I mentioned the other day in Twitter something about beating the dead horse.

I’ve done quite a lot of alternate tube maps. They are thousands of them on the Internet, but people don’t seem to get tired of them, so here I present my latest one.

I’ve been meaning to execute this idea for a long time, and of course the best time to do it is one week before my course’s dissertations are due. It’s basically the same tube map we see every day, but with all the stations ever built (and some of the never built ones) located in their respective lines in the map. For the first time, instead of starting a new one from scratch I took the official map and modified it, which may have some sort of legal implications. In any case Ill be glad to take the map down upon TfL’s request. Some cool screenshots first.

Detail of the Northern Heights project, abandoned in the fourties.King William Street terminus, near Mark Lane station (which is still visible from the trains going to Tower Hill).
The proposed Bakerloo line extension from Elephant and Castle to Hayes, via Lewisham and Camberwell.

The former (and ultra-long) Metropolitan Line.

(And many more!)

Here it is in its full splendor

This is an ongoing project and I would love your input on missing and misplaced stations, as well as comments about the layout of the map. You can leave comments here or in the map’s flickr page. Thanks a lot!

Most certainly someone else has already posted this, but I prefer not to look for it (I don’t want to pop my bubble). Anyway getting Harrison to do it:

We’ve got Italy here.

Hello Costa Concordia!

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time. As you know, I spent a good part of the summer at a work placement producing maps and data visualisations for some of the researchers at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. Some of you may be familiar with this place from its consistent appearances on the media and others may know it because I just won’t stop going on about it.

One of the core people in the department, Doctor in Physics, awesome songwriter and most importantly, my supervisor during my time there, Dr Martin Zaltz Austwick, made the mistake of a) shaking hands with me at last year’s CASA Show And Tell (and henceforth becoming my stalkee) and b) making a version of my Twisted London Underground Map. In this version, all the stations represent charges that repel each other whilst being attached with springs. He defines this as a force graph in his first post on the matter, dated one day later than my map.

Force Graph of London Tube Lines from Sociable Physics on Vimeo.

One of my first tasks during my stay was to design a web version of this experiment. As you can see in his post, he used Processing to generate the graph and create the video of its unfurling. With this web version we took it one step further, to the point of the user being able to modify graph parametres such as gravity, damping, spring strength[not at the moment], as well as dragging the stations around to generate different results. This was achieved mainly using Processing’s browser counterpart, Processing.js, as well as some useful javascript libraries such as dat.GUI.js.

You can play with the force graph here.

If you love travelling as much as I do then you may be used to looking out for great ways to keep yourself entertained during long journeys. Playing poker en route can be ideal, as it is one of the most engaging games and one which is sure to keep you entertained for hours. With this in mind, here are just a few of the great ways in which you can play poker while you travel, depending on which mode of transport you happen to be taking.

If you’re travelling by plane, then you’re more than likely to be taking your laptop with you in your hand luggage. This means that you can easily kill time waiting around in airports, simply by logging on to online poker sites such as partypoker.com. Playing poker this way is also perfect for the solo traveller, as playing online means that your opponents can be anywhere in the world.

Of course, if you’re getting inner-city trains during your travels, then you might not be able to make space for a laptop. Often, you’ll be lucky to get a seat at all on public transport within busy cities. However, if you have access to a smartphone, then you can still pass the time by playing poker. Thanks to handy poker apps such as Hover Poker, you can play poker on the go with up to 22 players! Meanwhile, the Poker Analyzer app is ideal for those who are keen to improve their future performances at the poker table.

Of course, you’re taking more of a long-distance train journey, then you might find that you have enough space to get out the poker chips and start a game around your carriage table! Travel poker kits are a great way to keep all your poker paraphernalia in one place, and make the perfect accompaniment to cross-country journeys with friends.

I recorded Felix Baumgartner’s position from jump to landing. Here’s the image I produced with Processing and Red Bull’s live feed.

Apparently there is a line of buses which go from Thessaloniki, in Greece, to T’bilisi in Georgia. They have no website, reservations number or public schedule, so the only way really is to go to the bus station and hop on the next bus.

Lonely Planet briefly mentions it.

I’ve spent the whole evening reading this, as well as playing F1 2012 (because at least in a videogame I have some degree of control over who wins the bloody championship).

I live just near an abandoned station. Well, the station is no longer there, but Silvertown stations used to be at the end of my road, as part of the North London Line between North Woolwich and Stratford. The DLR services made the line quite redundant, so it was terminated on 2006. The platforms and structure of Silvertown Station were invaded by weed and plants until three years ago it was demolished, for the railway to be refurbished as part of the Crossrail network. Here’s an awesome picture of the station, with Tate and Lyle’s factory behind.

