Tag: geography
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Wikipedia @ 25: Lake Baikal
Today's random Wikipedia article was about a kind of seal that lives only in Lake Baikal in Siberia, which turns out to be a really, really big lake. Like: it's got about a fifth of the world's fresh water in it; that's how big it is!
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Are you closer to Ireland or Scotland?
A throwaway comment in a WhatsApp group lead me to a deep dive into geodata encoding and drawing a big old line all the way across England (and a little way across Wales!). It's nerdsnipe time!
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The Devil's Quoits (Stanton Harcourt, Oxfordshire, UK) looks particularly striking in the bright sunlight of this Spring morning.
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A circle of standing stones in a henge, in a clearing flanked by trees, under wispy clouds in a bright blue sky.
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ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr
Given nothing more than a screenshot or two of my game screen, from the starting position only, ChatGPT plays GeoGuessr better than I ever could. Apart from cheating at GeoGuessr, what else could this mean? Is this going to be a scary new weapon in the toolkit of Internet stalkers?
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Thanks to finding a couple of geocaches here in Istanbul, my geocaching "2D convex hull" (the smallest possible convex polygon that covers an area), which I wrote some code to draw last year, just expanded a little further to the East. 🎉
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World map, with an irregular near-quadrilatral drawn such that it approximately connects Inverness (Scotland), Istanbul (Turkey), Cape Town (South Africa), and San Francisco (California, USA), encompassing the area within.
I've got a lot of the world left still to encircle, but I'm slowly extending my reach...
(previous map, for comparison: https://danq.me/_q23u/2024/04/dans-geoing-hull-2024-04-03.webp)
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My Geo*ing Limits
Let's use some self-data-mining plus a convex hull algorithm to plot a convex polygon onto a map that optimally encircles the entire corpus of my successful geocaching/geohashing expeditions!
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Local Expert
This week, I spoke to a school group about the history of The Devil's Quoits. Perhaps I should be more-willing to share what I've learned in-general, even in areas where I'm still learning?
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Automattic International
Off the back of a colleague's throwaway comment, Dan makes cartograms showing how his coworkers' countries proportionally dominate their world map.
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Automattic Privilege
Dan's thinks about the geographic/cultural privileges he enjoys within his international workplace.
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What's wrong with what3words?
Andrew's latest video criticises what3words. Dan piles on, too.
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Heatmapping my Movements
Leveraging a decade of past GPS data, Dan draws heatmaps of his movements around Oxfordshire.
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The Coolest Thing About GPS
I'm currently doing a course, through work, delivered by BetterOn Video. The aim of the course is to improve my video presentation skills, in particular my engagement with the camera and the audience.
I made this video based on the week 2 prompt "make a video 60-90 seconds long about something you're an expert on". The idea came from a talk I used to give at the University of Oxford. -
What's wrong with London's boroughs?
Jay Foreman's back with a long-awaited tenth episode of Unfinished London.
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The Race to Win Staten Island
Possibly CGP Grey's best video yet, it quickly diverges from a straightforward path through the Forest of All Knowledge and becomes an epic adventure.
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Watch UK's Natural Land Diminish in 100 Seconds
If the different land uses of the UK were divided up into their percentage-ratio blocks, what would a 100-second tour of the country (with each second covering a single percent of the land usage) look like?
