What’s struck me so far is the work of Ishu Patel. “Paradise†and “Bead Game†are included.
http://www.nfb.ca/animation/objanim/en/filmmakers/filmmaker/overview.php?id=12772
This legacy must be part of why Christine and I are delighted whenever we see “Vancouver Film School†on a Channel Frederator short.
The fire started around 11:45 a.m. between state Highway 35 and Stevens Creek Reservoir. As of 3:45, KCBS reports 150 acres burned and the fire still uncontained.
The CHP Traffic Incident Information Page has sig-alert information at this site which is likely to disappear when the incident ends.
Fire crews responding from Cal Fire, Santa Clara County Fire Department, and Palo Alto. Equipment includes airtankers, helicopters, and bulldozers as well as many fire engines from around the area.
Sources: Palo Alto Online, KCBS,Mercury News
(Side note: Woah! That Google Map was fun to make and embed! And easy. I wish i had some slightly better options for the polygons for coloring — like hatches — but the helicopter icon was perfect.)
CalFire incident report.
Friday morning UPDATE: See smoke via the Mt Hamilton video camera sequence for 2007-08-30. News from Calfire at blogspot.
Motivated by a thread in the geowanking discussion list, i’ve updated a bit of the Stevens Creek Watershed page.
I backposted some drafted streamkeeping notes and a post on household cleaning “chemistry”.
These updates were probably done in early July when i was very much under the weather with a summer cold.
This morning, while listening to the clip of Miss teen South Carolina on the NBC morning show, Christine and i talked a little about maps and cartography and map colors and our cartographic education. I muttered something about no mention being made of the four color theorem and promptly checked the wikipedia article. Lo, it seems that the theorem is not particularly relevant to cartography.
This reminds me, though, that i’ve been meaning to respond to a rare comment, and praise the refreshed look of the Yahoo Maps. They’ve been refreshed for months now, and i still react with pleasure when i see the design. Starting at the city scale (a search for Mountain View, CA), which a common scale to many regional driving paper maps, the first distinct difference that strikes me is the multicolored roadways. The cherry red double line clearly communicates the restricted access nature of interstates and some highways. It is somewhat conventional, but clarity in communication is often dependent on convention. (Jakob Nielsen is consistent in pointing out that, no matter how goofy the metaphor, shopping cart is the expected label for the ecommerce function of a website.)
When that distinctly different line and color is compared to the gold and grey (in two weights) major thoroughfares and streets, the difference in the type road is unambiguous. Yahoo has clearly communicated difference. I love the little triangle flanges that indicate the access ramps as well — that seems a true innovation over standard symbology. The two other services are less distinct in their symbology. Both Google and Mapquest offer four “distinct” road symbols at the same scale. Mapquest uses three different gold colors in three different weights, plus grey. Google uses two different yellow colors in three weights — although the weight distinction is subtle — and grey. A final note, by using such a powerful red for the limited access highways, Yahoo does not need to use such a heavy line weight to distinguish them from the major arteries.
It seems the text labels have a more intelligent algorithm behind them on the Yahoo map. Google’s text has a large halo that ends up looking cluttered, as labels don’t quite fit the domains. I suspect the Yahoo algorithm chooses to suppress those labels. It is a common cartographic practice that is far less troublesome in a digital map than on paper, as zooming in brings a scale at which a label can fit. Google’s labels show a hodge podge of regional park labels, and i’m not sure which label goes to which green area. Yahoo also uses a variety of fonts and font formats to show counties, different towns and populated areas, which are all well supported by distinct color grounds for the different regions.
I’m sure a more careful review could turn up more details and innovations, but this brief review is long overdue. Congratulations to the team at Yahoo Maps for such a lovely cartographic upgrade!
We’ve watched this slowly and found it absolutely wonderful. I find Bill Murray’s Polonious captures the pendantic pomposity and political posturing i associated with the character more powerfully than i’ve seen.
