On The Road Cartography

what is GPS good for?

Cindy Luk — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 20:44:17 +0000

Well, a lot of things, including catching burglars. Apparently Chris Rowland from Indianapolis was so sick of the burglar who seemed to like his shop too much that he decided to plant some GPS devices in his merchandises. So when the thief broke into his store for the 6th time, he was able to track the merchandise, and the burglar, around town. You can read the original story here. Wish I could do that with the SIM cards of my lost mobile phones, all 4 of them!

apple map

Cindy Luk — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 20:14:18 +0000

If you think you have seen just about every kind of map design out there, think again.

Kevin Van Aelst has come out with a brand new…apple map. I wonder how long did he take to complete the project. And also, will there be a follow up on oranges:)

Iraq casualty map

Cindy Luk — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:42:35 +0000

With the war entering the 5th year and another mega spending bill, this current pet project of the neo-cons will become the most expensive war in US history. The price in human tolls is also substantial.

Iraqbodycount.org has kept a record of the civilian deaths all along. However, the numbers are never having as much impact as when being put on a nicely designed map. This one is commissioned by the Newsweek and seems to be the best of the bunch.

nobody cares about Africa

Cindy Luk — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 00:10:33 +0000

BBC is running a story on China’s $5bn natural resources deal with DR Congo that just sounds like sour grapes to me. But the point of this post is not to complain about sloppy journalism, but its terrible map that manages to leave out the African nation’s capital, Kinshasa. It’s close to Matadi, in case you are wondering.

Then I look around for a map that shows the distribution of natural resources, to get some idea of what people are fighting over for, literally. The concession to China is in the south, which has loads of copper and cobalt. The only map that pops up was made in the ’50s, by the Belgians. Oh well…

UK flood map, or rather, the lack of it

Cindy Luk — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:18:10 +0000

With the worst flood in over 60 years ravaging the country, one would have expected some decent flood maps available for anxious property owners. But no, the flood map effort by the UK Environment Agency is almost laughable if the situation isn’t so grim. When was this base map made? Back in the 50′s?

What’s even more absurd is when someone who actually tried to load EA’s flood data into a Google mash-up, broadcasting vital information to a wider audience with new technology, he got a call from the lawyer. I thought these data were collected with public funding in the first place?

new sharp satellite map of earth

Cindy Luk — Fri, 11 May 2007 21:26:55 +0000

Bimonthly global composites for May to June 2005 and March to April 2006, based on data collected by the 300m MERIS sensor on board the ENVISAT satellite mission, are now available for download at ESA’s GlobCover website. These are the sharpest land cover data to date and more bimonthly data will be accessible in June.

The data are divided into mosaics and delivered via BT, quite an innovation among the various governmental agencies. Every time I need to use Seamless, I want to scream at its clunky interface. At GlobCover, the interface for selecting target area for download is very user-friendly, and you can further fine-tune the selection through BT client. While this is really handy, the download is quite slow right now perhaps because words haven’t got out far enough.

mapping languages

Cindy Luk — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:40:18 +0000

It’s fortunate that the two languages that I speak are both analytical. I can never understand the need for so many verb conjugations in Spanish. And the difference between subjunctive and conditional tense? But then, perhaps I should not complain too much, at least it doesn’t have declensions like German, which really did drive me nuts.

Despite all the moaning and groaning, languages have always been fascinating to me since they highlight our differences and limitations more than anything else. Ljuba from Sweden has an interesting site with a good collection of language maps, the most complete that I’ve seen so far. Mark Rosenfelder’s map of worldwide language families also come in handy. However, some of the maps seem to be based upon questionable data. Arabic is being treated as one single language while in fact folks from Egypt and the Gulf states are mutually unintelligible in their own dialects. The same is also true for the various southern Chinese dialects. Take it with a grain of salt, this is still interesting stuff.

per capita murders by guns

Cindy Luk — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 07:27:03 +0000

With the gruesome VT and NASA killings, everybody’s pointing finger at America’s gun culture again. Nationmaster has an interesting but badly done map on the per capita murders by guns. Outliers skew the color scheme to the point that it’s effectively meaningless. But the US does seem to rank pretty high (#8, over 5 times that of the next 1st world country, Switzerland) on the bar chart though.

Now, to be fair, you don’t really need a gun to kill. The numbers on per capita total murders seem better, with the US ranking 24. But it’s still the deadliest among industrialized nations, and 52% higher than the next in line, Finland. Before making final judgment, I think one still needs to adjust for 1) manslaughter figures (due to difference in legal systems), 2) total surface area and population (i.e. a more complex society). So, perhaps a cartogram to truly illustrate the theme.

Before some of you scream murder, I’m actually anti-gun*_^

China historic maps

Cindy Luk — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:57:23 +0000

Harvard has released a complete GIS dataset of historic maps on China. The data consist of populated places and political boundaries for China proper from 222BC to 1911CE and have all place names in English. Frontier data are available from 19th century onward. There’s also DEM data and background image derived from GTOPO-30. A bit dated, but comes by handy if you just need a quick fix. It can be downloaded for free for academic use.

The wonderful website contains portions of Army map scans and Russian historic maps on China as well.

Year of the Pigs

Cindy Luk — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 20:14:35 +0000

While researching for some historical maps, I came across this Map of World Production of Hogs from U of South Florida’s interesting site. Well, it seems that China did have a disproportionate number of pigs, so there’s actually a good reason for naming this the Year of the Pigs. But then, giving the population density then (and now), one really shouldn’t be too surprised at the outcome. I’m just curious as to where the underlying data came from, as this one was made in 1922.