Tagged with mapping
chemical signatures in our drinks
Posted July 1st, 2010 at 10:00 am. There are 0 comments.
Trackable Beverages This tap water “isoscape” map shows how hydrogen and oxygen isotopes vary throughout the country. Geographic factors like latitude, altitude and proximity to coasts all play a role in this isotopic variation. The cities on the map show where the researchers tested tap water along with bottled water, soda and beer. ACS/Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
These geographically specific signatures show up in human hair making a record of you travels a real possibility.
To test this theory, the scientists analyzed tap water from 33 cities and looked at isotope patterns in Dasani bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic and Budweiser. They found the beverage isotope pattern from those cities matched the tap water pattern — which makes sense, because many beverage companies produce their drinks regionally instead of in one main location. For example, if you drink a Bud in Utah, it probably came from the Anheuser-Busch plant in Fort Collins, Colo., not St. Louis.
via fresser
The Box
Posted May 12th, 2010 at 10:38 am. There are 0 comments.
Photo by Alastair Blackwood
The Box is back in the UK. For a period of over a year the BBC monitored their very own 40 foot shipping container as it travelled around the world carrying goods across oceans via intermodal transport. It was all to try and tell the story of globalization through the one defining symbol of the interconnected system of global trade – the intermodal shipping container.
It started it’s journey loaded with Scotch Whiskey headed for Shanghai China, and visited ports in Singapore, Bangkok, New York and Los Angeles and long stay at idle in Yokohama. Along the way it provided the context for discussions about piracy, the decline of the global economy and it’s effect on global trade and highlighted to the kinds of goods being made for cheap overseas and shipped to the west.
google mail envelopes
Posted April 12th, 2010 at 1:27 pm. There are 0 comments.
Love the idea of making maps into envelopes, even with the limitations of having to send all snail mail south-easterly to get the return address and the recipient’s address properly positioned.
Like when Reason magazine did custom magazine covers with aerial photographs for each of their subscribers homes – in June 2004
US Interstate system as a tube map
Posted November 12th, 2009 at 12:25 pm. There are 0 comments.
Senex Prime on flickr
the sea level rises and Switzerland becomes a series of islands
Posted October 22nd, 2009 at 12:42 pm. There are 0 comments.
I don’t remember seeing this in particular at the Swiss EXPO.02 but a number of artists working together under the name Waterproof “imagined a(n) (im)possible scenario wherein the water level in Switzerland rises to 1400 meters (4600 feet), turning the landlocked, Alpine country into an island nation, its rocky peaks rising above a vast ocean.”
The series of images over at Pruned show an imaginative take on how the Swiss might deal with their new situation.
via Pruned
setting an alarm for a where rather than a when
Posted October 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm. There is 1 comment.
Proximity is a simple iPhone app that works as an alarm clock except the alarm is not set for a time but rather a location. It is aimed at commuters and others that end up sleeping while they are moving in some sort of transport. It is a great mobilization of two things that are usually understood as fixed: You sleeping in bed and your alarm clock on the bedside table are in a fixed location. A standard proximity sensor that is fixed in location sensing when moving things get closer than a pre-selected distance threshold.
I really like the transposition of a specific location where one would usually have a specific time, attaching an alarm to a where rather then a when. It is a bit of genius.
Museum of the Phantom City
Posted October 1st, 2009 at 12:26 pm. There are 0 comments.
New York City of today isn’t exactly as we had imagined it. Through history there have been many possible futures that have gone unrealized. The Museum of the Phantom City presents these Architectural and Urban Design proposals as one moves through the city to the intended locations via an iPhone app that is available no in the app store. The Van Alen Institute is holding a walking tour on Sturday October 3rd, the day the full site launches.
Get the Museum of the Phantom City: Other Futures iPhone app
mapping a complete experience
Posted July 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am. There are 2 comments.
LEGO’s Experience Wheel shows the mapping a complete experience by surfacing the points that are critical to a good experience and where there is opportunity to improve, differentiate or optimize the delivery of the experience, in this case a fictional flight to NYC by a company executive. Bruce Temkin outlines what he like about this particular approach :
- It’s great to have a formal approach to describing/designing experiences
- It starts with the description of a specific customer (in the center)
- It recognizes the life cycle of experiences: before, during, and after
- It’s easy to use and simple to understand
the world as top level domains
Posted May 26th, 2009 at 7:15 pm. There are 0 comments.
See a large version, or buy as a poster
map is trademark Byte Level Research
On the Grid
Posted April 30th, 2009 at 7:17 pm. There are 2 comments.
On the Grid is a project documenting the space created by the vast nationwide network of powerlines and the land underneath them. Undeveloped except for the powerlines them selves they carve through the landscape, connected the most rural with the most urban. The shared space, buzzing with the hum of excess electricity, is at times a pristine and beautiful meadow surrounded by forest and others, the uninhabitable tract amongst suburban banality, beautiful in its own right.
On the Grid, a project by Adam Ryder and Brian Rosa, explores the landscape immediately surrounding high-tension electric transmission lines in Rhode Island. Starting near the Ocean State Power facility in Burnllville, Ryder and Rosa spent several days walking along various sites of this arterial infrastructure. Sites were chosen though surveying publicly available aerial photographs and land use maps, and all photos were geotagged with handheld GPS units. In combining the rigid technical process of digital mapping with the subjective practice of landscape photography, this project explores the state as a collection of differentiated spaces that, though seemingly isolated, are networked.
The resulting photographs showcase the topographical diversity surrounding these structures, whose own narrow terrain remains virtually unchanged throughout their straight, incisive paths. The path of the power lines functions as a rural to urban transect, cutting through farmland and commercial parks, cul-de-sacs and strip malls, used car lots and interstate highways.
As human intervention in the natural landscape sprawls to the most remote areas of the state, our lived space becomes increasingly regulated and our encounters with equivocal territories are especially rare. In more urbanized areas, we lose our relation to places which seem to exist unto themselves, where one can feel alone and unhindered. The ambiguity of the land occupied by high-tension power offers the possibility of experience outside of regulation. Despite being part of an infrastructure that is highly regulated and bureaucratized, the physical space inhabited by these power lines remains easily accessible though its sheer ubiquity. Thus, paradoxically, the realm of power lines seems to exist not only outside of regulation, but also outside of the normative properties of the native landscape. Whereas an area half of a mile away from a high tension line may be densely wooded, the space occupied by the wires will be clear-cut, devoid of trees and exhibiting, at most, low shrubbery and grass. The uniformity of this narrow swath as it cuts through the landscape reveals as much about its own spatial utility as it does of the landscape it bifurcates across the state (and beyond). It is this topographical sameness that makes the power lines amazing sites of contrast against both development and the natural landscape.
On the Grid invites reflection on the blurred relationship between networked technology, the built environment and nature through these buzzing monoliths.
- Website Text (An image on the original website)
They did a nice interview on the NPR show Living on Earth (mp3 link).
Quoting here,
Yeah absolutely, it’s a really unique tract of land that doesn’t have any development on it except for itself. So, it’s kind of, in a way its really pristine and untouched and…virginal, its kind of, kind of like, romantic and magical in that way.
-Adam Ryder
and
What’s really – I think actually awesome, is the best word I can use to say it – what’s really awesome about seeing this parade of power lines through the landscape, especially in rural areas is that we’re kind of seeing these, these tendrils connecting humanity as one large organism and it’s a cool way of looking at us, you know what I mean?
-Adam Ryder
Locate powerline grid infrastructure near you via this previous post
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