rodcorp: rodcorp: Transport systems, safety, maps

Rodcorp is moving home

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 10:41:17 GMT

Marginalia around underground / tube maps

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 14:13:42 GMT

NYC: both Todd Glickman and Peter Lloyd maintain records of NYC subway maps, which include a series of six or so issued in the days/weeks after 911. By all accounts, that period was handled very well. These maps occasionally come up on eBay and tended to have: a box which stated when the map was reissued and referred travellers to mta.nyc.ny.us for more updates, and a speech-bubble enlargement showing the lower Manhattan area.

London: the best records of issued maps are probably Letch's London Transport Bus and Tube Maps 1920-2000 and Burwood and Brady's London Transport Maps 2nd edition, 1983.

An unofficial London tube map form 2003 when the Central line was closed after a crash.

Picking up on ET's comment that the London tube map is highly optinmised for its context, can we recognise cities from the thumbnail images on these Google Images searches? (and does that actually tell us anything useful about their design?): subway map, tube map, metro map.

Edward Tufte on London Underground Map

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 10:54:54 GMT

Someone asked ET about the London tube map which prompted a linkful and thoughtful discussion. The interchange symbols on the Madrid map apparently indicate how far you have to walk to change lines - something the London tube might usefully provide because whilst some interchanges are conveniently across the platform, but others are loooong, eg: Bank-Monument, or (various examples) on the Northern line due to semi-permanent repair works happening in the stations.

The Moscow metro map is a little forbidding. But this one for the city of ??? is interesting: some stations have rotational symbols to indicate that you can change there, and it looks as if there are two, differently named stations ('I' and 'II') at those interchanges. Relic of bureacracy or cutting edge solution to problems with people-flow?

Also found whilst we were on ET.com:

ET reviews Ken Garland's Mr Beck's Underground Map
Minard: the classic Napoleon's invasion of and retreat from Russia, 1812 map, and the less classic (but good) Hannibal into Italy map. See also Minard biblio.
Still on the subject of war, A Narrative Graphic of The U-Boat war in the Atlantic 1939-1945
ET explains the forum moderation policy: We particularly seek to avoid the chronic internet disease of "All Opinions, All the Time"
discussion on ISO paper sizes
Project management graphics

Guardian: What time is it? Well, no one knows for sure

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:43:26 GMT

Four different time systems are used: Coordinated Universal, International Atomic, GPS and GMT. They're gradually getting out of sync because they either observe or ignore (for mostly systemic or historic reasons) leap-second adjustments made for the earth's rotation slowing. Some outcomes: navigational/astronomic/legal quagmire; atronomers expensively upgrade their systems; a return to the kind of timezoning done in the railroad era (albeit on a smaller scale); each group redefines the second to get the different systems back in sync, and keep them there (which the ITU would never allow, but would be funny).

Antimega: a Life in Paper, stalked

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:30:49 GMT

Antimega is receipt-mapping his life, which prompted the question 'What do the locations of his transactions tell us about him?'.

We put Holmes on the case, who observed the some of these receipts came from Northish London, and others from the Docklands, or thereabouts. Holmes then suggested that if we were to pick a tube station in Northish London (one in zones 1 or 2), we might be able to find him on the London Bloggers list, by taking advantage of the 'Weblogs Within 10 Minutes Of This Station' feature. We tried Baker Street, and then performed a 'Find in this page...' search. Elementary: Case closed.

Next week, Holmes says he may use inductive reasoning to delve further into Antimega's life, or to geographically stalk someone else.

SMS-mapped London will let you hail a cab by txt

Mon, 04 Aug 2003 16:02:10 GMT

5000 London Taxi Points and 4000 black cabs allow mobile users to text and book the nearest available cab, night or day.

28 July 2003: Anyone who has struggled to find a black cab in London will soon be able to locate the nearest available taxi and book it, all using SMS. With SMS connectivity supplied by Netsize, London's new Taxi Point service removes the need to wait on the street searching for a cab. Instead, customers can use one of the new 'Taxi Points' - actual signs that use a unique four-digit code to identify an exact location within central London. People wishing to use the service text the location code to the London Taxi Point short code (83220). Using GPS tracking, the service will identify and book the nearest black cab from the participating taxi fleets, delivering a confirmation SMS, and an alert when the taxi has arrived.

