Tag Archive for 'maps'

Along what dimension is cyberspace?

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marc
on 23 October 2008
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In 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin published an Atlas of Cyberspace, described by Vint Cerf as “explor[ing] a remarkable universe of visual representations of the Internet’s diversity, structure and content.” The atlas locates cyberspace along many dimensions: geographic maps of core fiber optic back bones, logical maps of network organization and hierarchy, social maps showing the relationships between individual users in virtual worlds, hierarchy trees of web page design, world maps from 3-d shooters, etc. While some of the visualizations, designed to shock and awe through their graphical sophistication, have become curious artifacts in their own right, almost like a first generation iPod, harkening back to simpler times, the book itself promises not to disappoint. The good news is that it has been re-released under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. There is a 20MB low-res version and a 200+MB high-res version.

Arpanet’s geographical configuration, 1975

Submarine fiber optic cables in the Caribbean

“Great Circle” map designed as a bit of marketing ephemera for the Cable and Wireless Company, showing the global connectivity of its telecommunications network, with Britain centered representing its position as “hub of the world”, 1945

The huge and dense mesh of connections shows the social geography of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimension, by mapping how over half of the 4,800 or so players related to each other. LambdaMOO was a well-established and well-known virtual environment created at Xerox PARC in 1990. The map was created using social statistics gathered by Cobot, a software agent that “lived” in LambdaMOO, sitting in the “living room” and observing the social interactions of players. 2000

On rogues of the high seas and the hunt for bounty

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marc
on 27 September 2008
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Marvelously fluttering around the margins of the mediascape during the past few days has been news of a hijacking by a group of Somali pirates of some heavy old world war-fighting technology. Piracy on the high seas is certainly something that excites the imagination filled with tales from yesteryear’s maritime literature and folk stories told before bed. However, knowledge of the sort of gritty reality of modern piracy is, like many of the unpleasant things in life, curiously absent from that font of common sense that we all draw from.

The Strait of Malaca, pictured above, accounts for approximately 40% of annual maritime piracy

Interestingly, the International Maratime Bureau, part of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Commercial Crimes Services, maintains an international piracy monitoring center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this role they investigate incidents of piracy and armed robbery at sea and in port, publish weekly reports of piracy incidents, and maintain a google mashup of attacks (as pictured above).

However, to discover a bit of greater resolution when it comes to the sorts of statistics that one finds meticulously maintained by the IMB, one would suerly not be doing themselves a disservice to consider the person of one F. Max Hardberger ((really quite a marvelous name)). Hardberger, through his ‘asset recovery’ firm Vessel Extractions , is one of a special breed of repo men that work for ship owners and insurance companies to recover hijacked ships:

If a repossession is requested, Hardberger and his team quietly enter the country involved. They seek out friendly officials and trusted local contacts such as ship agents who tend to a vessel’s logistical needs in port.

“You need to pick up clues about the ship and what is said in the bars, at the ship chandlers and in the local whorehouses,” Hardberger said. “Crews are not that sophisticated and talk about their orders and departure times. You can really keep track of a vessel this way.”

Hardberger said he does not carry a firearm, though he has hired bodyguards, as he did with the Aztec Express. Stealth and trickery are the preferred methods. [link to entire LA Times profile of Hardberger]

While Hardberger and others like him place an exiciting and romantic inflection on piracy through his fantastic adventures, it is also interesting to consider what an account from the crew of a hijacked ship would look like:

Everything seemed fine that spring afternoon as Captain Ken Blyth watched over the loading of his ship in Singapore. He was skippering the Petro Ranger, a medium-size tanker with a $1.5 million cargo of jet fuel and diesel oil bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It was a three-day turnaround…When the Petro Ranger finally slipped its berth, it was just another cargo vessel amid the daily parade that makes Singapore the busiest port in the world. Not far outside the harbor is the Horsburgh Lighthouse, the last outpost of domestic law. From Horsburgh on, you pass into the only true frontier of the 21st century: international waters — the no-man’s land of the new world economy. Not technically owned or patrolled by anyone, these waters are the last place on earth where you are truly alone.[Link]

However, if one does actually steal a ship and wants to disappear without a trace, this following video may be of some interest

An upright and locked position: early aviation

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marc
on 19 August 2008
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In an old brief case, I came across a map of Western Europe published by National Geographic in 1929. One of the plates published in the margin included a map of the passenger airline service as it existed at the time.

[Link to full map ~1MB]

I imagine that the Budapest –> Vienna flight must have featured a rather marvelous bevy of passengers… Most of the flights in Europe at this point were conducted in re-purposed WWI planes, with rather rough conditions that were, apparently, best endured for less than two hours at a stretch.

Commercial aviation in France was not a serious prospect until after World War I. Because of widespread damage to railroads all over Europe, air travel offered a convenient alternative means of transportation. The cross-channel route from London to Paris also offered a tempting opportunity for enterprising entrepreneurs. Near the end of the war, on February 8, 1919, a group of French businessmen had remodeled the Farman Company’s twin-engine Goliath biplane and began flying routes across the English Channel between Paris and London. By August 1919, Farman was offering daily service on this route for as many as 14 passengers. To attract passengers, the interior of the fuselage was arranged much like a railway coach. The early burgeoning private services, however, proved not to be financially viable because of high operating costs, high fares, and low passenger turnout. French commercial aviation, like aviation in Britain and Germany, would not have survived without strong support from the government.

The French government took an active role in fostering a domestic commercial aviation industry. French officials believed that aviation would be an important part of the country’s economic growth. They also believed that a strong air presence would extend French political and diplomatic influence to the new postwar world. Passenger comfort was not high on many of these services. As one aviation official noted in a report from 1922, “In some airplanes, the passenger cannot stand conditions for more than two hours.”

[US Centennial of Flight Historical Commission Essay]

Farman Goliath F 150 - Original Usage: Reconaissance / Bomber/ Torpedo-Bomber.

Potez 7,  a commonly used passenger aircraft by the French airline Franco-Roumaine in the 1920s

The Ford Trimotor 5-AT, nicknamed “The Tin Goose,” was used by almost all the U.S. airlines. Introduced in 1928, these planes could carry 14 or 15 passengers in its corrugated fuselage. It was produced through 1932, but these planes stayed in use much longer. One Trimotor 5-AT, built in 1929, was still being used in Las Vegas for sightseeing in 1991.

Interior of Ford Trimotor with “club” type cabin furnishings

The chilly curiosities of nation states

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marc
on 5 August 2008
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Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has drawn up the first ever ‘Arctic Map‘ to show the disputed territories that states might lay claim to in the future. The new map design follows a series of historical and ongoing arguments about ownership, and the race for resources, in the frozen lands and seas of the Arctic. The potential for conflicts is increasing as the search for new oil, gas and minerals intensifies.

The move to comprehensively map the region illustrates the urgent need for clear policy-making on Arctic issues – an area rich in natural resources. The Durham map shows:

1. where boundaries have been agreed
2. where known claims are
3. the potential areas that states might claim

Director of Research at the International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU), Martin Pratt says: “The map is the most precise depiction yet of the limits and the future dividing lines that could be drawn across the Arctic region.

“It’s a cartographic means of showing, and an attempt to collate information and predict the way in which the Arctic region may eventually be divided up. The freezing land and seas of the Arctic are likely to be getting hotter in terms of geopolitics; the Durham map aims to assist national and international policy-makers across the world.”

It’s a year since Russia planted a flag on the seabed, underneath the North Pole, highlighting its claim to a huge chunk of the Arctic.

