Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today
Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).
Link tags: geo
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Time Lords | Lapham’s Quarterly
A fascinating look at the history of calendrical warfare.
From the very beginning, standardized global time zones were used as a means of demonstrating power. (They all revolve around the British empire’s GMT, after all.) A particularly striking example of this happened in Ireland. In 1880, when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland declared GMT the official time zone for all of Great Britain, Ireland was given its own time zone. Dublin Mean Time was twenty-five minutes behind GMT, in accordance with the island’s solar time. But in the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, London’s House of Commons abolished the uniquely Irish time zone, folding Ireland into GMT, where it remains to this day.
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Mapping a World of Cities
A timeline of city maps, from 1524 to 1930.
Project Orbital Ring
An Orbital Ring System as an alternative to a space elevator.
Representing nothing short of the most ambitious project in the history of space exploration and exploitation, the Orbital Ring System is more or less what you would imagine it to be, a gargantuan metal ring high above the Earth, spanning the length of its 40,000 kilometer-long diameter.
Spatial Awareness
Robin Hawkes has made a lovely website to go with his newsletter all about maps and spatial goodies.
geoTrad - Google My Maps
Well, this is a rather wonderful mashup made with data from thesession.org:
The distribution of Irish traditional tunes which reference place names in Ireland
getlon.lat
80 geocoding service plans to choose from.
I’m going to squirrel this one away for later—I’ve had to switch geocoding providers in the past, so I have a feeling that this could come in handy.
Google Maps Hacks, Performance and Installation, 2020 By Simon Weckert
I can’t decide if this is industrial sabotage or political protest. Either way, I like it.
99 second hand smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps.Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route to avoid being stuck in traffic
Draw all roads in a city at once
A lovely little bit of urban cartography.
The Arrogance of the Anthropocene - The Atlantic
If, in the final 7,000 years of their reign, dinosaurs became hyperintelligent, built a civilization, started asteroid mining, and did so for centuries before forgetting to carry the one on an orbital calculation, thereby sending that famous valedictory six-mile space rock hurtling senselessly toward the Earth themselves—it would be virtually impossible to tell.
A nice steaming cup of perspective.
If there were a nuclear holocaust in the Triassic, among warring prosauropods, we wouldn’t know about it.
Mapping the Moon
A look at all the factors that went into choosing the Apollo landing sites, including this gem:
Famous amateur astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, also produced a hand drawn map of the moon from his own observations using his homemade telescope at his home in Selsey, Sussex. These detailed pen and ink maps of the Moon’s surface were used by NASA as part of their preparations for the moon landing.
The Decolonial Atlas
The Decolonial Atlas is a growing collection of maps which, in some way, help us to challenge our relationships with the land, people, and state. It’s based on the premise that cartography is not as objective as we’re made to believe.
For example: Names and Locations of the Top 100 People Killing the Planet — a cartogram showing the location of decision makers in the top 100 climate-hostile companies.
This map is a response to the pervasive myth that we can stop climate change if we just modify our personal behavior and buy more green products. Whether or not we separate our recycling, these corporations will go on trashing the planet unless we stop them.
Lights at sea
Lighthouses of the world, mapped.
An Atlas of Cyberspaces- Historical Maps
These diagrams of early networks feel like manuscripts that you’d half expect to be marked with “Here be dragons” at the edges.
Barely Maps
Minimalist cartography.
Glittering Blue
Scroll around this massive video of a timelapse of one day’s footage from the Himawari 8 satellite in geostationary orbit around our homeworld.
Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited
Art, geometry, and code. Sol LeWitt started it. Rob saw it through.
Let’s make the grimy architecture of the web visible again by Russell Davies
Beneath the URL shorteners, the web!
It’s increasingly apparent that a more digitally literate citizenry would be good for a thousand different reasons. A great way to start would be to make URLs visible again, to let people see the infrastructure they’re living in.