Tracking Sea Critters

The OBIS-SEAMAP site is a repository for observation and tracking data for marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds. What is neat is that the site lets anyone go in and look at maps of the observation data, so if you want to see where a short-tailed albatross can cruise to, you can.

Four Hundred Billion Pixels Of California

In the next week or so the State of California will make available for free download color aerial photography covering the entire state at a 1-meter resolution. Watch the California Spatial Information Library for details. This is a massive dataset—the mosaic for Yolo County alone is 1.5 gigabytes in size. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it but I’m already salivating over getting bits and pieces of this imagery on my computer.

Cell Phones For Moose

If Nokia et al. ever run out of humans as a market for their wares, they might try large ungulates. Moose in Sweden are being equipped with GPS collars hooked up to GSM cell phones for tracking purposes. I think this implies that the Swedes have their rural cell phone coverage more sorted out than we do here in the United States.

Reference Point

I finally took down the coordinates stamped in a benchmark set by UCD in 1991 on the northwest side of the bridge of Putah Creek and converted them to latitude and longitude values. This is so I can do GPS accuracy experiments—it’s a difficult thing to know precisely where you are on this planet!

Modeled City

“It’s often hard to convince people that Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs are real.” How one photographer’s experiments in tilt-shift aerial photography make Las Vegas “an avatar of itself”.

From The Map Room.

Remapping The Tube

The London Underground Map is a justly famous piece of design and a challenge to improve upon. Oskar Karlin, a design student and geographer, took up this task and reworked it so that it measured time from a particular station rather than distance.

On a lighter note, people have found all sorts of interesting animals on the Underground Map. I particularly like the dog and the pig.