America’s Chain and Independent Restaurants maps out all restaurents across the USA coded by their degree of 'chainness' from the 310,000 or so single-location restaurants to the 24,333 Subways. Now if they only would make the underlying restauranr address data available!
More @ https://friendlycities.gatech.edu/data-interactive/
Destination Earth is a lot of world salad at this time, but it seems to be EU version of an AI-based Digital Twin currently called DestinE. Very clever!
Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas visualizes Manhattan’s and Brooklyn’s transformations during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Drawing on 1850, 1880, and 1910 census data, it shows how migration, residential, and occupational patterns shaped the city.
Awesome!
Guess Where You Are is just a fun geography game using Street View images to let you explore the world - great fun!
Five ways to improve your chart axes is not particularly new or original, but the R crowd will appreciate the code examples provided.
Superblocks could be a way to create more pedestrian-friendly urban environments while still allowing for effiecient vehicle access. More here: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2024/03/05/are-superblocks-future-urban-living
Great video - basically the story/history of intelligence & artificial intelligence.
NASA Earthdata appears to be the (new) data portal for accessing all kinds of NASA data.
Climate Change Story Shorts lookl useful - here's some information from the NCSE:
NCSE's Climate Change Story Shorts provide a new, teacher-friendly take on Next Generation Science Standards storylines. These shorter instructional units with modular activities and optional sidequests engage students in the three dimensions to resolve one or more common misconceptions within one to two weeks of instructional time.
The Power of Where: A Geographic Approach to the World's Greatest Challenges by Jack Dangermond sounds like a great read & could possibly be used as modern geography 'textbook' for a modern geography class. But $59.99 seems like an odd price: too much to make it accessible and too little to make decent money.
Seriously: who is funding this nonsense & why give them any journalistic attention?
The latest from NASA: The Humboldt Glacier's Demise
Now please stop asking me about it...the Humboldt Glacier was already stagnant back when I mapped it in 2015 and nothing really has changed - it just shrinks and shrinks. I supposed someone at some point has to declare it 'gone', but much of this latest fanfare and 'reclassification' seems more like an attention grab than a relevant scientific discovery to me.
Hannah Ritchie has put together some really nice interactive charts and data on her website @ https://hannahritchie.com/slides-charts-explorers/.
Here are two nice web apps to explore hurricanes that impacted your particular area:
Probability of Success is a nicely-done interactive animation/explanation of an important statistical concept: If there’s a chance, with enough tries, you approach near certainty. Or: the house always wins!
climatearchive.org is an amazing 3D visualization of climate model data across time and space.
"How has the planet evolved throughout our lifetimes? Or more specifically, how does our current world compare to the world when we were born? Human existence may be short in the grand scheme of things, but our impact has accelerated the pace of global warming. Looking ahead, it's important to consider how our decisions today shape the future—not only for ourselves but also for future generations."
Climate Colors lets you compare your own experience of climate change to that of other born at different times.
PalmWatch: Tracking the impact of big brands' palm oil use seems really cool & slick, but may take you a while to figure-out what's going on & how to use it.
On George Washington's Birthday, 1974, Sam Lovejoy--a 27-year-old farmer--toppled a 500-foot weather tower in Montague, Massachusetts. The tower had been erected by the local utility as part of their attempt to build one of the largest nuclear power plants ever planned.
Leaving 349 feet of twisted wreckage behind, Lovejoy hitched a ride to the local police station, where he turned himself in along with a four-page statement decrying the dangers of nuclear power and accusing the government and utilities of "conspiracy and despotism."
Six months later, Lovejoy stood trial for "willful and malicious destruction of personal property," a five-year felony. He insisted on conducting his own case, and told the jury he had acted in self-defense. After a dramatic seven-day trial, Lovejoy went free.
More about this story here: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/lovejoys-nuclear-plant-civil-disobedience/
Earth Transit - Major World Passenger Rails is awsome: just a giant map as JPG or PDF.
The Coldest day of the year across the United States shows a really interesting east-to-west pattern!
Ful-screen app here.
Very cool: Genetic insight on ice sheet history
Nothing fundamentally new, but a great new independent line of evidence that supports what Mercer already told us 50+ years ago: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed during the last Interglacial (~129,000 to ~116,000 years ago) and sea levels rose by 5 m.
