Just sticking my head above the parapet long enough to post this cool cool vid from TED of Indian American geopolitics dewd Parag Khanna talking about borders and the world map. Yay!
lust, desire. Caution.
Yes, it's commodity. Yes, you can own it. For 3200 English pounds.
It's the felt Cityscape Paris rug by Hive. And I want it.
There's also a New York version, and, you can commission any city you want. And here's the best part: you can commission street maps as well. Omigod, I want a Berlin and a San Francisco! Arrggghhh!
I'm actually drooling.
they're almost done. In one year, they'll be releasing the results of a decade-long survey of ocean species called The Census of Marine Life. The LA Times just did an article about this amazing project (with nifty photos):
The whole project cost $650,000,000 (yes, that's millyuns.) I love the scope of the project alone. And the fact that it's (aptly) being compared to mapping the human genome. I love that this brings together my two original obsessions: taxonomy and mapping. But you know (you know) what I love the most. That's right, the actual maps.
The one above is an interactive map of the projects they're running. Click on the dots to get an incomprehensible overview.
Here's one of the cooler maps. Created by satellite tagging 47 white sharks, they discovered an area of concentrated activity between Hawaii and Baja they call the "White Shark Cafe." Awesome. Unless you're a surfer.
There are also a number of super depressing ones like this one, which tracks the "relative abundance of marine life by human cultural period," and another one which shows concentrations of life in the ocean in 1960 and 1990. But you knew there couldn't be a marine-life census without a save-the-whales mentality, didn't you?
But this brings me right back to one of my originary questions: what is this obsession with quantifying and charting everything? I mean, I know what it is: it's useful; it's necessary. We can't do science, we can't understand ourselves or the world without numbers and measuring and diagrams and charts. And maps. And that's part of it. But there's also the intuitive obsession, the part that just loves binding the world in the lines drawn on a piece of paper. Not needs to, loves to. It's what we drool over in these blogs.
And the lines aren't the same as the artist's lines, although we draw them quite beautifully, often. The lines aren't there for their own sake, but for their relationship to something in the real world: a number of actual creatures, a route of actual migration of actual creatures, an area of concentration of scaly, cold, swishy bodies. And yet we love the lines more than we love the slimy, cold bodies; as much as we love what they mean.
a lousy tutorial, but a fun visual. (A clue to why it's a bad tutorial: he was a big Frank Miller fan. Plus, this is his first tutorial.) Anyhoo, don't watch the whole ten minutes, just skip through it.
This one has no soundtrack, which is also a mistake. And it's hard to see what's going on. Also, not as cartoony, so not as fun.
Whoa. That is trippy. It's a 180 degree image, as if taken with a fish-eye lens. This guy says he can go up to six-point perspective. That's drawing on a sphere. Wait, he's got one:
Isn't that crazy? Dude has insane spatial relations in his head. That's something I might could learn to DO (with pain and suffering and a lot of help), but could never learn to SEE.
This just makes me remember that all these drawing tricks are just tricks, to make us think we're seeing what we see when we look around us. 2D drawing is an illusion. Adding points to perspective doesn't bring you closer to how you actually see the world, it just allows you to draw more from the same vantage point. More from your 360 degrees from the same vantage point. Which is ridiculous, since you can't SEE 360 degrees from one vantage point.
So, how many points could you add, just to be ridiculous? And how would you do it? Where would you add the seventh point? Where would it take you, anyway? Would you be drawing 360 degress in all directions from the same vantage point, rather than just 360 degrees around the horizon line? And at that point, does it lose all visual coherence and become illegible?
um ... was the music the selling point?
Speaking of perspective, which we have been for the past week or so, here's some real perspective on size.
Okay, it's a theme. Let's get some perspective before we go back to map animations. Or before I get bored with vid-mining YouTube.
kewl.
Speaking of perspective, it takes a while to realize that those teeny rocks whipping around the sun every few seconds are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The night sky never made me feel small, but this one just did.
neither an animation, nor a map. But this vid of drawings of the cosmos over an old recording of Bach is quite lovely.
Now, can someone take these people aside and explain to them the difference between dissolves and pans of static drawings, and animation?
this is actually "for travel documentaries," since that's what all the cool kids are making now, but anyone can use this to be random on the internet.
Useful!
cool looking, but illegibly small and incomprehensibly presented. The explanation, which should have been voice-overed, at least, is that this is a mapping of the celestial bodies the Hubble telescope has documented. But it's so small, it's hard to really see what's going on.