erhebung

Two New Maps

A few days ago I posted some satel­lite maps of my current location, but at the time I didn’t think to use the excel­lent Lightbox 2 plugin to provide larger versions of the images. I was thinking about modi­fying that post, but then remembered that I couldn’t do that as I didn’t keep the original files (I was using a dif­ferent computer at the time). So, instead, here is a new map (it should pop out when you click on it):

And this is a satel­lite map of a lake I really want to see:

Many Many Maps

Anyone inter­ested in maps should check out the Perry-​Castañeda Library Map Col­lec­tion, a huge archive of maps, all of which, with a few excep­tions, are in the public domain. The col­lec­tion is hosted on the website of the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, and I’ve been visiting it fre­quently since I dis­covered it, by accident, a couple of weeks ago. So far, I’ve seen dozens and dozens of amazing maps, but it is hard to make specific recom­mend­a­tions as they’re all really inter­esting; but once I’ve explored it a little more, delved a little deeper into the cat­egories and time periods, I’ll post the most inter­esting things I find to erhebung.tumblr.

Merry Christmas

This is wonderful:

For more than 50 years, NORAD and its pre­de­cessor, the Con­tin­ental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve flight.

The tra­di­tion began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-​based Sears Roebuck & Co. advert­ise­ment for children to call Santa mis­printed the tele­phone number. Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s oper­a­tions “hotline.” The Director of Oper­a­tions at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check radar for indic­a­tions of Santa making his way south from the North Pole. Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tra­di­tion was born. To listen to Colonel Shoup talk about the exper­i­ence, click here.

In 1958, the gov­ern­ments of Canada and the United States created a bi-​national air defense command for North America called the North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD. NORAD inher­ited the tra­di­tion of tracking Santa.

Since that time, NORAD men, women, family and friends have self­lessly volun­teered their time to per­son­ally respond to Christmas Eve phone calls and emails from children. In addition, we now track Santa using the internet. Last year, millions of people who wanted to know Santa’s where­abouts visited the NORAD Tracks Santa website.

Finally, media from all over the world rely on NORAD as a trusted source to provide Christmas Eve updates on Santa’s journey.

I hope everyone gets a visit from Santa this year.

A Future Tokyo

The above image is a scan of a two-​page spread from Akira, a Japanese manga by Kat­suhiro Otomo. It is a fant­astic series, and well-​worth reading (try to find the original black and white version cur­rently pub­lished by Dark Horse). Here is a summary from the Wiki­pedia page on the manga:

Akira is a black and white serial manga or graphic novel by Kat­suhiro Otomo. Set in a post-​apocalyptic Tokyo, the work utilises con­ven­tions of the cyber­punk genre to detail a saga of turmoil. Ini­tially seri­al­ised in the pages of Young Magazine from 1982 until 1990, the work was col­lected in six volumes upon com­ple­tion by Japanese pub­lisher Kodansha. The work was first pub­lished in an English language version by the Marvel Comics imprint Epic Comics, one of the first manga works to be trans­lated in entirety. Otomo’s art on the series is con­sidered out­standing, and the work is a break­through for both Otomo and the manga form. An identic­ally titled anime film adapt­a­tion was released in 1988, short­ening the plot, but with its struc­ture and scenes heavily informed by the manga and its serial origins.

A key char­acter in Akira is the city itself, Neo-​Tokyo, a new urban area con­structed in the after­math of the nuclear war that dev­ast­ated the “old city”. This “new” Tokyo is con­structed on top of Tokyo Bay: