Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.
Welcome to the Future?
Barclays have launched a combined credit, Oyster and cash payment card for travellers in London (a textbook Greenfield device if ever I saw one). At the moment there are ads for it all over the tube featuring a variety of mocked-up Minority Report-style futurescapes based on present day London. Thanks to Flickr I found that Ned Richards grabbed a couple of snaps of them; he's definitely right that the golf courses aren't as exciting as roller-coasters.
I love this kind of imagery, but my last year of travel has pretty much convinced me that you don't need to mock them up. I haven't been any of the cities that get the most attention for their present day sci-fi realities (Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai or Singapore), but there are pockets of unevenly distributed future all over the place. Here's a picture I took last week from London's Docklands Light Railway:
And one of the same part of London from the 23rd floor of One Churchill Place:
(apparently it was one of the first skyscrapers to be completed after 9/11 and therefore one with a tough attitude towards security and structure stability, which is good because just over to the right of this photo is London City Airport's runway)
I started thinking about the future-now of Western cities in May when XTech in Paris placed us in a hotel overlooking a tried-and-failed Modernist complex near the Eiffel tower. References to Alphaville were inevitable, the French origins of Parkour were entirely explained.
I'm not the only one taking these snaps though, my friend Adam took this one in Chicago recently. As if the city-scape there isn't sci-fi enough, his phone camera was kind enough to accidentally filtr it into concept territory, just so:
Welcome to the future.
Typists = £30 per week
Typists = £30 per week, originally uploaded by Just_Tom.
I love it when old bits of London are revealed temporarily. Like this poster at High Street Kensington a few weeks ago.
It may as well say, "Hot blonde in short skirt wanted, for typing and stuff." Any idea of the date?
Historical Blips
Gorgeous writing from Maciej about a flight from New York to Beijing over the North Pole.
"The unreality of jet travel continues to unsettle me. One moment you are in one place, and hours later you have crossed the most insuperable physical barriers by flying high in the atmosphere at nearly the speed of sound, and no one finds this unusual. The sun is over the wrong horizon, everything is different, but life goes on around you like nothing has happened."
I still find it unusual.
The view from an aeroplane window is number one on a very short list of things that I believe will never be tiresome. That air travel is so reliable and so routine strikes me as magic. We're in the middle of a blip in history where for just a few short decades the average altitude of a human being has been infinitesimally raised. The age of affordable consumer flight probably won't, and possibly shouldn't, continue throughout my lifetime. It's hard to see how we can justify it forever, such a significant environmental impact as it has.
We continue to build airports expecting two-to-tenfold increases in passenger numbers, depending on the expected trajectory of your economy. And yet, as the fuel becomes ever more precious and consumer flight declines, flying will once again become the exclusive domain of the rich and famous. The proverbial high-flyers will be the only true jetset left.
TimeContours
Nicholas Street, a recent MEng Computer Science graduate from Imperial College London, posted last week to the mysociety maps mailing list about his final year project work, TimeContours: Using isochrone visualisation to describe transport network travel cost.
His work includes a comparison with my own maps, which he says are "effective prototype implementations, but the unfamiliar unlabelled layout makes it difficult to relate to the underground". Touché! To his credit, Nicholas addresses almost all the deficiencies of my tube maps with his own software and goes significantly further in implementing the same kind of analysis for other transport networks (even including an example of using street data from my friends at OpenStreetMap).
His approach and background reading are covered in detail so the final paper will be a great resource for people working in this area in the future. I do hope he finds time to release the software for us all to use too. As well as the more traditional academic and print references, it's nice to see a hat tip to people putting their thoughts and experiments online such as myself, Rod and Oskar. Whilst a blog is no substitute for peer review and academic rigour, I strongly believe that the more of these ideas we share then the better all our work will become.
MySociety Travel Time maps of the UK
MySociety's Travel Time maps of the UK take a more rigourous and comprehensive look at the same kind of ideas I was exploring with my Travel Time Tube Map (and contours). Lovely results!
Computing for Emergent Architecture
For better or worse, I share my attention between three blogs: this one which syndicates to Processing Blogs, my personal blog Random Etc, and Computing for Emergent Architecture at UCL.
Often the things I write would be equally suitable for all three, so I thought I'd point you at two recent CfEA posts, one on an interesting project called Waiting and one on some thoughts for Real-time Ego-centric Isochronic Maps.
(If you're being completist about your e-stalking, you'll also want to subscribe to OpenGeoData and PintCast - the latter is a new podcast with Steve Coast and friends that is still finding its feet, and is yet to buy a good microphone...)
Tube Travel Contours
A variation on the tube map time travel applet, this version maintains the geographical layout but adds contours to show how long it takes to travel between stations. The contouring method isn't quite right (I should have used 1D textures), but it's good enough to experiment with.
Travel Time Tube Map
I've finally had time to get my Travel Time Tube Map applet to a presentable stage.
Here are a couple of screen shots to compare with Oskar and Rod.
There's a list of desired improvements on the applet page, but the next step for me is plotting this information on the Harry Beck style diagram rather than a geographic map. If anyone knows of a vector format tube map I could use to get me started, please let me know.
Maps, the Tube, and RDF headaches
Snowbound and carefree, I'm playing around with different methods of presentation for the ubiquitous London Underground (tube) map.
I found RGB versions of the tube line colours over at Rodcorp, so that saved me some bother.
Being the only machine-readable single-file resource I could find, I'm using Jo Walsh's RDF representation of the station locations and connections, a leftover from the sadly defunct MudLondon. I'm not sure yet if it's up to date, or complete, or internally consistent (reason number 1 in an ongoing series of why the semantic web might not be all that it's cooked up to be). Once I fix my doubtlessly buggy RDF parser and check with Jo for any pointers, I'll see if I can do better than this:
At least it's a start. If anyone has suggestions/links for alternative data sources I'd be very grateful - is there an electronic format schematic for the tube available from an official source? Aha - these CSV files from Wikipedia look more promising!
On with some alternative representations of the data - next stop: time to travel.
STUPID new sticker at the station…
STUPID new stickers at the station...
Originally uploaded by Just_Tom.
Don Norman would be turning in his grave if he was dead.
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