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Mapping a World of Human Activity
misterbarnacles writes "A Cartography of the Anthropocene maps the various ways that global humanity connects and is interdependent. From the article: 'Using data gathered from U.S. government agencies, anthropologist Felix Pharand-Deschenes has created a collection of maps that illustrate the various circulatory systems that connect humanity: cities, roads, railways, power lines, pipelines, cable Internet, airlines, and shipping lanes. The maps are remarkable cartographic documents of our current age, but also serve deeper research and educational purposes.'"
I used to use a simple program to monitor a couple IRC chatrooms; it created a timelapse map of interactions between members. It was fascinating to see the map literally breathe, but it also served a more important purpose in studying the interactions of those members with a 'bot script I created to run alongside. The results surprised me.
I went in expecting just one or two of the nerdier members interacting with the bot (the regulars knew it was a bot, the transients didn't) to "teach" it new responses to key words and phrases. What I found was pretty much everyone in the chatrooms interacting with the bot to the point of saturation. In fact I had to upgrade the hardware just so it could keep up.
I didn't have to look at the chat logs to see this behaviour, it was all on the maps and the ever increasing 'bot database.
FWIW, the mapping software was called PieSpy. I have since, unfortunately, lost the 'bot database and am not in a mind currently to recreate it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
To some degree, they do. Airport locations have clear requirements and flight paths avoid population centres when possible due to noise pollution. Mountain ranges or areas with known volatile weather patterns also dictate some flight paths. This is mainly for smaller aircraft rather than the truly high-flying international flights.
I think a Link to the Original Images is preferable. These are much larger, there are more of them, and some are javascript rollovers.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
What has slowed them down is a fairly clever bit of sabotage and perhaps killing a few people in key positions.
Yes, and slowing down plus creating a lot of additional hatred is the only thing these measures will ever achieve. Unless you continually bomb their universities and research facilities, a developed country that wants to build a nuclear weapon will at one day or another be able to build one. (Of course, it also doesn't help that the US and Israel already have many more nuclear weapons than Iran, it's neighboring country has recently been attacked and conquered by the US, and the US and Israel have de facto waged more attack wars than Iran.)