In a 15-minute video posted to YouTube, Adam Savage ruminates on the advantages of paper maps, the Los Angeles institution that was the Thomas Guide, and navigating by paper map in general (with digressions on the Knowledge and trap streets and such).
Previously: The Rise and Fall of the Thomas Guide.
The New York Times maps the distribution of COVID-19 cases in Los Angeles. “County officials recently estimated that one in three of Los Angeles County’s roughly 10 million people have been infected with Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic. But even amid an uncontrolled outbreak, some Angelenos have faced higher risk than others. County data shows that Pacoima, a predominantly Latino neighborhood that has one of the highest case rates in the nation, has roughly five times the rate of Covid-19 cases as much richer and whiter Santa Monica.”
Last week I pointed to the New York Times map of Democratic donors, which had some methodological limitations to it (it simply ranked the candidates by most donors on a per-county basis). On the other side of the country, the Los Angeles Times has dug even deeper, with detailed maps of donations to the various Democratic presidential candidates—but only for Los Angeles County. They also have maps of national donations to the candidates, of a similar scope to those of the New York Times: they both got access to the same data at the same time. [Maps Mania]
An Ottawa city councillor wants take a page out of Los Angeles’s playbook and create a real-time interactive map of the city’s road conditions. L.A.’s street assessment map rates road conditions as good, fair or poor. Since Ottawa’s roads are on balance between fair and poor, it might be revealing, if uncomfortable, to have all that road data easily accessible; at the moment it can only be accessed by asking city officials about the state of a given street.
KPCC’s AirTalk has a nostalgic look at the Thomas Guide, which at one point was to Los Angeles what the Gazetteer is to Maine or the Sherlock map is to Winnipeg. [Kottke/WMS]
Google is using its Street View cars, now equipped with air-quality sensors, to measure air pollution in California on a block-by-block level.
Earlier this year, we shared the first results of this effort with pollution levels throughout the city of Oakland.
We’re just beginning to understand what’s possible with this hyper-local information and today, we’re starting to share some of our findings for the three California regions we’ve mapped: the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and California’s Central Valley (the Street View cars drove 100,000 miles, over the course of 4,000 hours to collect this data!) Scientists and air quality specialists can use this information to assist local organizations, governments, and regulators in identifying opportunities to achieve greater air quality improvements and solutions.
