Best of the blogs

By on 6 November, 2018

Colorful Language: Decoding Utility Markings Spray-Painted on City Streets

99 percent invisible

In 1976, construction workers accidentally cut into a petroleum pipeline running under the streets of Culver City, California, resulting in a fatal explosion that essentially leveled half of a city block. It wasn’t the first or last accident of its kind, but it helped catalyze the systemization of critical color-coded utility markings — mysterious-looking tags that look like nonsense or a secret code until you start to decipher them.

XKCD Cartography


Maps Mania

Webcomic XKCD’s midterm elections map, and a wonderful retrospective of all of the seminal web comic’s forays into cartography.

Canada’s Declining Caribou Population

Map of the week

“We are a natural resource-driven economy, and limits to our footprint is anathema to most. Our system of monetizing does not extend to species. They have no value.”

Courtney Claessens: “It’s incredibly important that we stay humble in the kind of work we do”

Geohipster

Courtney is a product manager at the Canadian Digital Service. Before joining the public service, she worked at Esri building products to connect local governments and their communities using open data. She has a BA in Urban Systems and GIS from McGill University. She lives in Ottawa and is moderately active on Twitter.

All Over the Map – a review

Cartonerd

So many large format coffee-table map books are written by map experts, map librarians or map historians. They carefully select the maps based on a criteria that generally relates to some cartographic measure of their worth. Betsy Mason and Greg Miller are not cartographic experts, well, at least not by training, though they are fast demonstrating a deep understanding of what makes great maps tick.

Stay up to date by getting stories like this delivered to your mailbox.
Sign up to receive our free weekly Spatial Source newsletter.

You may also like to read:


, , , , , ,


Newsletter

Sign up now to stay up to date about all the news from Spatial Source. You will get a newsletter every week with the latest news.

QGIS WCPS plugin for multidimensional datacubes
The new QGIS WCPS Plugin enables seamless querying and visua...
Seafloor mapping reveals landslide, tsunami risk
Surveying and mapping are providing insights into some of th...
Company behind Pokémon GO splits off spatial arm
Niantic will spin off its geospatial AI arm into a new compa...
Sphere Drones transitions to in-house production
Sphere boosts its local manufacturing capabilities to meet m...
Terria targets the digital twin universe
We speak with the firm’s co-founders to find about more ab...
Desktop, cloud geographic software
Blue Marble Geographics has launched Geographic Calculator 2...