Issue 19

World

Ocean temperatures are off the charts. Sigh. This feedback loop is going to bite us in the ass.

• https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/05/world/ocean-surface-temperature-heat-record-climate-intl/index.html

GADM Good source for Country admin and subdivision data. “GADM provides maps and spatial data for all countries and their sub-divisions. You can browse our maps or download the data to make your own maps.”

• https://gadm.org/

Adams Bridge - Between India and Sri Lanka Before 1480. Nice geographic feature. No evidence that it is human made despite religious claims to the contrary.

• https://brilliantmaps.com/adams-bridge/

Rice Rice growing is in trouble. Which is trouble for the half of humanity that eats it. Another good scrolly-story by the NYT:

• https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/20/climate/rice-farming-climate-change.html

Toponyms Kaliningrad now Królewiec in Polish which is the historical Polish name. The Russian’s are unhappy. For hundreds of years it was part of East Prussia and was called Königsberg. Now that I’m not responsible for a map base I don’t have to actual get the team to go make any changes. That’s kind of nice. At Microsoft my friend Kate formed a geopolitical review committee to stay on top of these things. I remember phone calls with the U.N. Cartographer about details and questions. And it was questions to Kate, not from her. Definitely a world expert and that team eventually had a required review on all products after some game got into trouble and when Windows itself was banned in India for 12 pixels that India disagreed with on the Chinese border. Banned until fixed. That was a shit storm. The map was not by us, nor reviewed by Kate at that time. You can imagine the cost - because the products were all distributed on CD’s. We did get a Microsoft GM in Turkey thrown into jail once for an Encarta World Atlas physiographic name. Unfortunately the name was Kurdistan. But we were oblivious that “Stan” meant country. They let him out of jail after we promised to fix it.

• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65545636

### Germany

More Human footprints This time some of the oldest found, found in Germany. https://uni-tuebingen.de/en/university/news-and-publications/press-releases/press-releases/article/300000-year-old-snapshot-oldest-human-footprints-from-germany-found/

US

US County map of the decline of local news.

• Unfortunately it’s uncredited by Scott Simon. Most likely the US Census data listed below. https://steveinskeep.substack.com/p/whos-left-to-tell-the-story?r=8ivfo&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
• Another map of what appears to be the same data: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/interactive/2021/local-news-deserts-expanding/
• Interactive map, by State, of news deserts: https://www.usnewsdeserts.com/states-main/

  • This one is sourced: UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media

    U.S. Census Bureau 2012-2016 5-year American Community Survey.

GeoSpatial KG’s Very interesting article and code for building geospatial knowledge graphs using historical USGS maps. I can smell a new project here. Who wants to go “ghost” trail mapping with me? The goal would be to extract trails from historic USGS maps, compare them with current trails and go hike the ones that are no longer current. Everyone loves a lot of hopping over downed logs, right? Ok, maybe a ski/snowshoe excursion when we’re up a bit higher?

• “Building Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Graphs from Vectorized Topographic Historical Maps”:
  • https://www.semantic-web-journal.net/system/files/swj2918.pdf
  • Github repo for their code: https://github.com/usc-isi-i2/linked-maps
• Charlie, might be super cool to see it applied to the History of Irish Sports source maps vs. current.