atlas(t)

offensive place names with Hasan Minhaj

new orleans is ridiculously unrealistic

Like, look at this river. All these different places it could enter the lake or the sea, but no, it goes ALL THE WAY to the very tip of the land to enter the water. Artificial? Maybe, but who would bother? Totally unrealistic. pic.twitter.com/9vxBvtEQRT

— James L. Sutter (@jameslsutter) March 19, 2018

 

an RPG designer tweeted a series of posts critiquing the landscape of New Orleans as being an unrealistic design. It's pretty awesome. He even, halfway through, invents a freelancer named Steve, who is supposedly submitting this thing.

 

And speaking of sloppy: Did you seriously just label this thing as a LAKE? It is ATTACHED TO THE FUCKING OCEAN, STEVE. THAT MAKES IT, BY DEFINITION, NOT A LAKE. pic.twitter.com/MdodcUrjje

— James L. Sutter (@jameslsutter) March 19, 2018

 

Here's the whole thread. Enjoy!

scale model of san francisco ca. 1940

okay, I said this blog was mostly dead, but I came across this other thing: a scale model of the city of San Francisco, commissioned and made by the WPA and completed in 1940, has been found and partly reassembled, and will be displayed in public libraries all over the city. !!!

The model was constructed (from wood) in interlockable blocks, and showed every single building extant in the city at that time (!!!) so if your building was around then, you can see not only the tiny facsimile of it, but its actual color at the time.

The current project, an installation called "Public Knowledge: Take Part," is planned as a library treasure hunt: "A map is available, to be stamped at each branch. There will also be four bicycle tours covering six to eight libraries per ride."

When the exhibition ends in March, “the hope is to put the model back together,” Lochman says. She has identified three locations big enough to hold it: the Light Court at City Hall, the Roberts Family Gallery at the new Howard Street entrance to SFMOMA, and the Ferry Building.

The installation will be on display in various libraries through March 25.

I was going to squee, but I'll leave off. I think I'll organize a tour myself though.

cascade of geolocation fuckups

The default location for Pretoria, South Africa: someone's backyard.

 

yes, this blog is mostly dead, but my friend Thy Tran sent me this article from Gizmodo about a global geolocation fuckup that's, in its own small way, quite spectacular. And I had to put it on here.

At the private home in South Africa of a human rights lawyer and his nurse mother:

The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads.

See, it seems that those "find my phone" applications -- and many, many other geolocation apps -- are fed data by a company called Maxmind, which draws its geolocation data from a U.S. federal government agency, the NGA. Much of this data is mapped to IP (internet provider) addresses; and when an IP can't be mapped to a specific address, it's mapped generally to a city.

But instead of providing an entire city on the map, the NGA, and then Maxmind, choose a central location in that city and make that the default address for the entire city. They, of course, provide what's called an "accuracy radius" (of 5 miles or 100 miles or what have you,) but the apps they feed the data to aren't required to also provide this data (except in their fine print, away from search results.)

So when someone goes looking for a stolen laptop that ended up somewhere in Pretoria, South Africa, they will be directed straight to the house of the human rights lawyer and his nurse mother, which is the default location for all of Pretoria.

There's, apparently, also a house in Kansas which is the default location for all of the United States. And there are many others.

This is the perfect story for our times. Especially the part where the South African lawyer and his mother were being sued by an online store that had fallen so woefully behind on their orders that they were being accused of fraud and cyberbullied. Naturally, they traced the location of their cyberbullies to ... well, you know where.

So a cascade of failures on one side (from the NGA to Maxmind through whatever series of lazily organized apps) and on the other (from the online store's poor management through its customers' unacceptable online behavior) all landed on the doorstep of some good folks who had nothing to do with anything.

No one was deliberately creating FAKE NEWS, but multiple layers of falsehood were created all the same, through laziness, through irresponsibility, through greed (that of the app middlemen, trying to make a buck without providing thorough information,) through the willingness of multiple layers of people to jump to conclusions and go from zero to nuclear in five seconds ...

You don't need bad faith, deceit, or corruption in this world. The internet provides the ability for your smallest mistakes to go viral, and no one is holding anyone accountable for those.

