Happy Earth Day, in a British roundabout way

A recent twittersation with @rollohome had me pull out these screen shots from Google Maps - it doesn't appear to give proper driving directions around complex British roundabouts - I thought this was a curious counterpoint for Earth Day, as we go round&round...

Medieval Fenlands GIS

[Update 5: see its latest reboot on a new community engagement project here
Update 4: Data on ShareGeoOpen is now on successor Edinburgh Datashare
Update 3: see subsequent story with Ordnance Survey and 1SpatialOnline validation
Update 2: see web mashup with later historic data  and more on data repositories
Update 1: see companion Post-medieval drainage of the Fens from same source]

The recent release of UK Ordnance Survey OpenData opened the opportunity to post H.C. Darby's data from The Medieval Fenland and The Drainage of the Fens of East Anglia in the eastern UK. And parishes are the geographic unit that remained constant since the Middle Ages.

A Tale of two approaches, part III

My previous posts here, here and here are summarised in today' reply to Matt Ball's excellent Spatial Sustain entry, What comes first, model-based design or integrated project workflows?

Trending oilelefant.com

My talks at FindingPetroleum and PPDM presented the impact of the new web in petroleum.

No such thing as a free lunch, part II

Addendum: Steven Feldman just posted an great summary on this.

No such thing as a free lunch

To great press and technocrati fanfare, the UK Ordnance Survey freed up its data... somewhat! This was promptly announced on mapperz and Ernest Maples blogs. And commented on as far away as the US west coast by Ed Parsons and Geoff Zeiss currently in America - does location matter?

A tale of two approaches, part II

Things have moved since my previous post: even though ESRI doesn't want to be geodesign, that is high on their agenda in their business partner conference this week. And since where 2.0 among many others hail location services as the next big thing, it's no surprise Wired quotes Jack Dangermond as pushing handhelds for onsite design as I imagine it:

2D or not 2D, part deux

There's a comprehesive move toward fairly generic realtime 3D, beyond the many, many traditional implementations. Satish Pai said at a Schlumberger Forum over five years ago that video gaming consoles would drive 3D visualisation in petroleum. Steve Ballmer recently asked at Microsoft's Global Energy Forum if X-Box might be the next console (below)? Google Earth uses movie industry techniques to speed up visualisation. And military techniques used in seismic visualisation were presented at FindingPetroleum's seminar Advances in Geophysics & Sub-surface Description this week.

Another take on climate change

[ 2021 update: full twitter thread why "plume push" theory may be flawed

  2010 update: See follow-on Part II here ]

If the 8.8 magnitude Chilean quake may have shortened days by an infenitisimal amount late last month, it highlights the lesser-know fact that the earth wobbles on it axis, and that mass plate-tectonic movements are the result as well as the cause of earth tremors along plate boundaries below (may need to install Google Earth plug-in as indicated).

Gathering clouds over the horizon...

... intermittent sunshine and showers predicted tomorrow. No this is not a meteo prediction, but a metaphor for opportunities and confusion that cloud computing creates. I see it as a pressure-release valve, where the constant demand to deliver more for less is pushing both sectors, for-profit and not-for-profit.