The Russian demands relate to a complex area of law covered by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Convention (UNCLOS). Under that law, any coastal state can claim territory 200 nautical miles (nm) from their shoreline (Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ) and exploit the natural resources within that zone. Some coastal states have rights that extend beyond EEZ due to their continental shelf. Areas of the seabed beyond the continental shelf are referred to as ‘The Area’ and any world state – landlocked or not – has equal rights in this area.

The continental shelf is the part of a country’s landmass that extends into the sea before dropping into the deep ocean. Under UNCLOS, if a state can prove its rights, it can exploit the resources of the sea and the seabed within its territory.

Russia claims that its continental shelf extends along a mountain chain running underneath the Arctic, known as the Lomonosov Ridge. Theoretically, if this was the case, Russia might be able to claim a vast area of territory.

Surfing on Titan and other saturnalian abandons

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on 31 July 2008
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Scientists have confirmed that at least one body in the solar system, other than Earth, has a surface liquid lake by using an instrument on NASA’s Cassini orbiter.

The 235km long lake, situated near the moon’s south pole, is ringed by a dark beach, where the methane rich lake merges with a bright shoreline.

Titan has long been considered the most likely location that microbial extra terrestrial life might be found. The environmental conditions on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, are thought to mirror those of an early earth. As such there is hope that proof may one day be found linking chemical interactions of amino acids and the emergence of biological systems.

[link]

A ghost image from a cosmic disaster

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marc
on 9 July 2008
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The “Pillars of Creation” may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. Located in the Eagle Nebula (google sky), the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born. However, recent discoveries indicate these pillars were destroyed by a massive nearby super­nova some 6,000 years ago. This is a ghost image of a past cosmic disaster that we won’t see on Earth for another thousand years or so—and a perfect example of the fact that everything we see in the universe is history.

This photograph was stitched together from shots taken by four cameras. One of the cameras takes a magnified view of its quadrant, which—when shrunk to fit the scale of the other three—leaves dark space in the upper right corner. View a larger image [via].

See also, 1200 other Hubble images

The frontier of history and lost cities

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on 27 June 2008
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For part of the 10th century, this pocket of northwestern Cambodia was the capital of the famed Angkorian empire, a sprawling city studded with homes, irrigation channels, and more than 1,000 temples. Satellite photography helps archaeologists survey this land mine laden and largely unexplored site. [via ]


 Bit-rot, book worms, city swallowing hurricanes. The archaeologist is firstly set to task in the compilation of archives. Gathering up information in all of its varied forms after it has fallen out of the coherence and illumination of active human knowledge, pulling from the dust stories and dreams that have become untethered from the human network and reintroducing them to the possibility of knowledge and life. The first steps in the process are to index and collate these orphans and then to integrate and connect them into databases and libraries. A cartography of this knowledge, of those languages dead but in writing, those margin notes about household needs in medieval prayer books, represents the frontier of history at this moment. Or, to be more precise, one of the frontiers of history, the frontier of the public domain.


The Kirtas Technologies’ APT Bookscan 1200 can automatically digitize 1200 pages per hour. The machine weights 77kg and is priced at EUR 120,000. [company site]

There are regions even here overgrown with bush and scarcely traveled. Surely the maps have a record of them and lines extend out around them to show that they are claimed within the purview of history, but what are the declinations of the mountains there? Are there caves? Cities? These answers may yet to be discovered, or those dark places on the map may survive the map itself, may never be looked upon by human eyes, and fall into oblivion. However, recent advancements in the methods by which our civilization patrols, explores and defines frontiers will bring lonely wayfarers to these outposts along routes not originally conceived by the cartographers. The pharaonic enterprise of private corporations like Google and public institutions like the Library of Congress are taking point by point measurements of our the vast expanse of history’s frontier that is contained upon the continent of the public archive. The resolution is precise: each pebble a word whose characters are optically recognized and related to all other characters in the realm. This morphology transforms the frontier almost into a vast schizophrenic ocean where point to point geometry does not obtain, where a journal entry from an arctic expedition, a paper on audiology and a facebook profile might by happenstance resolve in the same state before a traveler searching for a friend who exists in midtown Manhattan.

