Slightly Buzzed

This great series of maps breaks down where “missed connections” occur by state. New York stands out in that many of the missed connections occur on mass transit. Another oddity: women looking for men in Oklahoma seem to have these could-have-been encounters at medical establishments.

Additional breakdown of “missed connections” with delicious pie charts.

Google introduced “walking” directions - routes that are the shortest by foot, not by car. Google’s interface to switch between the two disappears at 6.2 mi (10km), but you can still get it to route you insanely far distances… Next time I have two months to spare, I’ll verify that this is the shortest pedestrian route.

It will likely lead you astray if driving to Black Mesa (or just cruising for some cake), but it’s still pretty damn cool.

If you haven’t played Portal, you’re missing out.

Highland Park Cyclery is no more. They closed shop and moved further down Route 27 into Edison. They have officially joined the ranks of “bike shops you can’t bike to” due to their location on major, unsafe arterials. I guess it’s down to Bike King and Kopp’s for me.

I can’t say that I’m too upset; the service there was less than stellar. I wish Bike King - or some other true cycling devotees with great customer service - would locate in the space.

code_swarm, a visualization project by Michael Ogawa employs an interesting method of showing code commits over time. The commits for Python are shown above. Upon reading his homepage, my suspicions were confirmed: this is another incredible visualization made using Processing. I really need to get on the bandwagon and try and apply Processing to geospatial information.

I’m still not entirely sold on the iPhone - even though I’m a Mac user, I’m a Crackberry addict - but when I heard about GPS included and read the specs, the first thing I thought of was, “I wonder who’s making the GPS for it?”

Apparently, consumer GPS manufacturers are worried about how the iPhone will effect their market niche. They should be. GPS units now come with MP3 players and all sorts of add ons. Who needs it? Just give me some driving directions, traffic routing or sub-meter accuracy and I’m happy!

New municipal, county, and state boundaries were recently released on NJGIN. (By the way, if you haven’t checked out NJGIN recently, it’s been updated, and OIT is working on further improvements.) I started to use them at work and they are definitely an improvement over the old dataset, however there are some significant changes and some oddities.

I wrote some notes on the changes in a KML file using Google Earth, along with a WMS service serving up the old and new boundaries. You can grab the KML file from NJ State Atlas. The old boundaries are in orange and the new boundaries are in blue. You’ll need to zoom in to view the changes; clicking on one of the pushpin “notes” will bring up my comments and zoom you into the change. Zooming in will also make the appearance of the WMS layer a little less blocky and ugly. (I set a 4 second delay in WMS refresh after panning in GE.)

I originally put this together using all vector data, but the KMZ file ended up being about 12MB and brought Google Earth to a crawl on my Mac. I still have the KMZ of the boundaries - if you’re interested, contact me.

If you’re a GIS purist and would rather look at the two layers in ArcMap, you can still get the old layer from DEP and the new layer from NJGIN.

Pan around and look for other significant changes. If you find any, annotate them in KML and send me the file. I’ll add it to my notes.

13 june: minor update to post regarding wms refresh

Titled “Big Ideas (Don’t get any)”, the video utilizes several hard drives, Epson dot-matrix printers, an old Sinclair and an HP scanner to reproduce “Nude” in blips, whirrs and clicks. The first minute of the video is slow, but it’s worth the watch.

I’ve been working with an architect on a project in Camden that allowed me to incorporate some of my 3D modeling skills.

I firmly believe that incorporating 3D visualization (even if its hand-drawn perspective renderings) is key to any development or planning project. Most people cannot make sense of plan or elevation views. Detailed street sections are completely incomprehensible to the average person. 3D perspectives allow the public to get a better sense of what the physical structure will look like. 3D tools like SketchUp give the planners and developers a quick way to visualize a project and then distribute through Google Earth.

After drawing some of the surrounding buildings in by hand, I had a realization: Camden was recently included in a LIDAR flight that was then added to the USGS’s CLICK website. I downloaded the data and after a little geoprocessing, I managed to get a working 3D model in Sketchup from LIDAR data.

I had to trim the LIDAR data down to about 7 Camden blocks to make it manageable. A 7 block area is still 197,000 return points, which needless to say is a large amount of data.

I then created a TIN from the LIDAR data.

SketchUp has a plugin for ArcGIS that will export Feature Classes and TINs to a SketchUp file.

I’ll now use this as the base for the surrounding buildings and to make modifications to the buildings I already modeled.