September 2003 Archives

another entry lost to overzealous spam deletion

This is old news, but the Institute for Applied Autonomy's iSee mapping webapp, which generates surveillance-camera-free paths through New York, is useful and beautiful and I want their mapping code for New York for Fiasco. Plus, they have the only Flash intro that's not a waste of time that I've ever seen.

Paul Elliman is a British graphic designer. Official bios always seem to make a point of saying that he is "self-trained," as if it's somehow shocking that he does such great design without a couple of letters after his name. I suppose it is unusual, but Elliman is an unusual person himself.

He was my undergrad final project advisor. I would have jumped through flaming hoops to win his approval, but unfortunately the art department was short on circus equipment that semester.

Here he is talking with Michael Rock, another fantastic designer, about the cultural meanings of screens.

This software detects street addresses (such as "2400 Bayshore Parkway,
Mountain View, CA 94043") in a corpus of text and converts them into
geographical coordinates (such as "122.09720 W, 37.42532 N"). These
coordinates are indexed in a two-dimensional index along with a conventional
keyword index of the corpus. A query processor is then able to rapidly
process queries which ask for documents which match certain keywords and/or
contain addresses within a certain radius of a specified target address.
(Think "bookstores near me".)

Sonny Parafina reminds me that the winner of Google's programming contest last year is this amazingly versatile and useful Google geocoding app by Dan Egnor. Details here. And download here.

via Geowanking, my new favorite list. Big signal, little noise.