Ink and Water
Emmanuel Guibert used an incredibly clever technique to illustrate Alan’s War, a graphic novel about his friend’s experience in WWII. Here’s an example (via Drawn):
I was perplexed at first, but it all becomes clear about fifty seconds into the video.
MacBook Markerboard
It recently occurred to me that the exterior surface of my MacBook is quite similar to the surface of a markerboard. Tonight I purchased a package of small dry-erase markers and put the idea to the test. It works great!
Now I can’t wait to bring my notebook computer to a meeting so I can take notes on its lid.
Vote
Enter your address at maps.google.com/vote to find your voting location. Show up next Tuesday, November 4th, and cast your ballot. No excuses. Remind your friends and family members to vote, too.
Homeland Tour of Duty
I don’t know much about the historical precedent for “dwell-time” Army missions. I seek clarification and expert interpretation of this news.
Beginning Oct. 1 for 12 months, the 1st BCT will be under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the Army service component of Northern Command, as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks.
It is not the first time an active-duty unit has been tapped to help at home. In August 2005, for example, when Hurricane Katrina unleashed hell in Mississippi and Louisiana, several active-duty units were pulled from various posts and mobilized to those areas.
But this new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.
After 1st BCT finishes its dwell-time mission, expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one.
On one hand, it sounds like a prudent National Guard supplement. On the same hand, clenched, it sounds like active combat troops, however few, are deployed here in the US. So, what’s the story?
Cartograms
A cartogram is a map in which the area of each region is distorted to represent a value other than physical area, such as population.
It's election season here in the US, which means we see many maps of red and blue states. To keep the political persuasion of the nation in perspective, take a look at Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman's maps of the 2004 and 2006 elections.
One of my favorite web sites, Strange Maps, has occasionally featured cartograms, including a map of world population from another collection of global cartograms prepared by Newman.
Strange Maps also featured a cartogram of where news happens drawn from a seminal paper by Gastner and Newman. The paper presents a solution to the challenge of preserving recognizable shapes and adjacencies while manipulating area. Traditional techniques typically compromise contiguity or detail, as seen in these examples from Borden Dent's excellent Cartography: Thematic Map Design:
Conveniently, various implementations of Gastner and Newman's algorithm are available: cart, by Newman; cartogram, by Gastner; and Cartogram Generator, by Frank Hardisty. Hardisty's program has a cross-platform interface and works directly with shapefiles and shapefile attributes. I used it to create a cartogram of block groups in Binghamton based on their year 2000 populations:
The distortion is not extreme, but there are some interesting changes.
In addition to the interactive comparison view shown above, Cartogram Generator allows you to save the results as a new shapefile. It is supposed to have the ability to apply the same transformation to other shapefiles, too – useful for creating reference layers – but I could not get that feature to work.
I think it is important to show an undistorted map next to a cartogram except in cases where the actual sizes are well known (as with maps of the world or your state or nation). Otherwise, changes in proportion might not be recognized, and the story they are meant to tell will not be heard.