cartography
milhayser | April 8, 2011
The science of cartography has come a long way over the centuries, from the caricatured coastlines of antiquity to the highly-detailed satellite images of today. We know our terrestrial boundaries very well, and until all the polar ice melts and raises sea levels, mapmakers are busy looking elsewhere. Greg Laden explores the magma chamber beneath Yellowstone, which was modelled by observing the transmission of shock waves through the earth's crust. Greg explains, "This sonar-like approach allows the mapping of underground three-dimensional structure," and he has the pictures to prove it…
cagapakis | November 13, 2010Everything has a unique chemical signature. Every body, every place. When you smell home you're sensing all the chemical traces that make up the place you grew up. When you smell your mate, you're smelling the unique combination of their body and the microbiome of their skin.
The unique smell of a city is something that my Synthetic Aesthetics partner, Sissel Tolaas, has been interested in for a long time. Yesterday in her lab I got to smell her recreations of the smells of Paris--the corner bakery, dog poop on the sidewalk, old rusty cars, cigarettes and perfume, sun on the street after…
bioephemera | May 16, 2009
I have a feeling that this is what Isis sees when she looks at a map. Only with sexier shoes, of course.
From one of my new favorite blogs - Strange Maps. Thanks to Jake for the find.
greengabbro | March 19, 2009My job, for most of the past six weeks, has been to align cryptic old maps with existing digital data, so that points labeled in small, blurry fonts can be entered into a database. I am not going to show actual screenshots of my work - even if I gave away no useful information to the opposing legal team, it would be bad luck - but here is an artist's impression:
Extracting information from this pathetic excuse for a usable map is, in fact, a learned skill. I only realized this a couple of weeks ago, when I sat down with the company's graphic designer to show her how to do what I was doing.…