I know, I know. It's been a while.. Work has been pretty hectic and I've just not had time to finish off a number of posts that I've written 80% of. Somehow they've become an annoying job, so for now I'm moving on to something new.. and pretty old.
So, we've got a Christmas photo competition going on at work and for the 'funny' category I've entered a pic of me impersonating a security guard somewhere on Lake Geneva. Saving any suspense, here's the photo:
All I remember (well, until further research helped out) was that the sign was next to a big castle on Lake Geneva, near the town with the Freddie Mercury statue. Well, that town is Montreaux and a small amount of googling got me to the castle as well, Chateau du Chillon:
Now that is a pretty amazing photo, and looks for all the world to be an HDR shot, although apparently it isn't. Anyway, I particularly like the fact that I visited this castle but only bothered to take a comedic shot of me and a sign, the castle features no where in my album - ha.
Just for fun (this would also have been another route of castle-based discovery), I maximised the sign to try and get the french and then translate it. The bit I could make out reads, "..saut autorisation expresse de intendant du chateau du chillon la plage sise sur cette..", which comes out as:
I'd love to go to a beach where you need a Superintendent's permission to visit - sadly I didn't have said permission so just ended up disrespected his/her authority instead. For those interested, there's a wee map of the area below, along with a few links - enjoy!
To start of my new committal to posting regularly, here are a few pictures from BBC photo galleries that I've stumbled upon in the past few months.
I know photos often do the rounds on the internet, with lots of blogs linking to the same (often recently released) galleries at the same time. However, I've not seen these on any blogs (although I've not been looking) and just saw them as I browsed the BBC website, so hopefully there are a few newbies in here for all.
Wave Pictures (BBC Newsround)
As this section of the BBC website is designed for kids, the gallery itself is a bit garish, but that doesn't take away from the quality of the images, a few of which are shown below:
Everyone's seen images from the Hubble Space Telescope, but this gallery brings together the best of them and each has a good description as well. They're all crackers so take a look at the full gallery when you can, but below is a small sample for your delectation anyway:
I remember a few years ago seeing some photos from an scientific expedition to a "lost forest" in Borneo, where a number of new species were discovered within the pristine rainforest. Previously unexplored parts of the world (by science) are rare these days, so these pictures from an expedition to the Ecuador-Peru border are worth a wee gander.
The expedition reported 12 new species, most of which photograph rather well. This part of the world has been troubled by ongoing conflict and scientists rarely get a glimpse of the wildlife it holds.
A few weeks ago, the BBC Magazine put out an article asking for user's images of 'unsung views' across Britain. They got over 500 entries and have since posted an image gallery (with 25 images - although not all working it seems) and now an interactive map of the best images.
The map is pretty basic at the mo, but it at least allows the location of these great images to be easily found, due to the fact some are slightly of the beaten track (as requested). I've linked to all 3 articles below so you can see the lot - but the basic premise is quoted below from the original article:
I've posted a couple of times about things I've seen on the Strange Maps Blog (see: Old School GPS & Hoaxe Island and Pop vs Soda (USA)) and another post recently caught my eye. It's a decent blog, but occasionally things stand out - I'll try to add some context here too.
This time, it's a map of the world using typography to fill in the land area with the name of each country. It was created by Vlad Studio (a wallpaper design guy) and some countries were obviously considerably harder to work with than others. Firstly, some of them have awkward shapes, secondly, a lot of countries are way to small to fit readable type inside and thirdly, some countries names are way too long! It seems people didn't have such a task in mind when creating their states.
Looking at the image in detail (click to enlarge), It's fair to say any country smaller than Ireland has little chance of making the readability grade - leaving 111 countries out of the picture. As there are around 230 countries (too disputable to be 100% accurate!), this leaves only half the world's countries on the map - but I still love the look of it:
After seeing this, I thought it would be fun to find some other unusual maps - and not just modern designs but a few older maps that saw the world in a slightly different way.
First up, here's a map of the world with north at the bottom - and as space doesn't really have an up or a down, this map is just as accurate as any other - but it's strange how wrong it looks. Growing up in the UK, I also find it weird seeing maps that don't have GMT (and hence the UK) in the middle:
In fact, the first map of the world - The Fra Mauro Map of 1459 - used a similar system, although as was commonplace in the 15th century, a circular space was used rather than a more modern rectangular projection system. Fra Mauro was obviously a pretty impressive mapmaker though, as his map is not only beautiful, but he was described as "geographus incomparabilis":
Finally, here's a map that doesn't invert any display directions, but simply inverts land and sea - it's hard to imagine us all living on one massive chunk of land with a few huge lakes in the middle - but it might be fun:
So that's a little round up of some unusal maps - I'm sure there are plenty more examples out there and the Strange Maps blog is always a good place to start!
