Blog-hits top a million since Sept. 2009

Update: the last three posts  picked up further AI using  GIS, AI to convey complex astronomy and global-to-local integration efforts re: Climate Emergency. See the last two posts on my companion blog here closing my social commentary launched in Kuwait. My Medium Professional Channel also closed on a humorous take on AI here, & my Personal Channel did here. Note also "last post" entries in my feature AI 'magnum opus' here. Note finally my internet footprint on the banner menu of this blog's web view here... 

"So long, farewell, auf wieder-sehen, goodby-ye!" (apols to "The Sound of Music" here).

Is reaching this milestone not fitting on the blog's 15½th anniversary? The 20th anniversary of my return from the US, a mo. to the 50th of emigrating to Canada, & 6 mo. to the 40th of my original pre-internet post ( see 1986, top left banner menu of this blog's web view here)?

As cumulative hits exceed the 1⅛M mark, let's update the last recap here. 

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This is how I ended my feature blogpost on AI:

September marked 15 years of blogging: quite happy with 375 posts garnering over 750K hits topping 50K monthly, up from under 10K before addressing AI; see my next post for stats in the context of web history incl. mine. My web footprint is on the banner menu of this blog's web view, where you can see hits at top right. 

Update: March 15 2026 exceeded 1M hits at 400 posts with monthlies nearing 50K hits. Note that Sept. 2020 had ½M hits... so hits doubled in last 5 out of 15 yrs.!

Detailed evolution per Copilot

I tabulated monthly hits since the beginning here, and the pivot table (Wikipedia) summarizes 15½ yrs in tabular and graphic form:

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Copilot AI traversed the 15½ yrs to tabulate its themes as follows:

Copilot synthesizes it into a Emergence Timeline:

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Copilot estimates a qualitative Intensity Timeline:

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It creates this Visual Temporal Graph:

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Footnote: is it not amazing how Copilot suggested the method, ran the Python script based on the blog to post this graph... all without writing a line of code?!

And finally we have a Color‑Coded Theme Matrix (ASCII Heatmap):

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🧭 What this matrix reveals:

1. GIS dominates early, then stabilizes

    A strong red block on the left, tapering to yellow — your technical foundation.

2. Climate peaks sharply in the middle

    A bright red column in the Climate Era — your environmental deep dive.

3. History explodes suddenly

    A dramatic jump from green to full red in the Medieval Era.

4. Personal + Narrative become your late‑era engines

    The Integrative Era glows red at the bottom — your reflective, essayistic turn.

5. Tools fade but never vanish

    A warm orange → yellow → green gradient — always present, never dominant.

________________________

4/9/2026 update:

The hardest problem AI ever solved, with Google Deep Mind CEO

In the 1st ¼ hr., I get vindicated for putting my work on the web free-to-reuse (called CC BY-SA 4.0 at the bottom of this blog's web view): AlphaFold was put on the web for free & pretty well every drug is now made today using it (~ 13:00 mark). See also their full movie at the bottom of my feat. post atop my blog. Aside from the million hit mark above, this is a nice way to wrap up my "the internet is free" socials, isn't it?

Update: ditto, bottom of "AI-ding Tools" here, "How Nature Solved Robotics" here ends up sharing widely the know-how around DIY robotics to help improve collective learning... I rest my case!

Climate & ecological emergency (CEE) from global to local

David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth, 1970s environmental slogan “think globally, act locally” needs to be recast ½ c. later to “think globally, observe locally” in order to better act locally: that is why I push Citizen Science  thru this blog & provide tools, say, to build your own maps here; see the banner map on the desktop not mobile blog here. 

I bird-dogged the increased flooding thru SusCott in East Anglia prior to joining Extinction Rebellion (XR) then starting & morphing Cambrdgeshire.ai (here) five years ago. I'm a geologist who was paid, after all, to observe, assess & interpret, see opener here:

... a geologic principle [is] that small-scale features - the texture of a rock fragment at left - reflect much larger ones - local land form at right to entire mountain chains - within a knowledge framework...

Flysch sample & outcrop, Gan, SW FR (Greg Zolnai, 1984)

AI drew Lagrange Points in a jiffy

 Astrodynamics published here a new route to the moon that saves fuel & avoids comms break when moon lies between Earth & spaceship. 

It uses a Lagrange point of equilibrium between two planets where an object can be left w no energy needed to keep it there. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST Wikipedia) is the best known at L2 w the Sun, the new lunar route the L1 in Earth Moon pair.

I first heard of it decades ago in Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga (Wikipedia): Joshua Calvert, nicknamed “Lagrange” Calvert in the Night’s Dawn trilogy became famous for risky navigation and jump travel associated with Lagrange-point maneuvers (Perplexity).

Exhuming my thesis, part V

 This follows on Part IV with further AI investigation in GIS that created the maps in previous Parts. This is also an update on my Community Engagement series ending here. Our non-profit has an opportunity to re-engage GIS & AI after my partner attended an AGI meeting on same. I plan to repatriate to pursue this, stay tuned.

We decided to pursue AI offerings on QGIS as it's free - my other account off maintenance curtails my access to AI tools - and the prognosis looks good. First I did a review of what's available in Google Gemini here. The update esp. the closing caveat were particularly useful.

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Two Antiquities leaders by the map

This follows on "Ancient Roman environment" paragraph halfway down here: the blog post about the Roman road network ended up observing the vastly different water regime in ancient Mesopotamia. 

Update: I renamed the blogpost to add a second map of Marcus Aurelius along the Danube, see also the footnote. 

Alexander the Great in Mesopotamia

Fox News Digital ran a feature titled Alexander the Great's long-lost city located after nearly two millennia: ‘Absolutely stunning’ about Alexandria-on-the-Tigris (Charax Spasinou, summary at bottom). That falls smack dab in the middle of that map region. I simply recycled the previous map with Ancient World Mapping Center (AWMC) at UNC-Chapel Hill data for that period.

Continental drift not push-me but pull-you, the Rockhall Plateau

 A funny thing happened when I showed my last blog post to my mom: "what is that blob right above where it says 'Atlantic Ocean'?". Widow and mother to geologists, she learned to read maps: she spotted the Rockhall Rise as it shows in the zoomed-in view below; it's also known as Rockhall Plateau (Perplexity), briefly a piece of crust left behind in the spreading of the North Atlantic. The tectonic plate margins, incl. the mid-Atlantic Ridge top right, are highlighted in cyan below. Same as the second-last blogpost showed interesting geomorphology only seen in North polar view, this portion of the far North Atlantic also shows better than in a normal or equatorial map view shown at right.

Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands, cont.

 This follows on the original post here, with more news on "Arctic fires" that are counterintuitive a priori:

Perplexity summary of NASA captured it from space, and it looks like a bad joke: fire burning on the ice of the North Pole. The scary thing is that it has been multiplying for 10 years: NASA satellites have detected a dramatic rise in Arctic wildfires over the past decade, with fires spreading farther north into icy regions, fuelled by an Arctic warming four times faster than the global average. These blazes, now more frequent and intense, are shifting from the Arctic's edges to a broad northern band, burning drier tundra and releasing ancient carbon from permafrost, turning some areas into carbon sources. Lightning ignites many of these deep-burning fires, whose smoke travels globally, worsening air quality and signalling urgent climate impacts as noted in recent Arctic assessments. 

A view from the top of the world

This follows on from 3D maps in current affairs: it showed an intriguing feature bisecting the Arctic on a proxy topography for the earth's crust; it's only visible on a Polar Stereographic projection, looking straight down the North Pole, mapped here for features N of 50° N lat.

This was seen when mapping ArcticDEM - High-resolution Elevation Models of the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas) and Seabed Sediment Thickness (clipped to N of 50°N, Esri Living Atlas).  From the poster & overlay at the bottom:

Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands

This follows on East Anglia environment in a global context. A recent article, Peatlands across the Arctic are expanding as the climate warms, research shows  via @physorg_com, made me look to map data for that. I posted a fair bit on East Anglia peatlands in this blog. I also recently used polar Arctic basemaps N of 50°lat., like Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes, amongst this blog's Arctic coverage. Next post is Mapping Arctic Boreal Peatlands, cont..

Bomber, missile & drone ranges in current Iran conflict

This follows on a previous post mapping long-haul flights (this blog) in a similar manner.

March update: ballistic missile range map differ slightly from aircraft range maps.

Late March update: debunking sensationalist press re: drone threat Down Under...

2026 Iran Conflict

Currently in the news, the UK prohibited the use of forward bases by the US, whereas that issue was sidestepped last summer for US intervention in Iran (Perplexity). Having looked at the range of fighter jets in Arctic War games (this blog), I did the same for B52 bombers (Perplexity). Here are the relevant data:

The travels of La Macareña

 ... Aaand now for something completely different! Following on tracing travels & travails on simple maps for my travels over a decade ago and recently Samurais & Richard Lionheart, I traced the journey of that song&dance everyone knows.

It all started with ye olde beer advert popping up on YouTube shorts:

Henry VIII Dissolution of Monasteries in England

This continues history posts from Roman Roads vast network and local effect, to medieval travels by Richard I and by Samurais.