The other day in Quora we had this nice little chat about whether or not Google Maps, and Apple’s disastrous counterpart, was a relevant piece of cartography. My opinion was that I don’t believe they are, as they are tools that were conceived as a means for the user to expand their awareness of their local businesses, attractions and services, as well as for guiding people across streets. They lack the aesthetical component, the functionality and simplicity of a proper map or an atlas so they shouldn’t be seen as such.

I like, though, that MapBox, my new favourite company (and potential victim of my harassments jobseeking-wise), is trying its best to merge both worlds. They very recently released the terrain data for their MapBox Streets web application and the sharpness of the relief and its shades looks absolutely ace. I’m working on a couple of maps that use terrain data and I’ll be showing them soon, so this is good inspiration.

Did I hear… inspiration? Oh yes! The tangential relation between the topic of this post and my research interest towards my degree project means that this is post #4 for Ayfaw Kucha! YAHAHAAAA

How does a person do to travel from London to New York, if they don’t want to use a plane? I’m becoming more and more interested on solving this question in an automated way, and it is very likely that my degree project will address this.

I’m obsessed with a) travelling and b) transport. And I really hate Ryanair (I’ve written extensively about this, but it was in Spanish and the website in which the text was stored disappeared because I stopped paying its hosting). So almost every summer I end up going by train from London back to Spain. And I really enjoy it. I’d like to build a travel planner for this kind of trips, but extremely comprehensive.

Like a website that, if you asked it how to get from London to New York, it would tell you to go to Southampton and take the Queen Mary II, one of the few transatlantic liners left. Then stay onboard until it reaches New York. Or how about getting a train from London to Paris, then a couple of trains to the North of Denmark, followed by a nice trip on the Smiryl Line to Reykjavik. From Reykjavik enter a cargo ship as a passenger to Nuuk in Greenland, from where it shouldn’t be very difficult to catch another service to the coast of Canada. From there a train will take you to New York.

I’m not even mentioning going the other way round the globe.

Of course I’m just bullshitting because the reality is not that I’m ‘playing with this idea’ just now, but that I’ve been working on it the whole summer on the side while I was at CASA. I really like it as part of the project,as it has lots of ramifications one could explore

This follows up from the last post.

I have a personal war against Tumblr, which has the same roots as my personal war against the hipster culture (assuming we can call such a thing a ‘culture’). In brief: I’m very self-conscious about my own stupidity, and therefore I tend to dislike people that a) display it publicly on a daily basis or b) think they are special when they are not. My thoughts on the matter are very nicely conveyed by Louis CK.

Apparently in this series of posts that I have to do I need to include, among other things, quotes from books, magazines, etc. Now the problem is that I don’t want to turn my blog into a Tumblr, where the poster does basically nothing of value and limits themselves to copy (or “reblog”) stuff from other people.

When I was very little I wanted to be a journalist. And I was very told then that if I read a lot I would turn into a good writer. So I became a compulsive reader, until now. Since my writing abilities haven’t improved much ever since, I’m starting to feel a bit scammed. This is relevant because there’s the fact that, in spite of thoroughly disliking Tumblr, I really like quotes. And I’m not referring to the ones you find everywhere, like “I may not agree with what you said, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”, which by the way is always wrongly attributed to Voltaire. I mean like the cool, long ones I’ll be posting here, which hopefully won’t make me look too much of a douchebag.

Remember that it’s a course requirement. By the way, this is post #2.

From Imperium, by Ryszard Kapuscinski:

Ashkhabad, a peaceful city. Now and then a Volga passes along the street. Now and then a donkey’s hooves tap against the asphalt. They are selling hot tea in the Russian market. One potful — twenty kopecks. But can the value of tea be measured that way?

Here, tea is life. An old Turkman takes the teapot and pours two small bowls — one for himself, the other he passes to the little yellow-haired boy. “Nu,” he says to the boy. “Oy, Diadia,” the little one answers, “I’m always telling you that you’re supposed to say na, not nu.” Diadia laughs, perhaps at the same thought that occurs to me: that he can no longer be taught anything. A Turkman that has lived long enough to have a gray beard knows everything. His head is full of wisdom; his eyes have read the book of life. When he got his first camel, he learned what wealth was. When a herd of his sheep died, he learned the unhappiness of poverty. He has seen dry wells, and so he knows what despair is, and he has seen wells full of water, and so he knows what joy is. He knows that the sun brings life, but he also knows that the sun brings death, which no European really understands.

He knows what thirst is and how it feels to have one’s thirst quenched.

He knows that when it is hot one must dress warmly, in smock and sheepskin, and not strip down to the bare skin, as some men do. A dressed man is thinking, an undressed one — no. A naked man is capable of committing every stupidity. Those who created great things were always dressed. In Sumeria and Mesopotamia, in Samarkand and Baghdad, despite the diabolical heat, people walked about dressed. Great civilizations arose there, which neither Australia nor the African equator, where people walked naked in the sun, can boast of. All you need to do is read the history of the world.

It could be that this old man knows the answers to Shakespeare’s great question.