Prison Uniforms, 2007
10×23 feet in six vertical panels Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.

Sean Tafller sent me this link to Chris Jordan’s photography. Hi-res photos of e-waste and his “American Portrait” depicting everything from the number of flights per day int he US to the number of toothpicks used is a real big here, long zoom moment. Similar themes are explored in Ed Burtynsky’s work, who will be speaking in our Seminar series later this year.

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Former intern Jason Li sent in this brilliant “maps through time” site that shows growth in urban centers over time. Of particular interest is the Seattle mapset that shows the spike in homes built in Seattle as people moved from San Francisco after the 01906 Earthquake.

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I just got this great note in from our friend Davide Bocelli in Italy…

Dear Alexander,

I was thinking about “Long Now” and “housing” and I found a page on wikipedia on the very ancient town of Matera with her multimillenial heart. In Italian we call this place “Sassi di Matera” (the Stones of Matera). For the last 9000 years people lived in this area. Objects nfrom the Paleolitic age was found in the caves that form the core of the town. And thousands of these caves have been converted into houses and used and re-used for centuries and centuries. The place has known periods of abandon and repopulation following the ups and downs of demography and local economy, but there is still people that, quoting the English Fodor’s Guide, “can boast to be still living in the same houses of their ancestors of 9,000 years ago”. The local authorities with UNESCO and foreign partners are working to revive the area. There are many things to learn from this site: it is so interesting to see, in this poor and simple multimillenial neighborhood, how they managed water or they oriented of the main door of the house to take advantage of the sunlight.

Some links:
Sassi di Matera (in English)
http://www.sassidimatera.it/
Wikipedia (in English)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassi_di_Matera
Pictures of the Sassi (in Italian)
http://gbmaragno.interfree.it/

(Image above: A view on Matera - bottom, the rocks; center, the ancient houses that are partly made of cave or dug into the rocks; on the horizon, some  contemporary constructions, far away. )

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Stewart Brand sent in this spiffy UCLA project that uses historical interactive maps of Berlin through time. This is part of a larger trend I have seen from many governments and municipalities to use modern geographical information systems (GIS) to not only create maps of what is there, but to add the time element to create a much deeper now.

• Historical Maps in Google Earth
• Virtual Berlin
• Westport Ireland
• China
• Philadelphia

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 Nice animated time line of human migration sent to me by Paul Saffo (via Jim Warren).  The coolest thing I learned was the very exciting day about 80,000 years ago when a massive volcanic eruption caused a 6 year darkening of the skies!

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I just got an update from David Rumsey that there will be a special event at the map museum in Second Life Thursday March 6th at noon PST.

MIT Tech Review is reporting that Long Now board member and mapping maven David Rumsey is launching his historical map collection in Second Life this week.

A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible. (See “From Lewis and Clark to Landsat.”)

Rumsey has also given a talk in our Seminar series, and some of his collection is in the featured layers on Google Earth where you can see historical maps overlaid on modern geography.

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Long Now has been playing with geo-data mash-ups recently as a potential interface for our Rosetta Project. In researching what is out there Flickr Vision and Earth Album (and TwitterVision linked off the same page) is one of the cooler geo-mash-ups I have seen. Using online mapping capability tied to social networking, and online photo services like Flickr, this mash-up is an endlessly rotating ball of earth that shows you pictures as they are uploaded to Flickr by location. The locations are often not perfect correlations (as where a photo is uploaded is often not where it is taken.) None the less it is a fun serendipitous interface to great data that is otherwise un-minable. Another nifty one I have seen along these lines is a Google Earth Layer that tracks Instant Messages…

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 Nikon Japan has put together a nice Powers of Ten style interactive Flash animation that does a great job of showing us scale with all kinds of clickable examples called Universcale.  Skip the intro and go right to the interactive part.  Thanks to Stuart Silverstone for sending this in.

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Above is the first known image ever taken from space and our first image of the really ‘big here’. It was shot from a captured German V2 rocket launched after WWII from White Sands missile range. You can find more about the effort in this excellent article in Air & Space magazine (also a link to this really amazing panorama). While it feels like space imagery is something fairly new because of new tools like Google Earth, this hauntingly grainy black and white image taken over 60 years ago reminds me that the intelligence community has been seeing and using this data for a long time. Also worth noting is that while we have this first image, it is my understanding that NASA is missing a large amounts of the early satellite data due to digital data loss. This is a good case where a real film camera has helped preserve the data.

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 Reuters is running this interesting story about a map created in 01507 that is the first to have named the new world “America”.  Even more interesting is how accurately it shows unexplored territories such as South America (within 70 miles of accuracy), and shows the Pacific Ocean which was not known to have existed at the time.  Strangley later maps are less accurate and stop using the term America for some time…

“This is … essentially the beginning or first map of the modern age, and it’s one that everything builds on from that point forward,” Hebert said. “It becomes a keystone map.”

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