Inspired by National Archives' story map: Discover the Dissolution of Monasteries by Henry VIII from 1536 to 1540, here is its intro:

 Henry VIII's break from Rome and the creation of the Church of England set in motion a revolutionary chain of events that resulted in the closure of almost 900 religious houses, displacing 12,000 people from their religious orders. While some were allowed to remain or convert, many were given pensions to surrender their churches and many still were simply evicted with no compensation. The dissolution changed the kingdom's schooling, medical care, land ownership and powerful figures - but why did it happen, and how did it affect your local area?

A Belgian holiday

 This picks up from A Roman Holiday about aspects of Roman Roads. A friend pointed out this YouTube video, How A Roman Road Changed Belgium Forever, here is their synopsis:

Why does Belgium speak two languages? The answer is a 2,000-year-old Roman road.

In this video, I explain how the Via Belgica, a highway built by the Roman empire around 50 BC, created a language border that still divides Belgium today. The road ran from Tongeren to Bavay, separating Romanized Gaul in the south from Germanic tribes in the north. That linguistic divide has persisted through the Middle Ages, Spanish rule, Austrian rule, French occupation, and Belgian independence.

Today, Dutch speakers live north of the line, French speakers live south of it, and the border is still influenced by that ancient Roman road. Even Belgium's election results are decided by this 2,000-year-old line.

Having mapped Roman Roads, I recreated a focussed map on the region, adding the Belgian Wallonie region in green. As roads were unidentified in the AWNC database, I selected them per video. I found a source (no metadata in arcgis.com) that put Via Belgica right along it, confirming my choice.

3D maps in current affairs

This picks up on the previous Beautiful maps... as well as Arctic Waterfront... re: the distribution of influence over the Arctic in the news of late.

Update: see in A view from the top of the world more on an intriguing lineament bisecting the Arctic from top to bottom on an Alaska Polar Strereographic projetion.

This time let's look at the elevation maps of the area:

• High Resolution Elevation Model of the Arctic (Esri Living Atlas)
• Seabed Sediment Thickness (Esri Living Atlas)

Arctic Waterfront, a measure of geopolitical stakes

 Update: next in the series on the Arctic is here with more data & a 3D view.

A mid-2011 post Beautiful maps in current affairs (note the updates) said: 

UN Convention on the Law of the Sea [...] by Dr Parson of the Southampton UK National Oceanographic Centre [...] described how nations were given an opportunity to claim Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) beyond the standard 200 nautical mile limit (viz. UNCLOS and UNEP). [...]

Bird-dogging COVID, a five year retrospect

This follows on the last COVID update  here, 5 yrs. after polling COVID stats Jan. 2020 to May 2021.

I went to London exactly 6 yrs. ago to get my Canadian passport: my UK "settled status" as a French national wasn't in yet; if they didn't take me as EU citizen, they couldn't refuse me as Commonwealth citizen... I met my best friend in Chinatown to witness my passport pics, before I went to the consulate to renew my passport... Well Chinatown was already all set up with one-way ingress-egress in stores, social distancing & face masks! The consulate also closed for no reason given. So, everyone but uk.guv seemed to know what had started in China late Nov. early Dec 2019 had already arrived here... 

Exhuming my thesis, part IV

This follows on my previous post here of a series started here. Also here under Great Lakes with a different perspective. And here its pivotal role in my career. Lastly a case of "AI to the rescue", it's  listed on my blog's pinned post under 2026. 

Update: see follow-on with further maps investigation merging QGIS & AI here.

In my initial post of this series, I wrote (caps added):

That prompted me now to look up geophysical data (aeromagnetic anomalies, Wikipedia): will it allow to GLIMPSE terranes in the subsurface below the Great Lakes, as well as earlier Archean and later Phanerozoic features such as, respectively, the Wawa Lineament and the Niagara Escarpment? Lo-and-behold, I found aeromagnetic data (NOAA) and sketch-mapped them below on my desktop GIS (Esri)!

Richard Cœur de Lion's return trip

This follows on from new maps posted on history & newmaps.

Update: added fun calculation about castles at the bottom

Update 2: for an excellent narrative, go to Lionheart Substack here

Medievalist.net posted here a rethink of the circumstances of Lionheart's return from the Third Crusade, summary here and in three-sentences:

The article presents Attila Bárány’s argument that Richard I’s capture after the Third Crusade was primarily a product of high politics, not an accident of storms, pride, or divine punishment. Richard’s secretive, indirect route home and his decision to pass through risky territories are treated as calculated responses to the political threats posed by figures like Philip Augustus and Emperor Henry VI, who could profit from his detention. Leopold V’s personal resentment is seen as a catalyst rather than a sufficient cause, with Richard’s captivity and ransom functioning as tools of imperial strategy and diplomatic theatre.

Even more maps, with a twist

In this opening view from this video here, doesn't the Grand Canyon appear inverted to you? As in the deep parts pop up instead of down!

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