This Pegasus sculpture was micromachined from a particle of diamond dust using a focused ion beam (FIB) microscope. It was produced as a piece of marketing ephemera to showcase Norsam Technologies’ archival etching process which can shrink down and inscribe between 1,000 and 100,000 pages on a 2 inch nickel disc. [company site]

But this frontier is an inherently fragile and fluid one. While some territories are constantly being opened through the labors of scientists probing the heavens and of suburban mothers cataloging their anxieties over which of the many baby carriages on the market they ought to select, others are consigned to an inescapable oblivion. The frontier of history traces out a wholly technological interior. What is knowable historically lives in media. Buildings, infrastructure, inscriptions, papyrus, punch cards, floppy disks, all as physical containers of meaning are intimately tied to the preservation and persistence of history. The contemporary reality of digital representation as the prevailing medium of history presents two radical possibilities for the future frontiers of history. Either on the one hand history will become more monolithic in its shape as all of human activity in the real world recedes not quietly back into time, but rather is inscribed persistently in a record which in turn pushes the frontiers of history further and further outward. However, the consequence of this may be precisely the thing that results in a complete foreclosure of this period of history. What will become of our harddrives, and our PDF file formats hundreds (even dozens) of years hence? Even baring a catastrophic interruption in our civilization, a generation of technological progress and poor preservation could relegate the prior generation to naught.

Mapping infrastructure, part 2

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on 17 June 2008
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Just came across this advertisement from a September 1914 edition of Modern Mechanix [via the Map Room] that shows all of the telephone exchanges that existed in the US at that time. (Aside: in a North American phone number, the “555″ is the exchange: 1-XXX-555-YYYY). Propoganda value asside, it is quite a fascinating map. We see that the highest density of exchanges originated in Pittsburgh and extended out like a large sneeze all across the Midwest (who would have thought?). Ahh, to imagine a time when Florida was just a backwater swamp and California had roughly the same telecommunications density as North Dakota. I bet Detroit was just twitching to become an industrial powerhouse…

Infrastructure visualization

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on 16 June 2008
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Ben Fry, a data visualization artist and teacher, compiled the above image of the US. As he describes it,

All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. No other features (such as outlines or geographic features) have been added to this image, however they emerge as roads avoid mountains, and sparse areas convey low population.

While not terribly profound, it is an interesting inversion: geography as an emergent property of infrastructure. Fry mentions elsewhere that one of the reasons he omitted Hawaii and Alaska was because this relationship is not visible.

I rather like looking at a crop of the image, and watching these nameless towns become nodes in a web traced out by roadways, looking almost like bacterial cultures. It is almost like looking up into the sky and seeing all the different stars, some bright, some dim, wondering what those worlds must be like.

Project website with higher resolution close ups

Fry’s commentary and sketch of the technical process involved

Geospatial imaging and human rights

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on 15 June 2008
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Wired today featured a profile of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) efforts to bring satellite reconnaissance photography to bear upon human rights violations within closed societies like North Korea and disputed territories like the Gaza Strip. They work with NGO’s and regional groups to help provide and disseminate documentary evidence of acts of violence to the world community.

Visualizing human atrocities from the perspective that these images afford is a quite a complicated thing to do. One can look at an aerial view of Auschwitz, for instance, of prisoners lined up, tracing a curved line, to be processed through the gate. But the whole scene still resolves at such a clinical level. One can illustrate and argue from miles in the air, but can one provide the visceral force of documentation needed to rouse the world’s intervention? After the fact, when the picture has meaning and history behind it, certainly, it can be quite compelling and have an almost a voyeuristic magnetism to it. This was where they would shoot them. This is the creek that the ashes were dumped in. But how do we understand it, how do we relate to the reality in these images?