This article started life whilst looking at the Wikipedia page for the International Space Station (ISS). The 'thought train' (i.e. following various wiki links!) went something like this: ISS > Golf Ball Launched from Space > Origami Airplane Launch > Kessler Syndrome > Graveyard Orbit. It therefore makes sense (in some warped way) to tackle these subjects in 'thought-order':
The International Space Station (ISS) With cooperation from 16 countries, the ISS is an ongoing research operation - effectively replacing the Russian Mir Space Station and combining (and replacing) plans from many countries to operate their own Space Station in the future: Russia's Mir 2, the USA's Freedom, the European Columbus Laboratory and the Japanese Kibo laboratory. For a bit more information, here's a quote from Wikipedia - there are also more references at the end of each section:
Golf Ball Launched from Space In 2006, as part of the EVA 1 mission (Expedition 14) Mikhail Tyurin hit a 3g golf ball (a normal ball weighs 48g) from the exterior of the Pirs airlock on the ISS. Despite the shot being a substantial slice to the right, the ball entered near-Earth orbit (NEO) and travelled for much longer than the 3 days NASA predicted. This stunt was performed 35 years after the first golf shot on the Moon and was sponsored by a Canadian golf company, E21. The map below shows the progress of the ball - "the longest drive in history" and the company website suggests it is still transmitting, although this may be out of date. Click the picture to enlarge:
This operation has been criticised by some due to its purely commercial nature. There are very high costs associated with bringing equipment up into space (golf club and ball) and therefore some have cast doubts over the true purpose of the ISS - as its founding role is one of research, not commercial venture.
Origami Airplane Launch Now it's time for the upcoming part of the story...Japanese scientists are planning to launch a number of paper aeroplanes from the ISS, pencilled in for early 2009. Around 30 planes are to be launched and any that make it down to Earth will have travelled some 400km along the way, surviving Mach 7 speeds and heating to up to 446F!
The planes will have no tracking equipment but will instead use the age-old method of a written note asking for the planes to be returned if found. It may be a fair while before anything is heard from this mission, but prototypes have been tested to survive the predicted conditions and even had a test-flight from a New York skyscraper:
Unlike the golf ball stunt, this mission does have a grounding in research, as the quote below explains:
Kessler Syndrome Virtually all space missions, satellites and space-based research causes an increase in low-orbit space debris. Early NASA missions always ended with a trip to a graveyard orbit (see below) but new research suggests that over time, even these "buried" objects will be broken up and pieces of debris will find their way into occupied orbits. Kessler Syndrome is simply the assertion that one day the amount of debris in useful orbits will be too great to overcome:
Although not of immediate concern, it is a problem that is worth considering - especially with the large amount of commercial satellites in operation (where future safety is more likely to be sacrificed for cost saving). Still, I think the main concern is of pieces of broken machinery, rather than stray golf balls and paper aeroplanes - but watch out for tool bags:
As mentioned earlier in the article, the logic behind putting a space vehicle into a graveyard orbit seems to be false, as these objects are now predicted to break up over the years and cause as many problems as if left in their original orbit. And just to show how much damage an impact with space debris can cause, the picture below shows the 'energy flash' from a hypervelocity space debris impact:
It's easy to think that all spacecraft should be brought back to Earth after their useful life (like most contemporary NASA missions) but there are many issues to contend with here also. Not only do you have to consider the complexity of such an operation (atmospheric re-entry, carrying sufficient fuel, recovery, predicting orbit etc) but also the relative difficult compared to launching to a graveyard orbit. In order to reach a graveyard orbit, a spacecraft will need to be accelerated to around 11 m/s, whereas to gain re-entry, the velocity needed would be around 1500 m/s.
So, there we have it - a nice roundup of the surrounding issues to space launches of all kinds. Not only does this article show how increasing space debris can cause major issues to future space travel (even if put into 'safe' orbits) but it highlights the debate between the (research) function of space launches and their purely commercial counterparts.
I saw a story on the BBC website yesterday about Google.org creating a map of influenza activity in America based on recent Google search terms alone. The concept is relatively simple - keep track of the prevalance of certain search terms (for example "buy flu rememdies") and track the locations they are coming from to produce a map of current flu patterns across America.
This system wasn't designed to replace any current data (obviously, cases of Flu can be tracked by official health data) but instead could provide an early warning system for health professionals about where the virus is spreading and where its activity is strongest. Using this system, flu activity can be predicted 2 weeks in advance of officially released data.
The idea has been tested against the official data when it is released and the search terms being tracked tweeked to give the best results. As Google say on their "about" page:
"We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity in your state up to two weeks faster than traditional flu surveillance systems.
Each week, millions of users around the world search for online health information. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Trends. But can search query trends provide an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?"
As you can see above, the data from Google and the official data match pretty well and the system can offer a useful pre-warning. I'd be interested to see how this idea can be taken further - the possibilities seem almost limitless!
I think I've posted about the Strange Maps blog before, so I just revisited it and thought I'd link to a couple of recent stories.
Firstly, there's the great story of a made-up island, used as an April Fools hoax by The Guardian newspaper. The headline is worthy of an award, but I'm not sure if that's of the blog's creation or The Guardian's!
The second story is of an old-fashioned 'GPS' system, only really of use in an age of few roads, or the amount of scrolls would become rather epic! Still, a great-looking solution to a problem and one I'm pretty fond of.
Strange Maps is an interesting blog that showcases the world's weirder maps, from modern GIS works to unusual historical paper maps. When I visited, the latest post was about the differing names for fizzy drinks across the USA. I've noticed a big difference with this in the UK too and although the research is kind of pointless, it's an interesting result none the less! I suppose that's what the blog is all about - click map below to enlarge:
..unless specifically authorized by the Superintendent of Chillon castle located on the beach.. 
