We're all in deep map now

A few thoughts on the Atlantic article on GooMaps...

• I love the term "the deep map".  I'm not doing GIS any more - I'm doing deep mapping!
• Yay!  Geospatial conflation gets a mention in the MSM!
• The article name-checks Borge's map.  The original story pointed out the paradox of a 1:1 scale map - but this is only paradoxical in 2-space.  In the infinite-dimension virtual world it's possible to have maps that are more detailed than the physical world (in that they can represent relationships across time and other more abstract dimensions)
• That is some great synergy between StreetView data acquisition and Google's work on self-driving cars
• The author is convinced that Google has an unassailable lead on building the virtual map of the world.  But without knowing what's going on at Apple (and perhaps Microsoft) I wouldn't be so sure about that.  (And even Google isn't as transparent as this realtime view of OSM edits.)

As always, James Fee has a pithy comment and a great picture. The good news is you get a ping pong table in the office.  The bad news is that 2000 more map edits just came in, so get back to work!

Global Earthquakes since 1898

This post shows off a very cool image of global earthquakes since 1898.  

No link to the source dataset, though.  That's unfortunate, because it would be really cool to see this as an animation, and as a KML file (with timestamps, to allow temporal scrolling).  Hmmm... sounds like a job for JEQL.

Update:  the post does give a link to ANSS, which has a service making the data available in a variety of formats, including KML.  It doesn't have a timestamp for temporal scrolling, however - and perhaps a different way of styling might be interesting.  A heatmap, perhaps?