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.
Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.
A beautiful visualisation of shipping routes and cargo. Mesmerising!
You can see movements of the global merchant fleet over the course of 2012, overlaid on a bathymetric map. You can also see a few statistics such as a counter for emitted CO2 (in thousand tonnes) and maximum freight carried by represented vessels (varying units).
Graham is recreating the (beautiful and addictive) Geometry Wars in canvas.
Best played with a twin-stick controller (or WASD + Arrow keys as a fallback)
If you’re on Windows, XBONE or XB360 controllers are the easiest to use. On Mac, a PS4 Dualshock 4 or wired 360 controller (with a downloadable driver) works well.
This is nifty—a map of all the Irish music sessions and events happening around the world, using the data from TheSession.org.
If you’re interested in using data from The Session, there’s a read-only API and regularly-updated data dumps.
Hot nuclear blasts in your area.
(like Eric’s HYDEsim)
In this terrific essay by Marina Benjamin on the scientific and mathematical quest for ever-more dimensions, she offers this lovely insight into the mind-altering effects that the art of Giotto and Uccello must’ve had on their medieval audience:
By consciously exploring geometric principles, these painters gradually learned how to construct images of objects in three-dimensional space. In the process, they reprogrammed European minds to see space in a Euclidean fashion.
In a very literal fashion, perspectival representation was a form of virtual reality that, like today’s VR games, aimed to give viewers the illusion that they had been transported into geometrically coherent and psychologically convincing other worlds.
This is a fascinating way to explore time and place—a spyglass view of hundred year old maps overlaid on the digital maps of today.
I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.
A fascinating bit of cartographic reverse engineering, looking at how Google has an incredible level of satellite-delivered building detail that then goes into solving the design problem of marking “commercial corridors” (or Areas Of Interest) on their maps.
You can use Google Maps to explore the worlds of our solar system …and take a look inside the ISS.
A lovely interactive photo essay charting the results of what happens when evolution produces a life form that allows a planet to take selfies.
I quite like this proposal for geo element in HTML, especially that it has a fallback built in (like video). I’m guessing the next step is to file an issue and create a web component to demonstrate how this could work.
That brings up another question: what do you name a custom element that you’d like to eventually become part of the spec? You can’t simply name it geo because you have to include a hyphen. geo-polyfill? geo-proposal? or polyfill-geo? proposal-geo?
You are on a website. There are exits to the north, south, east and west.
>...
In this English language alternative to latitude and longitude coordinates, the Clearleft office is located at:
cross.rooms.quick
Everything you never wanted to know about conveying elevation information on maps, delivered in Peter’s always-entertaining style and illustrated with interactive examples.
Mappa Mundi Rubrum.
This geography lesson makes a nice companion piece to Johnny Cash has been everywhere, man.
An interactive map of the world’s undersea cables, to accompany Nicole Starosielski’s book The Undersea Network.
A wonderful collection of treasures excavated from GeoCities. Explore, enjoy, and remember what a crime it is that Yahoo wiped out so much creativity and expression.