Mapping Just About Everything

Strange discovery of the day is that window blinds and curtains are the most curious things ever. When I wake up I wouldn’t want to pull the curtains and let the sunshine in for anything in the world, but when I go into the kitchen half asleep to put the kettle on I wouldn’t be able to conceive not taking a peek at what’s going on outside, from every possible angle. I know it’s almost the same view from my bedroom but I don’t want to let the sun in there just yet. That and there is no sun probably because it’s 5 in the morning when I wake up but still in a perfect world that’s how it’d happen.

Even though I look outside the window, I don’t seem to register the actual temperature so inevitably a desktop widget with BBC weather comes in handier than opening a window. This morning the forecast was of painfully dull fog for the next twelve hours so imagine my disappointment at not seeing anything outside any farther than twelve feet and my disappointment at the ‘More detail’ button on the BBC. Grey fog, pale fog, wet fog, dry fog, very thick fog, fluffy fog, fog that looks like cigarette smoke or just fog that will trick you into thinking it’ll go away when it won’t?

If you do things manually and visit BBC Weather for a whole forecast, you’ll have noticed a ‘Weather Beta‘ button and a “Some fog lingering through the day” prediction. The beta doesn’t do anything yet apart from tell you that there will be some content but you can play with the map and see how it goes from cold to bloody cold during the day or at night. Apparently there’ll be video content soon as well although I wouldn’t rank British weather interesting enough for video.

Moving on, Google launched something more interesting for the United States a few weeks ago and if you’re curious to know how ill your state or country is, get a flu jab, Flu Trends is the place to be following. I wonder if people will look at that and think it’s time to visit their relatives in California when it gets too cold, just because there are less germs there. It’s not entirely accurate but they’ve correlated the data from search trends with scientific proof of ill people:

“We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening.”

It does happen because it gets cold outside in winter but cold weather only makes peoples spend more time indoors, not trigger a flu or cold – they’re both just viruses. But it is pretty accurate.

So exploring the subject of maps I bumped into a website that’s kept me busy for a few days now, about a week from when I first discovered it: Strange Maps. It’s been the revelation of the week and has kept me busy when I should have been working but if you’re nerdy enough you’ll find a lot of pretty interesting things there – even a floorplan of 221B Baker St. Completely pointless, I know, but curious. 

And since I’ve admitted to liking maps of any kind (not just tube maps), the Google map of the Mumbai attacks was the first place I found out about them a couple of hours after they happened and meanwhile, the Birmingham Pubs map has seen a slow but sure growth.