 

the san francisco earthquake blend

just sticking my head in here for a second to draw your attention to these awesome photos by Shaun Clover. He selected archival photos from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire and then took photos from the exact same spot and blended them together. They look like sci-fi stories where two moments in time are blended by a wormhole or time-warp, or whatever the current fashion calls them. Awesome.

More on the project here.

Via Dino Ignacio.

decolonized area rapid transit

the amazing poet, graphic designer, and cultural worker Kenji Liu (who is on the board of Kearny Street Workshop, where I work) just decolonized BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) with this map above, which he created by committee on Facebook. Click here to see the discussions (in comments) on version one, and here for version two.

Kenji has been involved in the Occupy Oakland movement for a while now. It was he who produced the meme-ing postcards about the central Oakland square, called Frank Ogawa Plaza, which Occupy Oakland renamed to "Oscar Grant Plaza" after the young man who was shot by a policeman while facedown on the ground, causing protests and riots in January 2009. His postcards pointed out that Frank Ogawa, a legislator, was also interned during WWII, and his being deposed from his post by Oscar Grant wasn't necessarily an example of historical justice.

Kenji's also producing a series of images, which you can see on his Facebook design page, relating more directly to the Occupy movement.

But you know me: it's the politically motivated toponymy that really gets my juices flowing. I know from experience to expect from Kenji this quality of political/cultural critique in the form of innovative art projects. But it's how OWS is getting the creative juices gushing all over the place that really tells me this movement has legs. I think urban toponymy and memorialization -- and especially the discussions that surround them -- are markers of a healthy, active, living polity. That is, a polity composed of engaged citizens, who are engaged with their environment in the broadest sense of the word: geographical, ecological, political, and cultural.

Kenji's map has also made clear to me something I hadn't thought of before: that OWS is a political movement that takes metonymy -- basically a system of geographical metaphors -- at utterly face value. Wall St -- the concept, as opposed to "Main Street" -- is the center of power. "Wall Street" the center of power is inaccessible to them. So protesters made the geographical location into a reverse metonym for "Wall Street" the banking industry, and occupied it. They can't access the center of power, so they occupy its physical symbol. This is why the locations of the various occupations are so important to both sides. And why a physical occupation is so important to the movement at this stage.

It's important for more than just this reason, of course. The failure of broad-based political movements over the past decade or so, and especially during wartime; the transferance of our base of cultural communications to the internet, and the attempt to organize people politically on the internet -- an only moderate success; and the accession of a new generation of young adults who have never engaged in political movements, have all made face-to-face, real-time, real-place politics exciting and essential.

And in the wake of the worst wave of defaults, repos, and evictions since the Great Depression, moral ownership of place is profoundly emotional. I haven't seen anyone considering this (although I'm sure many have) but for the first time since the colonization of North America, we have a generation reaching adulthood with a seriously questionable prospect of land ownership. In the same way that you see homeless people walking slowly across busy streets, forcing traffic to slow and stop for them, OWS is forcing a momentary ownership of public space by people who mostly don't own space.

More thinking needed on this.

But in any case, Kenji is still refining his map, so go visit the Facebook posting and contribute ideas!

sanborn maptcha

way cool!

Somebody took the Sanborn insurance atlas of San Francisco from 1905 (before the earthquake and fire) and is mapping it, page by page, onto a contemporary map of the city. It's a big job so they need help. And yes, you can help, too, by going to the website and looking up intersections, then orienting and sizing each page to match map to map.

Can't wait to see the end result!

the connected states of america

via Bernice Yeung, an interactive map of how connected via cell phone the US is, by county.

Click on a county to see which other counties it connects with most. Then explore the site to look at the beautiful and cool visuals and vids they made from analyzing aggregated cell phone data.

I'm so glad they got the memo about science can also be beautiful.

edward glaeser on the daily show

edward Glaeser loves him some city. Check it out.

mta.me

via Pireeni, this lovely map tracking trains in New York's subway system as they leave and course through the city. As each line crosses another, it "plucks" it like a string, and you hear a thoughtfully chaotic music. Subway art. Enjoy.