UK flood map, or rather, the lack of it

24Jul07

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?

Filed under: Mash-ups, cartography, environmental disaster, flood, floodplain, map design - web, mapping, maps   |  Leave a Comment

new sharp satellite map of earth

11May07

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.

Filed under: Datasets, ESA, GlobCover, cartography, map, mapping, maps, satellite   |  Leave a Comment

mapping languages

09May07

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.

Filed under: GIS, cartography, language, mapping, maps   |  Leave a Comment

per capita murders by guns

21Apr07

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*_^

Filed under: map design - web, mapping, maps   |  Leave a Comment