Flying Nautical Charts

Chart Art

If you can't navigate on them or use them for situational awareness, why not use as art.  A create idea for unloved Admiralty charts.  Love it.  Perhaps I can persuade some of the team to make us some? 

Lives on the Line

The tube map style is used for many types of art.  For example, the tubular fells, UK motorways or this wonderful map of the world, tube style  (just adding it to my Christmas list).  This recent map, lives on the line, is a new way of depicting life expectancy in and around London.  

Sheep Shuffling

And finally GPS has been used to prove that sheep huddle more when faced with a predator.  Now that makes perfect sense.  I think I'll try that, except I don't really look like a sheep.

New York (She's got the whole world in her hand)

After 3 weeks in the States I am still not out of the habit of walking past buildings with my eye level approx 40cm above ground level looking for benchmarks.  However, occasionally I look straight down and find them.

But sometimes the geo goodies are a tad easier to spot.  This is the Unisphere out at Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

For one moment I had the whole world in my hand.  Fortunately I let go before I created havoc.

It's a great globe - with 3d topography.

And today we popped into the New York Public Library to view their Mercator 500 exhibition.  It was more of a display cabinet but its small nature was more than compensated by the magnificent map room in which it sat.


My ideal looking bookcase - atlases, globes and framed maps above.

My daughter loved this huge atlas.

A lovely globe.

Fascimiles of his early work.

Smooting

Spent the day in Cambridge today.  Found a Harvard trig point.

Small but sweet.

Was stumped by this mathematical clock.  I can work some of them out - and obviously I know the answers - but 1, 3, 11...?

And the treat of the day was discovering the Smoot measurement.  Harvard Bridge is 364.4 Smoots +/- an ear.

Smoots are marked all the way across the bridge.


How cool is that?

Washington II

Just a couple of other geo spots on our US vacation.

Visited Annapolis yesterday and came across this wonderful chart store.  Isn't it great?  The only point at which my family rolled their eyes is when I asked if their charts were in metres or fathoms.  Come back in a few weeks as their website will be far better organised, they told me.

Walked up to the historic US centre of power, the Maryland State House.  Imagine my excitement (not my family's) to find this.


Actually perhaps I'm not insufferable as my husband pointed this next bag out to me and suggested we go find.  Unfortuately there is a temporary security cordon in place at the moment so this is the closest we could get to the Zero Milestone.  Wish I could have actually read the inscription.