Tag Archives: geography

March 2024 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: Ralph Nader says the civilian carnage in Gaza is an order of magnitude worse than even the Gaza authorities say it is. Which is almost unthinkably horrible if true, and makes the Israeli public statements about collateral damage seem even less credible. However even handed you try to be in considering this war could be a proportionate response to the original gruesome attack, it is getting harder.

Most hopeful story: Yes, there are some fun native (North American) wildflowers you can grow from bulbs. Let’s give the environmental and geopolitical doom and gloom a rest for a moment and cultivate our gardens.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I looked into Belarus, and now I am just a little bit less ignorant, which is nice.

tile maps

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Tile maps, which visually show areas with unequal areas as having equal area, are, somewhat obviously, appropriate when you don’t want the unequal geographic area to distort the message you are trying to communicate. An example might be if you want to show a variable by congressional districts, which have (roughly) equal populations but variable (spatial) areas.

A couple other ideas with tile maps are (1) to use rectangles of equal shape but different length/width ratios, and (2) to use words spatially arranged and with a variety of properties (font, size, color) to denote a variety of variables.

Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus, and NATO geography quiz

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There are lots of point-and-click geography quizzes online. I tried this one and did horribly at 57%. If I manage to find the time, I might take it once a day until I actually know where some of the places I am hearing in the news are. That still won’t help me much when the media uses terms like “the Baltic States” and “the Caucases” (being “Caucasian” doesn’t help me with that last one. I also looked up the map of who is in NATO at this point and what surprised both at some countries that are and some that aren’t.

According to Wikipedia:

The Baltic states is a modern unofficial geopolitical term, typically used to group three so-called Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. All three countries are members of NATO, the European Union, the eurozone, and the OECD. The three sovereign states on the eastern coast of the Baltic Sea are sometimes referred to as the “Baltic nations”, less often and in historical circumstances also as the “Baltic republics”, the “Baltic lands”, or simply the Baltics.

Wikipedia

The Caucasus (/ˈkɔːkəsəs/), or Caucasia[3][4] (/kɔːˈkeɪʒə/), is a region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, mainly occupied by Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and parts of Southern Russia. The Caucasus Mountains, including the Greater Caucasus range, have historically been considered a natural barrier between Eastern Europe and Western Asia.[5]

Wikipedia

The NATO members are:

  • ALBANIA (2009)
  • BELGIUM (1949)
  • BULGARIA (2004)
  • CANADA (1949)
  • CROATIA (2009)
  • CZECH REPUBLIC (1999)
  • DENMARK (1949)
  • ESTONIA (2004)
  • FRANCE (1949)
  • GERMANY (1955)
  • GREECE (1952)
  • HUNGARY (1999)
  • ICELAND (1949)
  • ITALY (1949)
  • LATVIA (2004)
  • LITHUANIA (2004)
  • LUXEMBOURG (1949)
  • MONTENEGRO (2017)
  • NETHERLANDS (1949)
  • NORTH MACEDONIA (2020)
  • NORWAY (1949)
  • POLAND (1999)
  • PORTUGAL (1949)
  • ROMANIA (2004)
  • SLOVAKIA (2004)
  • SLOVENIA (2004)
  • SPAIN (1982)
  • TURKEY (1952)
  • THE UNITED KINGDOM (1949)
  • THE UNITED STATES (1949)

alternatives to word clouds

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I like this post on R bloggers proposing several alternatives to word clouds. I’ll list them below but really, you should look at the pictures because hey, this is about pictures.

  1. circle packing (basically this replaces the words with circles, dealing with the problem of bigger/longer words appearing to be more important in standard word clouds); there is a variation on this called the “horn of plenty” where the circles are arranged in order rather than randomly
  2. cartogram (in my ignorance, I have been calling this a “bubble map”. I have used these frequently to show engineering model results and find they work well for many people)
  3. chloropleth (these shade in geographic areas to convey data. I find these work well if the size of the geographic area is important information. If it is not, these tend to draw the viewer’s eye to larger areas, and in that case the bubbles are better. For example, per-person income of Luxembourg vs. China.)
  4. treemap (I’ve been calling these “packed rectangles” and I generally find them good for anything where conveying relative magnitudes of things to people is important)
  5. donuts (surpringly, the author concludes a donut is the best option for the data he is trying to show and I kind of agree, it gets the point across and leaves lots of room for labels)

The article has links to the specific packages and code used to create the graphics.

globe buying guide

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I’m thinking of getting my son a globe for his fourth birthday. I’ve done a little research, which I’m going to share here.

Replogle appears to be the largest manufacturer of globes. But dig into some reviews, and they appear to be not all that well made, yet not priced any lower than other brands.

There are all kinds of globes with electronic bells and whistles out there, like this one from Oregon Scientific. In the end I decided to keep it simple and not go for one of these.

Some globes have “raised relief” for mountains, like this Advantus globe, which is cool.

Ultimately I picked this Waypoint model. Even though it doesn’t have topographic relief, I like the colors and topographic detail.