Archive for the 'Geography' Category

METAL MAPS

Published by Yuletide on April 19, 2007 in Energy, Environment, Geography and Metal. 0 Comments

I’m working on a mapping project for a cartography class. To map METAL around the world, and investigate its distribution. I’ve already compiled a list of all the countries which have bands listed on http://metal-archives.com (my main source of primary data thus far) and calculated a preliminary METAL RATIO, which is basically population divided by # of metal bands. While far from perfect, it certainly gets things to within an order of magnitude. Also, its clearly skewed by reporting error (internet connectivity is quite high in scandinavia, for instance). But still, the data remains useful.

I’m also putting out a request for anyone who has data I could use in this project. I’ve tried contacting the people at metal-archives.com to no avail, so I just scraped the data by hand. Ideally I’d like an excel spreadsheet (or at least an sql dump) of any kind of relevant music data with geographic relationships (music industry data, album sales, all that is good too). Also interesting would be user demographics for the popular metal forums and sites, though so far the responses have been so lacking on the forums I’ve tried I’m not hopeful anything will come up (at least for now, maybe things will change once I start posting the maps themselves).

random aside:

[posted with ecto]

OH, and as if we didn’t need more reasons to love Norway:
From USA Today: Norway aims to be carbon neutral by 2050

OSLO, April 19 — Norway wants to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 in the world’s toughest national plan for fighting global warming, Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Thursday.
He said that Norway, the world’s number five oil exporter, wanted other rich nations to set similar “carbon neutral” aims.
“Norway would be the first country in the world to take on such a concrete commitment,” Stoltenberg said in a proposal to his Labour Party that was met by a standing ovation.

I should add some extra bonus points to Norway’s Metal Ratio, no?

Granted, they’re just buying a crapload of carbon credits using money they earned exporting oil and gas… but it’s a start, right?

Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast - New York Times

Published by Yuletide on October 4, 2006 in Environment, FUCKERS!, Geography and Human Interest. 0 Comments

Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast - New York Times:

How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization. It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.
…
French, Dutch and British toxic-waste experts and oil traders said it can be easily ascertained that Ivory Coast has no facilities capable of handling high-level toxic waste…
…
So far eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized and 85,000 have sought medical attention, paralyzing the fragile health care system in a country divided and impoverished by civil war, and the crisis has forced a government shakeup.
…
“The whole procedure was illegal, first allowing the waste in, then pumping it back on board and letting the ship leave without any licenses,” said Eco Matser, a chemist and expert in toxic waste at Greenpeace.

Enough to make me sick.

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New Blog

Published by Yuletide on September 18, 2006 in Blogging, Geography and Wordpress. 0 Comments

Ok. So I just sorta had a revelation… I realized that I should run multiple blogs on different subjects, rather than one blog that spastically tries to cover all my bases without becoming so unfocused that it loses its purpose… or whatever. I guess it would be the ideal amalgam of random crap for ME, but it’s prolly easier for others if they can just check the different blogs for differing coherent lines of thought/musing/investigation. Plus it’ll probably foster better blogging on my part. Now to put one more thing on my todo list… Look at multiple blogs in a wordpress environment or something.

ALSO! I’m still looking for a simple way to enable auto-linking of URL’s in blog posts. ie. http://www.google.com automatically becomes http://www.google.com. I’ve been completely dumbfounded at how difficult it is to find ANYTHING helpful on this around the web. My next step was either to a) post on some forum (WHICH forum?) b) Look at some of the php for the more complex linking plugins and hack something together that works (and release it as a plugin? ooooh…)

So yeah…. back to “homework”

p.s. Some cool geography/GIS/cartography blogs:
An old favorite of mine: Cartography: The Canadian Cartographic Association Weblog
Some new ones:
The Map Room: Blogs. Also, The Map Room itself is a blog about maps (duh).
Spatially Adjusted
The Center for Geographic Analysis’ list of GIS blogs
[damn CSS templates]

Endgame : World War - A Google Maps RTS (beta)

Published by Yuletide on August 15, 2006 in Geography. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Online players (2-25) randomly receive a set of countries with troop hitpoints based on real world population data.To play: attack neutral and enemy countries in an effort to try to take over the world. You have a 20% chance of receiving more troops when you overtake an enemy country. More features to come! (currently in public beta status).

For real? Too cool.

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On Hezbollah and Israel

Published by Yuletide on July 19, 2006 in Geography and Politics. 0 Comments

From an article in the L. A. Times on the conflict; Iman Hamdi, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo:

“The decision by President Bush not to support the Lebanese government’s plea for a cease-fire, even though that government has been backed by the United States, has dealt a further blow to public feelings about the U.S. in the region.

Members of the governing bloc in the Lebanese parliament, led by Saad Hariri, “are the most pro-American Arabs in the Middle East. They have promised, ‘America will protect us if we stand against Syria,’ ” said Joshua Landis, a Middle East expert and professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Now Israel is “blowing the hell out of them, and America isn’t taking one step to protect them,” Landis said. “The whole Arab world is going to look and see that Hariri has been sacrificed on the altar of Israeli power. For the Arabs, this just rips the face of democracy right off.”

Oh joy. (emphasis added)
Continue reading ‘On Hezbollah and Israel’

“Neogeography” Blends Blogs With Online Maps

Published by Yuletide on May 17, 2006 in Geography, Tech and Web Applications. 0 Comments

“Neogeography” Blends Blogs With Online Maps:

“It is as if we shipped a map to someone and they stuck pushpins in it,” said Bret Taylor, product manager for Google. “We provide the map, and other people put in the pushpins.”

The trend has been dubbed neogeography, and some enthusiasts predict it could spur a revolution in electronic cartography.

(Via National Geographic News.)

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