BBC News: “Russia is causing disruption to satellite navigation systems affecting thousands of civilian flights, experts say. […] The persistent disruption led Finland’s flag carrier Finnair to suspend daily flights to Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to return to Helsinki due to GPS interference. ¶ Tartu Airport relies solely on GPS, unlike most larger airports which have alternative navigation systems that allow aircraft to land even if the signal is lost.”
Month: May 2024
Chinese Academy of Sciences Releases 1:2,500,000 Geologic Maps of the Moon
Last month the Chinese Academy of Sciences released a set of geologic maps of the moon at 1:2,500,000 scale—twice the resolution of the USGS’s 1:5,000,000 scale maps. Available, it seems, as a geologic atlas as well as quadrangle maps—though it’s not immediately apparent from where. News: Nature, Popular Science, Universe Today.
North Yorkshire Bans Apostrophes on Street Signs, Outrage Ensues
North Yorkshire council announced that apostrophes would be removed from street signs to avoid running into problems with geographical systems; as the Grauniad reports, this move has “provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike.” Okay, several things. One, the standard being cited, BS 7666, from what I can gather (I can’t actually find BS 7666 online, just several guides to it), doesn’t ban apostrophes and other punctuation marks, it just deprecates them as a best practice. Two, removing apostrophes breaks Irish names—no O’Reilly Street, for example—and as such in an English context is Not a Good Look. And three, any database that breaks in the presence of an apostrophe is incompetently done. [Brian Timoney]
Why Oh Why Does an Alphabetical Cartogram Have to Be a Thing?
More proof that Randall hates us and wants to hurt our eyes comes from last Wednesday’s xkcd, which does what I’m pretty sure no cartogram has ever done: size by alphabetical order.
Pokémon Go Users Are Adding Fake Beaches to OpenStreetMap
Some Pokémon Go players are apparently adding fake beaches to OpenStreetMap in order to improve their chances of catching a new pokémon. The pokémon in question was added to the game last month and only spawns in beach areas. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMap as its base map. It’s not hard to see how players can cheat by adding natural=beach nodes where no actual beaches exist, and indeed beaches started turning up in odd places in the game—and in the real-world map as well, because the game uses real-world map data, and that’s what gamers have been messing with. Receipts at the OSM community forum thread. [Atanas Entchev]