Maps

Our search needs, and in turn our browser history, are not being met with single query anymore. We move through a variety of sources with every new piece of information giving us new ideas and directions to follow. Without us ever knowing it, our search queries are constantly fluctuating.

...Our browser’s history should reflect our behavior on the internet and help us understand the process behind it. It is crucial to actually understand and question the way we use the internet, and without the suitable tools, it is not possible.

I find answers in maps.

Boetti and a collaborator spent seven years researching the lengths of rivers, determined to arrive at a convincingly accurate hierarchy despite the impossibility of absolute measurements. This work presents their findings in a straightforward list in descending order of length, giving no clue to the inexact and contradictory information underlying it.

A 3D DOM viewer. Copy-paste this into your console to visualize the DOM topographically.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

On April 8, the sun, moon and Earth will enter the precise alignment of a total solar eclipse. The moon will block the sun, casting a shadow across a strip of North America from the Pacific Ocean west of Mexico, through 15 U.S. states, to the Atlantic off Canada.

This strip, roughly 4,000 miles long and 115 miles wide, is called the path of totality.

Given there’s an explosion in software to accrete and organise knowledge, is the page model really the best approach?

Perhaps the building blocks shouldn’t be pages or blocks, but

neighbourhoods
roads
rooms and doors
landmarks.

Or rather, as a knowledge base or wiki develops, it should - just like a real city - encourage its users to gravitate towards these different fundamental elements. A page that starts to function a little bit like a road should transform into a slick navigation element, available on all its linked pages. A page which is functioning like a landmark should start being visible from two hops away.

This 1900 map of Manhattan looks, at first glance to be simply another detailed map with building outlines shown. But there’s a surprise when you zoom in: The buildings are little isometric drawings rather than just outlines.

Embeddings are a technology that’s adjacent to the wider field of Large Language Models—the technology behind ChatGPT and Bard and Claude.

Embeddings are based around one trick: take a piece of content—in this case a blog entry—and turn that piece of content into an array of floating point numbers.

The key thing about that array is that it will always be the same length, no matter how long the content is. The length is defined by the embedding model you are using—an array might be 300, or 1,000, or 1,536 numbers long.

The best way to think about this array of numbers is to imagine it as co-ordinates in a very weird multi-dimensional space.

Why place content in this space? Because we can learn interesting things about that content based on its location—in particular, based on what else is nearby.

The location within the space represents the semantic meaning of the content, according to the embedding model’s weird, mostly incomprehensible understanding of the world. It might capture colors, shapes, concepts or all sorts of other characteristics of the content that has been embedded.

Nobody fully understands what those individual numbers mean, but we know that their locations can be used to find out useful things about the content.

Primary series for imaginary map drawings, spanning 2008-present and using various materials and techniques.

The above is a map of all Hacker News posts since its founding, laid semantically i.e. where there should be some relationship between positions and distances. I've been building it and some other interesting stuff over the past few weeks, to play around with text embeddings. Given that HN has a lot of interesting, curated content and exposes all its content programatically, I thought it'd be a fun place to start. [Case Study]

Lynch puts forward five primitive elements: paths (e.g. streets); edges (e.g. uncrossable rivers); districts; nodes (e.g. street corners); landmarks (e.g. a recognisable building). Each element has an intuitive way to sketch it, as if on the back of a napkin.

...Lynch’s five primitives comprise a notation.

It’s composable. A small number of simple elements can be combined, according to their own grammar, for more complex descriptions. There’s no cap on complexity; this isn’t paint by numbers. The city map can be infinitely large.

Compositions are shareable. And what’s more, they’re degradable: a partial map still functions as a map; one re-drawn from memory on a whiteboard still carries the gist. So shareable, and pragmatically shareable.

Not only are maps in this notation functional for communication, but it’s possible to look at a sketched city map and deconstruct it into its primitive elements (without knowing Lynch’s system) and see how to use those elements to extend or correct the map, or create a whole new one. So the notation is learnable.

• fractal software makes it hard to orient yourself, since everything looks the same regardless of the "depth" level - which is a feature of fractals
• Gordon Brander suggests looking into how orientation works in cities – through landmarks – how could this look like in software?
  • for some reason I'm not using the color tags in macOS, which could be helpful? – or is this too small of a landmark to matter?
• bash prompt, miller columns, urls, breadcrumbs are all a way to show "you are here" in fractal structures

Nobody would disagree with the author of this tweet, Simon Kuestenmacher — of course it’s nice to have your map available while you are reading along.

The reason it doesn’t generally happen is not, surprise, surprise, that publishers had never thought of it — it’s because it’s very expensive. Every book should of course have maps set up like this, and every book should cost another $5 or so for each tip-in pull-out in it. Four or five maps and you’ll be getting to the point where it’s cheaper to buy a second copy and use your scissors to cut the maps out. Once you’ve done that, maybe you can Scotch-tape them together as similar handy pull-outs!