The service will cost the user £1 and Taxi Point signs will be positioned in locations such as public and private buildings, restaurants, theatres and bars. More than 5000 Taxi Point locations will be created in London over the next three years.

Just as the 5000 Taxi Point locations finished being rolled out, the mobileworld will finally tip over and most location mapping will be done by the network, not via an intermediary sign.

Or is this done for ease of cabs: so they need to know 'merely' 5000 locations, rather than attempting to find where you are from location data that isn't granular or accurate enough? We don't understand.
[via antimega]

Books read in 2002, 2003

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:45:23 GMT

Rodcorp's books read in 2003 (now you know what we've been doing instead of working) and 2002.

How many ways can the (exact) centre of London be defined?

Wed, 30 Jul 2003 20:06:24 GMT

(in progress)

Geography/latitude: Greenwich (meridian). St Pauls / The Thames / Charing Cross as the centroid - thanks to Chris (and also: Hammersley has some interesting comments on geographic centres of continents)
Systemic
- Charing Cross station is the centre of London for Black Taxis
- Piccadilly Circus is considered the centre of the Underground network (though Victoria is the busiest, and the first line ran from Farringdon to Paddington via King's Cross)
- Postal districts: useful explanations here and here, but no mention of an origin
In name (historically): Apsley House - 'No 1, London'
Historical, again: Roman London. The square mile roughly defines where Roman London stood, and there was a basilica and forum in Cornhill, dating from 70/90AD. (Where were roads measured to? - thanks Chris)
the flow of people: multiple centres (Struan)
retail and finance: where are the most/highest transactions and revenue? Oxford Street? City of London for non-retail.

Sort of related: openguides, a network of free, community-maintained city guides to which anyone can contribute (thanks Paul)

Sources: London Encyclopaedia, various
To check: histories of London, Museum of London.

Bike courier culture, alley cat racing

Mon, 21 Jul 2003 19:35:01 GMT

This weekend we met a bunch of bike couriers at a barbecue. Interesting people, with a strong sub-culture - sub in the sense that non-couriers know very little about what they are like, how couriering works etc. Unsurprisingly, most of them are mad about bikes, and it's a way to earn a crust. So there was much talk of the Tour de France. They knew only one person who'd gone on from couriering to 'proper' road racing. There are 600-1000 couriers working London at any one time, and they do about 70-80 miles a day in town, mostly within the Circle line area, though they may travel further west to Notting Hill, and further east to the Docklands. This bunch had a strong sense of identity and shared culture/community. Some have expensively tricked-out rides, some something seemingly more standard (the playoffs between lightness/efficiency, reliability and cost being the key equations couriers run in choosing the tools of their trade), with single/no brakes and single gears common.

About 50+ of the London couriers are into "alley cat racing": illegal checkpoint-to-checkpoint race where the racers only know the next checkpoint. Ie: orienteering on a bike, in (and often against) the traffic. AC Racing was imported from US couriers in the mid-90s. Last night they showed a video made by film students by mounting a camera on one of the alley cat racers. 8 minutes of crazy, often-dangerous riding through traffic and people; ends with the cyclist getting hit by a truck when he attempted to zoom across a red-light and straight across the traffic going both ways (he'd successfully done this a few times already in the film). He wasn't hurt too badly, but the bike probably was. "Oh well, that's racing", he concludes.

Even though you don't quite get a sense of the true speed on film, it was fantastic, and reminiscent of several other illegal car or motorbike films (Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, the Getaway in Stockholm films, Black Prince Peripherique).

