Road rage = emotions + location

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The New Scientist has an article in their blog about an artist who is mapping people's emotions. Basically, he's got people hooked up to simple arousal sensors on their skin and has those sensors plugged into GPS units. From there, he aggregates stress levels across a number of people. Perhaps even cooler, he's allowed the people with the sensors to tag what they were doing or how they felt at certain points. Check it all out at the project's site to download and view the data via Google Earth.

Mapping gas prices

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gasprices.jpgSince I'm about to embark upon the most poorly-timed road trip in the history of automotive travel, I appreciate any opportunity to visualize my own masochism. That's why I was so happy to find GasBuddy's USA National Gas Temperature Map, which compiles GasBuddy.com's user-entered gas price data into a nationwide map of average gas prices by county. As you can see (and your wallet has been feeling) California is a festering red sore. My only consolation is that most of my meandering will occur in the lush green of the sub-three-dollar Southeast. The money I save shall be spent on smoked delicacies.

Affinity for London

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Fitzroofsm.jpg Digitally Distributed Environments is a great blog for all sorts of goodies that revolve around the visualization of London. There are a number (46 and counting) of panarama's that can be viewed w/ your quicktime browser plugin (shift zooms in, ctrl zooms out, and left-click drag pans the image). There are also a number of .kmz's and .kml's that you can download for google earth, and a recently posted Lidar movie as well. If you use a news aggregator, just subscribe to http://digitalurban.blogspot.com/atom.xml for all the latest syndications.

Sudden Oak Death from Google Earth

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While browsing Karin's sudden oak death KMZ file for Google Earth, I noticed some signs of SOD in Google's images. Take a look at the forest patch just northwest of China Camp State Park around confirmation number 1339597. There are a host of yellow, reddish, and bare crowns surrounding the area. Unfortunately, Google does not release the dates of image acquisition, so we can't use this for any sort of tracking (not sure how we could swing that anyway). On the bright side, this is a very visual and accessible way to show people the impact of sudden oak death in the Bay Area.

Visualizing Infrastructure

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WorldChanging recently linked to this neat 1957 San Francisco Bay Area Hydrological Model, an actual physical model built by the Army Corp Of Engineers to model hydrology in the Bay. WorldChanging also makes the point that visualizing the hidden infrastructure on which urban areas depend is an important way of understanding urban environmental impact. I've always wanted a mapping tool that tells me where my water comes from, where my power is generated, where my sewage goes, etc. But, uh, that might just be me. Anyone know of some good infrastructure visualizations out there?

Center of the (Google) Universe

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Wired is running an article on the "center of the universe" according to Google. The upshot behind the whole article is that Google Maps starts out at a point near the center of the United States. If you don't change the extents and zoom in fully, you end up in Coffeyville, KS. Coffeyville is neither the geodetic center of North America or the lower 48, so the choice is somewhat odd. Not terribly useful, but a neat intersection of geospatial stuff and culture.

Geocoding Couldn’t Be Easier

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Check out http://www.batchgeocode.com/. All you need to do is copy and paste your tab-delimited text file into the body (remove example locations). I assure you, this site is really easy to use. Results are generated using Yahoo Maps, though, you can generate a .kml file, then open that .kml file with Google Earth. Give it a try. If you wish to import your .kml files into ArcMap, check out KMLer at the following link http://www.mi-perm.ru/gis/programs/kmler/index.html

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Dynamic isochronic map of the London Underground

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This isochronic Tube map really is quite cool. It isn't nearly as pretty as this one, but what it lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in dynamism and utility. Back when I didn't have a car I used to wonder what a map like this would look like for all of public transportation in the Bay Area. How warped would a map look if space was adjusted for travel time from Mulford Hall? I guess all the urban areas would be all scrunched together.