A nice tweet: The two ways of doing a map of ISIS control. A: The Big Red Blob. B: The Thin Red Lines. pic.twitter.com/bElTBdzozv — Richard Hall (@_RichardHall) February 20, 2015 Let’s have a closer look at that right-hand map, because it’s a real beauty. There are people. Where the people are, that’s the important…
Read More A more sophisticated version of something I made earlierHere’s a map of the UK creating regions the size of London. Compare the emergent regions in the BT CDR graph.
Read More Redesigning Britain on a rational basis, againSo I searched for the following address on several popular mapping sites: Dos Trece, Calle Carme 40, Barcelona, Spain OpenStreetMap‘s gazetteer search is reliably hopeless and this occasion was no exception. It returned nothing. Microsoft’s Bing Maps did worse than that, much worse, as you’ll see if you click the link – it directed me…
Read More Whoops, there goes the Chinese embassyI’m not quite as sceptical as some about this. However, it’s not clear to me how this differs from the sort of thing UNOSAT does all the time – here’s their analysis of imagery over Abyei, the key border area between North and South Sudan. Actually it looks like the “Enough Project” is going to…
Read More tasksThis paper in PLoS One is fascinating (if heavily blogged already). Basically, BT let some researchers from MIT, Cornell, UCL, and their own R&D division have an anonymised slice through their call-detail record (CDR) pile, the database from which phone bills are calculated. The scientists filtered out all the numbers that only made or accepted…
Read More an infallible scheme for redesigning BritainSo the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which…
Read More killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphereSo I scraped the government meetings data and rescraped it as one-edge-per-row. And then, obviously enough, I tidied it up in a spreadsheet and threw it at ManyEyes as a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, IBM’s otherwise great web site is broken, so although it will preview the network diagram, it fails to actually publish it to the…
Read More Exactly what is Communication Strategy & Management Ltd?Keep the shit and the drinking water separate, and you’ve gone most of the way from an average life expectancy of 35 to one of 75. Boris Johnson, famously, decided that replacing London’s water mains was a minor issue that could be thrown out as a sop to the roads lobby. So here’s the Borisfeed.…
Read More Civilisation is common defence and waste disposal. And drinking waterVia Airminded, find your local V2 rocket strike. London, Antwerp, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Riyadh, and Tehran have what in common? That’s right, it’s the list of cities that have been subjected to attack from space. Then, why not go here and look up how big a hole it made? Someone’s photographed and flickr’d a whole…
Read More there are, however, rockets in this postThis really is getting strange. The Tories look worryingly convinced of the wisdom of a plan to build a gigantic airport in the North Sea, split between two separate islands, because you never need to change the runway a plane is going to depart from…right? At the same time, the Government is considering a gigantic…
Read More the latent content of this airport, however…