With apologies to James Niehues

Principles of cartography
[via TomC]
Pretty much a one-stop shop for links to useful information on mapping. The outline format might turn off some visitors—the page seems to have been made to support lectures in a mapping class at Rutgers—but there’s plenty of good stuff here.

Case in point: this map of the Breckenridge Ski Resort [PDF!] has adopted the Tube map’s use of colored lines and circles instead of relying on decades of ski resort mapping tradition. Unlike these old, bird’s-eye views of airbrushed slopes, the new Breckenridge map gives skiers and snowboarders what they need when they’re actually on the mountain itself: relative positions for all the lifts and trails.

I expect network maps like this one will continue to show up in unexpected places as map users become more comfortable with the style. Take Mondrian: after the world warmed to his brand of minimalism, they put it on tubes of styling gel.

Richard Serra sculptures on Google Maps
[via blackbeltjones]
Richard Serra’s massive sheet metal sculptures are easily seen from the Google planes. Are there any artists consciously collaborating with our new abilities to drag and click from on high?

Cake Wrecks: when professional cakes go horribly, hilariously wrong
[via jbushnell]
A collection of funny cake mistakes from Cake Wrecks.

Maps of flow, not just infrastructure

BBC to put every publicly owned oil painting in the UK online
[via rodcorp]
The BBC is going to put all 200,000 publicly-owned oil paintings in the UK online.

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

Mapping a connected world
[via migurski]

To understand how the world really works, we need maps, not just of infrastructure, but of flow. We need maps not just of the internet and shipping lanes, but maps that help us understand who and what we pay attention to, how we get information, what we know and what we don’t know.

A partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation charity will see all the UK’s publicly owned oil paintings – 80% of which are not on public display – placed on the internet by 2012.

A Newspaper? On a PC? That’s Crazy Talk
[via nautical2k]
A post from the New York Times’ Bits blog links to this video from 1981:

Historical superimposition

‘Untouched’ East German flat discovered
[via hawktrainer]

It appears the inhabitant of the humble flat fled in a rush.

Grocery brands from the Socialist state filled the kitchen and old bread rolls still lay in a string bag.

A wall calendar showed August 1988 and an empty bottle of Vita Cola, Marella margarine, Juwel cigarettes and a bottle of Kristall vodka were in the kitchen.

The only foreign product to be found was a West German bottle of deodorant.

See also the most popular bookmarks tagged ‘abandoned’ on delicious.com.

The Siege of Leningrad ended 65-years ago today
[via bldgblog]
Old photographs from the Siege of Leningrad superimposed over photographs from the city as it is today. (English translation of the original page.)

“rising like alien plants on the terraformed lakebed”
[via mtchl]
In order to minimize the carcinogenic dust storms off of barren Owens Lake, the City of Los Angeles built a series of over 5,000 irrigation bubblers on the lakebed at a cost of $425 million. Pruned compares these bubblers—sad, broken sprinklers, really—to fountains:

since time immemorial, fountains have been creating micro-climates, cooling gardens, palaces and sartorially bedecked aristocrats. The array of bubblers, you could say, is also a type of weather modification system: an anti-dust storm.

Looking toward EveryBlock’s future
[via migurski]
Adrian Holovaty announces the EveryBlock publishing system will go open-source when their grant ends five months from today. With so many smart people able to get their hands on that code, I wonder how long until we have the beginnings of a Craigslist for location-based local news.

I also wonder if this decision by EveryBlock will force Sufjan Stevens into open-sourcing his album-writing formula so the rest of us can release material based on the other states.

Crowdsourced math and enforced props

Above: Glowing cities under a night time sky [via migurski]. Beautiful.

Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?

[via nielsen]
One day after Michael Nielsen’s post looking at how blogging creates a new forum for solving scientific problems, Fields Medal-winner Timothy Gowers decides “to suggest a problem and see what happens.”

He’s laid down a set of twelve ground rules I think might be helpful for anyone wanting to start a similar project, even in a field outside mathematics; Gowers has obviously spent plenty of time crafting each rule. Number 6, for instance:

6. The ideal outcome would be a solution of the problem with no single individual having to think all that hard. The hard thought would be done by a sort of super-mathematician whose brain is distributed amongst bits of the brains of lots of interlinked people. So try to resist the temptation to go away and think about something and come back with carefully polished thoughts: just give quick reactions to what you read and hope that the conversation will develop in good directions.

The Mission doesn’t want chains

[via TomC]
In 2006 San Francisco voters approved Prop G, requiring Planning Commission reviews for the approval of all chain stores opening new locations. According to a map of what appear to be Census Blocks, most in The Mission voted between 70-90% in favor of Prop G. While the passage of Prop G doesn’t mean chain stores are prohibited, it does mean they now require approval from a Planning Commission whose members are often unsympathetic to their interests. Sometimes this means vacant buildings are left vacant:

ICI Paints operated a store on Market Street for 65 years but needed to relocate after its lease expired last year. The company wanted to move into the shuttered Hollywood Video, whose parent company had gone bankrupt and left longtime landlord Ken Allen without a tenant.

Allen worried that the vacant property would attract graffiti, garbage and other blight. He said he surveyed most neighbors within 300 feet of the site and found that most favored the paint store, in part because the nearest existing one is more than half a mile away.

But as part of their review, planning commissioners concluded that the property could be used for something more beneficial to the community - possibly new housing and some non-chain stores, although no developer had proposed such an alternative.

The shell of a Hollywood Video remains, at least in street view.

View Larger Map

And ICI Paints seems to have found a location a little up the street.