I have never ran in the Boston Marathon and have no intention of ever doing so. I did cross country in high school, and that was enough long-distance running for my lifetime. But, I was interested in the history and legacy of such a long running event, and after some initial research, I thought that the race had some unique and interesting geography which would make for a fun map. Places like Heartbreak Hill, where Johnny Kelley goaded Ellison “Tarzan” Brown with a playful shoulder pat, and ended up losing because of it. Or the Wellesley Scream Tunnel, where cheers of encouragement from Wellesley College students can be heard by runners more than a mile away. There are also a number of landmarks along the course that can help runners gauge how far along they are, including the iconic Citgo sign near Fenway, the sharp turn at the Newton Firehouse, or the many statues commemorating past icons of the race.

At the end of the 18th century, Spain's official geographer, Tomás Lopez, was asked by the King to create an accurate map of the kingdom. In an attempt to delegate the herculean labour required, Tomás drew a series of circles, picked the town in the center of each circle, and asked the local priest to answer a questionnaire and draw up a map of their province. The goal was to amalgamate the responses into a single map. But none of these priests were trained in cartography, and many of them would have had limited access to maps at all. Nonetheless, 500 of them tried. In one map, the entire region is represented simply by a series of letters (“A” for church, “B” for hermitage, “C” for house, “D” for tree, and so on). Another represents the surrounding villages as if they are orbiting planets. In some, the handwriting forms the topographies. In others, descriptive columns of text take center stage, as if the language itself is a landmark. Each priest implicitly reveals how they see the world around them, and the relative importance of its constituent parts: nature or people, religion or trade, architecture or landscape, precision or vibes.

This map shows all the blinking beacons from OpenStreetMap.

More specifically, it asks the Overpass API for all elements with an seamark:light:sequence or seamark:light:1:sequence attribute, decodes these, and displays them as coloured circles on the map using Leaflet. It also tries to take the seamark:light:range and seamark:light:colour into account.

A new timeline design layers in details to give a more accurate overview of project progress.

Milestones will now appear on project bars as long as they have a target or completion date. Represented by diamonds, milestones indicate status and can be hovered over or clicked on to show details. Milestones near each other collapse into a set, like on a map app.

15 years ago, I helped design Google Maps. I still use it everyday. Last week, the team dramatically changed the map’s visual design. I don’t love it. It feels colder, less accurate and less human. But more importantly, they missed a key opportunity to simplify and scale.

Vastness is a visceral, continuous sense of the universe being incomprehensibly bigger than your conceptions of it can ever be. This need not be a sense of the unknown, though much of the vastness is in fact unknown. Isolated bits of the vastness can in fact be known, named, pointed to, and even rise to familiarity.

Maps are useful only when they are used in combination with observation. Never try to design a site by just looking at a map, even if it is thoroughly detailed with contour lines, vegetation, erosion gullies, and so on marked in.

Maps are never representative of the complex reality of nature. Remember, "The map is not the territory."

In the digital age, physical maps had been widely expected to die out, since people could easily track their every move as dots on screens. But instead, interest has intensified.

...Cartographic décor can help sate fundamental human needs to feel oriented. “Maps are inherently trusted — there’s something about them that makes people feel secure,” said PJ Mode, a map scholar and collector who is donating his holdings to Cornell University. His main focus is “persuasive cartography”: maps meant to sway public opinion, for instance by advocating abolition in the early 1800s, or women’s suffrage or warmongering in the 1910s. Mr. Mode likes to quote what the writer and aviator Beryl Markham imagined that maps wanted to say to their users: “follow me closely, doubt me not. … Without me, you are alone and lost.”

He flicks another pebble. A STARBURST glints off the windowed cabin of the crane. It's identical to the traffic graph. Acre jumps to his feet. He smacks his hands together. I knew it!

ACRE (whispering)
I have that one!

He picks up the traffic graph off the ground and turns back to the crane as if he might present it as proof. There is ANOTHER DIFFERENT STARBURST from the crane.

Acre is puzzled. After a moment he breaks the trance:

ACRE
Oh.

He scavenges the area for a suitable rock and begins marking the ground with the starburst pattern. At one point he closes his eyes briefly to remember the shape.

He stands in the center of the marking. It has two spikes. One points back in the direction that he came from, the other about 90 degrees off that. Acre aligns himself with the second one and starts walking with the measure wheel.

EXT. FIELD — NEXT

He brings the wheel to a stop.

He paces back and forth, anticipating, continually scans the cityscape on the horizon.

RADIO
Acre, how far off are you on—

In one swift move Acre reaches to his belt and switches off the radio, never taking his eyes off the horizon.

Far off in front of him a TRAIN crosses his view. From it a starburst flashes.

ACRE
I have that one...and...

A second later another different glint flashes from the same spot.

ACRE
...okay.

He carves the new starburst into the grass and dirt with his boot.

I wish the world was flat like the old days
Then I could travel just by folding a map
No more airplanes, or speed trains, or freeways
There'd be no distance that could hold us back