archiving the day

Ever wonder what it really means when someone says 800,000 metric tons of carbon. Well this calculator can give you an idea. For example 800k tons of carbon is the equivalent of 146k cars on the road for a year. Like everything else big government agencies do it isn’t pretty but it is interesting…to me…I think.

Favorite TED talk so far this year.

This is a great way to make a map and I hope it becomes an iPhone app.

From the article:

What’s going on?

Imagine a person standing at a street corner. The projection begins with a three-dimensional representation of the immediate environment. Close buildings are represented normally, and the viewer himself is shown in the third person, exactly where she stands.

As the model bends from sideways to top-down in a smooth join, more distant parts of the city are revealed in plan view. The projection connects the viewer’s local environment to remote destinations normally out of sight.

How?

Jack Schulze explains…

“First we take an electronic Manhattan. It’s a patch-work of various commercial sources, where we’ve repaired walls that aren’t drawn right and roofs that don’t fit. About a tenth of the city is re-built by hand, then textured.

“The projection seen here is a combination of city manipulations in modelling software, and choosing the best lens for the simulated camera. The nearby buildings obstruct the view if you get that wrong, or the distant ones stop working as a conventional map. There’s fine tuning and instinct. Let’s not demo the power of 3D applications, but make a map which is both useful and optically awesome to look at.

“Annotations come after the render. You’ll see that roads have to contour around buildings that would otherwise hide them. The design key is what’s handiest for a person standing in this exact spot, looking at this exact poster.”

Why?

Because the ability to be in a city and to see through it is a superpower, and it’s how maps should work.