mov­ing map, ooh­hhh) of the chan­ging bound­ar­ies of Habs­burg ter­rit­orial domains. I star­ted with a series of HTML pages with maps gen­er­ated by Adobe …