Sometimes you do it just because you can

The Japanese are so awesome. Mach 7 paper airplanes. C’mon, who else would do this?

Maps are Cool

Maps are really cool. I think the best kinds of maps are those showing the movements / effects / realities / influences of human populations on the world. Sometimes I find it useful to get out of my local bubble by staring at a map and seeing how we collectively exist and how we affect things. Sometimes I look just to see how things are laid out and how certain places or things relate to others.

My favourite book as a kid was the gigantic National Geographic atlas that my parents got for me for Christmas ‘91. It’s pretty cool as it is the last National Geographic atlas that shows the Soviet Union. It even came with a letter apologizing for the out of date maps. The USSR had broken up between printing and shipment. It was pretty sparse in terms of cool maps of the Soviet Union, so here’s a good one courtesy of the Encyclopedia of Marxism… those fun-loving guys. This one shows the distribution of ethnic groups in the country and gives a bit of perspective on the current little problem.

People who know me know that I am french and identify pretty strongly with that. Well, here are some french maps! Paris is a bit obsessed with documenting itself and they have tons of information on the City of Paris website. They even made their own version of Google Maps for Paris. But, some of the more interesting maps I’ve found on their website are the noise distribution maps (scroll to the very bottom).

Also, space is fascinating. Here’s a map of the Universe. Download the 300dpi version if you have the time and inclination. It’s awesome. Note the scale. Also, note where the ISS is. Not such an impressive use of $100,000,000,000 now, is it? Also, also, note that that scale is the reason we’ll never be an interstellar civilization, but that’s an entirely different post.

So, it shouldn’t be too surprising that I wasted (or very intelligently used in the quest for knowledge, depending on your perspective) a night at radicalcartography. This site makes me want to map data. I never thought I’d say that. This, this, this and this are some of the highlights, in my opinion.

Always save the best for last. Harold Fisk’s 1944 reporting on the flood plains of the Mississippi River. These are probably the most beautiful, interesting and detailed maps I’ve ever seen. They’re archived at radicalcartography for reference, but I found them independently before I found radicalcartography, ha! These are unbelievably detailed recordings of the track of the Mississippi River throughout geologic time. They’re really gorgeous maps. The colours are great. I am going to eventually get a few of these printed up professionally, I like them that much.

And thus ends our cartographic tour of the internet. Until next time.

Nicer iPhone Wallpapers

I wasn’t really happy with any of the default iPhone wallpapers. They are nice and all, but they seem a bit too much like stock photography. So, I did a little searching and I’ve put together a little collection of images that I think make good backgrounds.

Here are a couple of examples:

evilsupergenius-iphone wallpapers-v.1.zip

PNGs and color management in Safari

Sometimes getting the colors in your images to match across browsers is a pain. This is especially true now that Safari 3 and Firefox 3 are rendering images with their embedded color profiles. However, the problem runs deeper. PNGs specifically have gamma correction included in the file and Safari will obey it. So, despite having the same color space, you will get a different rendering in Safari than in Firefox.

After a while of on-and-off research trying to figure out why my PNGs were not rendering with the correct colors in Safari, I came across a couple of blog posts. The first, which was very informative, recommends double-checking your embedded color profiles. If they don’t match, the colors will come out differently. That makes a lot of sense. For the web, default to sRGB or don’t include one at all. Most browsers will assume sRGB if there is no color profile included.

I did this and I still had some odd rendering. After some more research I came across this blog post (check out this page for some background info on PNGs on the web) specifically about PNGs. So, there is gamma correction in PNGs that is independent of the color profile. That’s annoying! But, you can strip out all that extra information and have the browser drop back down to defaults with a neat little app called GammaSlamma. Just drop your PNG onto the application and done! For Linux and Windows machines, check out PNGCrush.