The movement of the setting and characters into year 2000 while keeping the language of Shakespeare provide wonderful ways to invite more commentary on the well known text. When Hamlet delivers the soliloquy in Block Buster, the repetition of the signs saying “ACTION†“ACTION†“ACTION†“ACTION†give a wonderful urgency to the familiar words.
Some days ago Morgan Wilson posted about why he’s chosen blogging as part of the library science blog world discussion about blogs being “grey” literature (per Walt Crawford) yet vital and full of vitality.
I made a quick response this morning:
An interesting thread in the natural science blogging world came to my attention this morning via the Nascent blog: it’s a discussion about indicating which blog entries are about peer reviewed research to distinguish them from the more personal or casual or entertaining entries. I suppose, in a sense, it’s about bringing the blogging peer review to a visible location.
“Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting strives to identify serious academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research by developing an icon and an aggregation site where others can look to find the best academic blogging on the Net.” Hello World here.
Some time last week or the week before i was inspired to post a comment to a JCDL blogger’s notes on a site that used OpenID. Yippee, i thought, and i promptly used my OpenID via MyOpenId.com. Unfortunately, the public profile shown via that service doesn’t have a link back to my blog and it apparently shows an email address. So, i made this correspondent into a guinea pig (poor behavior on my part) and commented again using ClaimID. Much better. I also note that ClaimId allows one to set a web page as a OpenID server which delegates back to ClaimID (instructions). This means that my blog (or my bio) can be my OpenID URL.
That’s very nice.
I continued fiddling with a few other identity aggregators: Explode! and Spock. Spock is indexing LinkedIn and a bit of MySpace. Explode has a larger cluster of social sites — but not LinkedIn or MySpace — which can bee seen in the dropdown on their add me form. Explode also has a way of forcing the indexing of a user account/profile while Spock seems to depend on the email addresses for invitations.
Then, late last week the (not really) Lunch 2.0 at Facebook led to the news that Plaxo was going to release new cool functionality. Impatient, i went ahead and signed up to see the “before.” I’ve not had any luck using OpenIds with registering or aggregating, but Joseph Smarr says ClaimID does work for him. (We were corresponding on another topic where i displayed my absolute troglodyte nature.)
Last night i finally set most of my Plaxo account up. I’ve mixed feelings about the Mac software. On one hand, it’s very slick in how it interacts with Address Book. On the other hand, i’m not sure how much i like loosing control over my data about others. I’m a bit of a data packrat, and i’ve kept old numbers and email addresses. I’ve hopes that someone will take up the development of ZOË and that it will integrate with my address book (or at least a .vcf dump) — thus keeping old emails connected to current is important. (Probably a use case of one, that.) Then there’s the colleague who apparently didn’t trust Plaxo when he used it last. He only has his first name in the system, so when Plaxo synced with my address book, his name was removed.
The Mac software doesn’t stay off, either. I’ll quit it, but if i start my address book or the mac mail client, the Plaxo software starts up again. clearly, i’m supposed to be so enamored i wouldn’t want it off.
Now, i don’t know how much of this is new as i didn’t add the Mac software until last night. The pulse view of others in my address book is intriguing; it’s a slight disappointment that my profile doesn’t show the pulse feeds i’ve marked public. I’m also pondering how i divide up my world into Friends, Family, and Business Network and my identity into Work and Home. I do see that i can use the “old” email addresses to list my special case email addresses such as the one i make available for blog correspondence. And, despite the temptation to pull every RSS feed that might be related to me into one thread — i can’t imagine that anyone would be interested.
It’s all quite intriguing. Still, it’s a pity that the economics don’t support publishing FoaFs. When one begins to be able to link system generated FoaF files like those produced by LiveJournal (http://exampleusername.livejournal.com/data/foaf, but blacklisted by the FoaF explorer) to other system or individually generated FOAFs, we’ll be able to start having programmable agents figure out when everyone can meet for dinner. Well, maybe.
