The stunning beauty of Maps, part III

History and current events are a great opportunity for GIS as they allow to disseminate pertinent information fast to those who need it. They bring out the best in map-making I posted here and here already. Not a few websites posted maps on the Japanese catastrophe, here are those I found from watching Al-Jazeera and my favourite blogs.
NOAA tsunami map (I already posted it for Chilean quake exactly a year ago):

Another Take on Climate Change, Part II

[Update 2: thanks Greg Cocks for this April 2019 update
Update 1: Part III, more on plate boundary earthquakes]

A year ago today I posted here on the Chilean 8.8 magnitude earthquake.... The recent earhtquakes and tsunamis in Japan and New Zealand, and China and Indonesia before that, truly indicate an increased rate of incidence in these catastrophies! Add to that the more frequent hurricanes and cyclones off the Gulf of Mexico and NE Australia, and fires or floods in N America, Australia and Europe, and we truly wonder what is going on really?

Google Fusion Tables for Current Affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this, and another  example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Wolfram Alpha is a search tool that does statistical as well as word searches. This is powerful indeed as it allows to query across diciplines, subjects and techniques. I live in Kuwait now, and the current events made me curious about the distribution of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Having already used Google Docs and Fusion Tables here and here, I performed the following:

More maps for the rest of us

I recently updated a simple web map of my travels using Java on Google maps, to spice up my homepage of old that was just text. It's part of two map samplers here and here. Still working on getting the latter onto arcgis.com, keepya posted on how their Java API handles this map...

Transition and cleanup

Slideshare is a great venue to post presentations - it cross-posts to my LinkedIn and Twitter profiles as part of my next-gen social network - the lion's share of my recent Slideshare posts relate however to oilelefant.com I just left: I have thus moved all relevant presentations to a new Slidehsare account, henceforth managed by David Lloyd:

Mappliance (continued)

Here is one cool map of a favorite outing near where I live.

Reading Social Web Maps

Look at this map, and what it doesn't show is as instructive as what it shows. You guessed it, it's the low number of social media hits - anyone on the blogosphere or twitterverse would find those numbers on the low side, especially considering the passion current events in Egypt generated on the ground and online - and I wager doesn't reflect poor map making, but rather the fact the web was tampered with during the events in Egypt.

IQPC show in Kuwait City

Attended this small and personable show and met some friends old and new - vendors were invited into the talks and plenty of time was left in between to meet&greet.

2D or not 2D, Part Deux

As a 3D aficionado I just had to repost these two YouTube videos, courtesy of a Wired UK article: Kinect hack builds 3D maps of the real world. It goes to show how far lateral thinking can go if you let "boys play with their toys" to make Google Labs or Microsoft Research drool. I'll just let the article and following videos speak for themselves, and you draw your own conclusions...

Web maps and Skype

Brisbane floods in eastern Australia affect areas I grew up in, and where friends still live. There are many map resources online through news media, for example Ushahidi community flood reporting map on ABC News, showing maps becoming mainstream.