Given what’s been going on with Twitter recently, I figure that a Mastodon account for The Map Room might be useful, at least for those who feel the need to jump from Twitter to Mastodon. You can find it here: @maproomblog@mastodon.socialUpdate Nov. 20: I’ve moved it to maproomblog@mapstodon.space.
I have no plans to shut down any of The Map Room’s other social media presences (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter)—not at this time, anyway. And you can always subscribe via RSS or email—no intermediating platform required.
Geofiction involves creating imaginary worlds through maps—maps of fictional places, but without the story attached—and David Nuttall has been at it since the age of five. He says he’s gotten better since then (his gallery, sorted by medium: see if he’s right). One of his maps is featured in the new (6th) volume of the NACIS Atlas of Design; Nat Case writes about it here:
David’s maps do wear the sorts of stylistic suits of clothes “regular” referential maps use. They studiously use stylesheets from particular eras and schools of cartography. And the “places” mapped, like most historical fiction, has strong roots in actual geographies. The patterns of settlement and transportation, the way landforms relate to one another: David knows his stuff. And so this map, “Kjempsavor Ayars,” looks like the Faeroes … and the Shetlands, the Outer Hebrides, or the islands of Norway. And the map artwork looks a lot like a kind of map-making from the early mid-20th century, where old schools of hand-lettering and drafting met an ever-more-engineered modern world. But, and this is such a puzzle to know what to do with: It’s not actually of anywhere. There’s no stories to back you up about this bridge or that ferry route, the Viking history of that settlement or the modern fishing industry at that port. It suggests there ought to be a history like that, but it unexpectedly leaves you with that job.
The Atlas of Design, vol. 6, costs $25 and can be bought here; David’s shop is here.
An odd story out of California, reported on by Vice’s Chloe Xiang, from earlier this month. Ryan Crownholm’s website, MySitePlan.com, sells residential and commercial site plans. California’s Board for Professional Engineers, Land Surveyors, and Geologists has fined him $1,000 for practising land surveying without a licence and ordered him to shut down the site. He’s fighting the citation in court with the assistance of the libertarian Institute for Justice: see their page on the complaint. Their argument is that California surveying laws are vague enough that a literal interpretation would make any map drawn in California, no matter how informal or non-authoritative, illegal.
It’s unlikely to say the least that the Board intends to ban Google Maps or every California-based instance of GIS. This is an edge case. Crownholm’s defence turns on his drawings being “non-authoritative” and a disclaimer that these are not legal surveys. The Board apparently thinks that’s insufficient. A spot of litigation seems required to clarify things.
NACIS reports that, once again, videos of the presentations made at this year’s annual meeting in Minneapolis, which took place last week, have been uploaded to the society’s YouTube channel. The playlist is here.
The point of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, consisting of some 3,000 low-orbiting satellites (so far), is to provide broadband internet access. But it could also be used as an alternative to GPS that might be less susceptible to jamming or spoofing. The U.S. Army and a team at the University of Texas at Austin were interested in the idea, but SpaceX told them to go pound sand in 2020. Now said UT team has gone and reverse-engineered the Starlink signal to pinpoint a location to within 30 metres. Not as good as GPS, obviously, but the researchers say that a software update—and SpaceX’s cooperation—could get that accuracy down to within a metre. Their (non-peer-reviewed) paper is here. Coverage: El Reg, TechCrunch.
When the invasion of Ukraine started, these images started popping up on social media and in the news so often that it seems like most of us have access to advanced satellite imagery intelligence in real time. […] But the role of commercial providers in acquiring and sharing so many images with such regularity is unprecedented. Their rise has made military-grade intelligence available to pretty much everyone who wishes to look into it.
What’s notable is that because the satellites are commercial, the images aren’t classified.
Launching at NACIS, which is next week, but available on the Mac App Store now, Eduard is a Mac-only application that generates relief maps by “[using] machine learning to match the aesthetics and details of relief shadings created by Swiss cartographers.” (The name is a pretty obvious reference to Eduard Imhof.) The app allows you to adjust direction of illumination, aerial perspective and detail, and works with digital elevation models and a number of file formats. The launch price is US$69.99 (C$99.99) until the 23rd, after which I presume the price will go up.
The Bodleian Map Room Blog (no relation) has a nice look at some tactile maps for the visually impaired, with some interesting 20th-century examples of the form, such as 3D relief maps, a globe, and braille maps.
Apple is touting the Apple Watch Ultra’s dual-frequency GPS support, viz., it uses the GPS L5 band in addition to L1 to improve accuracy. The new L5 signal is higher power and is supposed to provide more robust service, but with only 17 satellites broadcasting on it it’s not yet fully operational. Still, a Reddit user was able to document the improved accuracy by conducting an unexpected stress test: mowing the lawn. With the Ultra the mowing rows can be made out, whereas the tracks made with a series 4 watch were all over the place. [9to5Mac]
While the Ultra is the only Apple Watch that can use the L5 band, watchOS 9 adds a redesigned Compass app and a Backtrack feature that lets users retrace their steps using on-the-fly waypoints and GPS traces. MacRumors has a tutorial. This is something I’m looking forward to trying out: my series 8 watch arrived last week.
As the keepers of the Vinland Map, the folks at Yale’s Beinecke Library might be expected to have a few thoughts about map forgeries, seeing as the Vinland Map is arguably the best known example. In an article posted to the Beinecke Library website last July, Raymond Clemens discusses the work of Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage to determine the Vinland Map’s inauthenticity, and detecting map forgeries in general. Yale seems to be making a point of studying map forgeries, to the point of adding known forgeries to their collections.
Apple is touting the