Couriers, alley cat racing, etc:

some somewhat dark alley cat video at DC Courier
Google for 'alley cat race'
Travis Culley's The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power
London Bicycle Messenger Association (who also have a print(?) newsletter called Moving Target)
bikereader.com: a rider's digest of essays, humour etc
various bike movies (list), BicycleCam (races filmed from the bike)

Other films:

Claude Lelouch's infamous C'etait un Rendezvous, a 9-minute 1973 short film in which he races his Ferrari through an empty night-time Paris. Buy Rendezvous here. (Lelouch also did a Tour de France film, Pour Un Maillot Jaune)
Black Prince Peripherique, in which a Kawasaki is raced round the 35km Paris peripherique in morning traffic. You can also buy Periperique here.
the Getaway in Stockholm films

(Update: Struan correctly reminds us that alley cat racing perpetuates the image of 'cyclists as arrogant, self-righteous grumps with only limited respect for the law'. Which, together with the rest of us non-courier cyclists going through red lights, really doesn't help. Perhaps the racing is symptomatic of a bike culture that sees itself as *against* motor traffic. Alley cat racing isn't safe or particularly clever, but we have to admit it was quite exciting to watch.)

Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World

Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:28:26 GMT

Published by the Ancient World Mapping Center. Buy it used: Amazon.co.uk
[via mefi]

Archaeological dig at Heathrow Terminal 5 building tells 8000 year story

Thu, 17 Jul 2003 14:37:12 GMT

Many artefacts found on UK's largest dig. Including, no doubt, the remains of the teams that started working on T5 several hundred years ago.

London taxi cabs: The Knowledge and The Blue Book

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 12:41:07 GMT

The 320 runs through London that the student needs to learn are known as The Blue Book.

The New Military-Industrial Complex

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 00:32:59 GMT

Which companies are building next-gen land, sea, air, space, network military technology
[via ?]

London traffic congestion charge a success for now

Tue, 15 Apr 2003 19:24:13 GMT

Traffic in London has decreased by 17% since the introduction of the congestion charge, according to the architect of the scheme. It will be interesting to see whether the traffic pattern stays like this in Oct-Feb when the weather will deteriorate (or June).

Tufte: Boeing powerpoint on Columbia misleading?

Wed, 19 Mar 2003 19:16:52 GMT

Close analysis of Columbia investigation, its reasoning and presentation. Reminiscent of Tufte and Feynman on Challenger.
[via Robotwisdom]

Encoding Altruism: The Art and Science of Interstellar Message Composition

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:18:48 GMT

See also: Brian McConnell's Beyond Contact (am.co.uk)
[via boingboing]

Pictures from the space shuttle Columbia reconstruction project

Fri, 14 Mar 2003 17:17:28 GMT

[via jwz]

Cartograpolitics: New Pentagon map explains why we will keep going to war

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 15:09:36 GMT

New, very nation-state-centric/geopolitically-centric security paradigm (what of borderless, nation-stateless politics?) being pushed by the Pentagon. Possible summary: We are "the core", which is a good democratic, networked place. The bad people are in "the gap" [corporate pun not intended sadly], where things aren't networked or democratic. Thesis: shrink the Gap to stop bad things.

Or to recapitulate, the thinking seems to go like this:

Globalisation is good (because we in the West are at "the core" of it?): "Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder"

"But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and—most important—the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap".

Therefore: "Disconnectedness [to globalisation and the networks that exemplify it] defines danger".

The borderline (or "Seam states") is where terrorist activity is disseminated from the Gap to the Core.

Conclusion: "Shrink the Gap".
[via ?]

Blood, dirt, and nomograms - a particular history of graphs

Thu, 27 Feb 2003 15:12:07 GMT

[via robotwisdom]

Cultural divide persists between engineers and managers at NASA

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 08:32:59 GMT

After the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman asked NASA officials what risk of failure each mission carried. NASA engineers said about 1 in every 100 flights was likely to experience a catastrophe. NASA managers put the risk closer to 1 in 100,000.
Technical people tend to assess risk based on individual components, which can behave unpredictably in the hostile environment of shuttle launches and reentry. Engineers know that solutions to problems often create other problems. Managers tend to look at the big picture, and base their assessments of safety partly on the previous number of safe flights flown. In the Columbia investigation, managers say they discounted the damage done by a piece of foam to the underside of Columbia's wing during liftoff because such damage had happened many times before -- and those shuttles had all come back safely.
"Each time it ran a risk and succeeded, the institution learned the wrong lesson," said Charles Bosk, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies why organizations fail. "Instead of saying, 'I was lucky,' you say, 'Maybe that wasn't so risky after all.' "
[...] "You don't want the hubris of imagining we can overcome everything," Bosk said, "but without that hubris, you can't create the enterprise. How do you instill a spirit of adventure, and at the same time have the humility to recognize all the things that could go wrong? One doesn't go very well with the other."

