THERE’s where I’ve gotta be

Oh such a nice application (not new, but just discovered) from Dutch GIS organization, Alterra.  “Daar Moet Ik Zijn” allows you to pick the type(s) of landscape you like, weight them by how pervasive they should be, and how important they are… and then voom!  … nice map showing you which places fit your preferences.  This should be useful for … well, vacation planning, or in case I want to move somewhere, and by the way they are collecting statistics probably to understand what is important to Dutch people (at least geeks).  My map (shown) heavily weights woods.  I love my environment here in Amsterdam, but do miss the trees.

The Middle East Puzzle

This is a nice and useful little Flash puzzle from Rethinking Schools.org. (I was going to look up these things anyway, and this is a nice mnemonic tool.) Checked myself on the second try and I performed significantly better… maybe I should have another go for perfection. I wonder how this was made and by whom… trying to find the source. It would be nice to also identify cities, rivers etc. this way. I guess American kids are trying to catch up and overcome the image crated by Miss South Carolina a couple of years ago!
I have a feeling that all of these names will become much more familiar in the decade ahead.

The UK, etc., Explained

This is a great little animation: “The Difference between the United Kingdom, Great Britain, and England Explained“… plus a lot more explaining about the old British Empire, and “the Crown”. The guy (C.G.P.Grey) sure talks fast, but thank goodness you can replay it if you are motivated! This is the kind of information you sometimes wonder about but never get around to looking up. His source is Wikipedia, so hope they’ve got it right! Found this video via NACIS (North American Cartographic Society). In case you can’t take the monologue, he published the script on his blog.

Crowd Counting

Estimates of people at the Cairo protest vary from 10,000 to 2 million. Using ArcGIS to outline an polygon which might represent the heaviest crowd, the area is 104,000 square meters. Assuming a rather tight crowd, the average could be 2 people per square meter. So my estimate is 200,000 people give or take 50,000. And of course there are masses, coming and going, and in all the streets not included in the polygon. Anyway, impressive, but not a million. I don’t think it matters.