Old but worth posting again: They Write the Right Stuff

Wed, 12 Feb 2003 08:31:39 GMT

How software is written for the shuttle. Not your average development process.

Shuttle: Columbia's timeline, and the future of humans and/in space

Tue, 04 Feb 2003 14:16:49 GMT

Columbia fact-file
Includes a timeline on which we can see that the project to build Columbia took from 1971 (project approval) to 1981 (maiden flight). A long development cycle.

Washington Monthly reprints its 1980 essay on the drawbacks (dangers?) of the shuttle: Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty:

The main cause of delay is currently the shuttle's refractory tiles, which disperse the heat of reentry from the ship's nose and fuselage. Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other. They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules; they can be used indefinitely. But they're also a bit of a letdown in another respect--they're so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them.
[...]
The tiles break so often, and must be remolded so painstakingly, the installation rate is currently one tile per technician per week.
[...]
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.) "

Hopefully the Columbia tragedy won't affect projects like these, which are designed to make it a little easier for humans to work in space:
Constance Adams: Space Architecture After 2001
Constance is working on the International Space Station's TransHab crew module. The article has these interesting quotes:

all architecture is space architecture; terrestrial architecture is just the specialized subset with which we are most familiar"
[...]
in this world of increasing specialization in every field, the last professions that demand multiplicity of thought at every scale are Architecture and Design; we may well be the world's last trained generalists"

On the other hand, those that prefer the thought of unmanned space exploration and science will appreciate this from a 2002(?) talk on The Cyborg by William Gibson:

Martian jet lag. That’s what you get when you operate one of those little Radio Shack wagon/probes from a comfortable seat back at an airbase in California. Literally. Those operators were the first humans to experience Martian jet lag. In my sense of things, we should know their names: first humans on the Red Planet. Robbed of recognition by that same old school of human literalism.

[links via the usual places, nasa and google]

Small drawbacks of Harry Beck underground map

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 12:10:45 GMT

A measure of the genius of the Harry Beck-originated London tube map is that one of the very few things it doesn't do better than a geographically accurate tube map (also mirrored here) is inform you that it would be much quicker to walk a trip than take it by tube:

Leicester Square to Covent Garden (250 metres away)
Mansion House to Bank (change once, 6 stops - as noted by Bill Bryson in Notes From a Small Island (though you could walk to Bank districtline and go in two stops, but his point is still well made))
Chancery Lane to Farringdon (change twice, 4 stops)
Even Finchley Road to Hampstead (change twice, 9 stops) could be walked in half an hour, although what neither map will tell you is that it's up a steep hill.

Related: V-2's Why the map is not the territory (geography and schematic maps are different; sometimes schematisation goes too far)
Also, the Tube's Tubeguru interactive map (IE only we'd recommend) provides more contextual information (geographic, local).

[update: more here: What is the centre of the tube network?, ET on the tube map, Real-time SF commuter map shows buses]

Science Hobbyist: Traffic waves - physics for bored commuters

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 15:21:58 GMT

On the nature of traffic jams, and preventative action

RFID tags: Big Brother in small packages

Fri, 17 Jan 2003 15:18:45 GMT

It becomes unnervingly easy to imagine a scenario where everything you buy that's more expensive than a Snickers will sport RFID tags, which typically include a 64-bit unique identifier yielding about 18 thousand trillion possible values. KSW-Microtec, a German company, has invented washable RFID tags designed to be sewn into clothing. And according to EE Times, the European central bank is considering embedding RFID tags into banknotes by 2005.

That raises the disquieting possibility of being tracked though our personal possessions. Imagine: The Gap links your sweater's RFID tag with the credit card you used to buy it and recognizes you by name when you return. Grocery stores flash ads on wall-sized screens based on your spending patterns, just like in "Minority Report." Police gain a trendy method of constant, cradle-to-grave surveillance.

It's the darker side of the IP-everywhere-lets-you-find-your-socks-when-you-lost-them story.
[via Charlie Stross, sci-fi writer]