BRITISH LIBRARY DELIVERS..

An early Christmas present was delivered by the British Library this week. It unveiled a million images that it has placed onto a free to use Flickr account.

Anyone can now browse, download, re-image or edit through the collection of illustrations. Each illustration is taken from the massive British Library resources of 17th to 19th century books it has in the archive in London.

I had an hour of browsing and curated my own collection of interesting map images below.
Click an image and it will open the British Library collection in a new tab.

#1: Leonardo Da Vinci's World Map. Da Vinci produced this between 1513 and 1515 (exact date not known). This is an incredibly important map as it is a) the first to name 'America' on it, b) the earliest map showing the West coast of America unconnected to Asia.
Drawn on a strange construction of what are known as Da Vinci-Reuleaux triangles. This is one of the two maps that when placed side by side make up two halves of the globe as Da Vinci saw them - a lot different to our usual representation of the world on a flattened cylinder.
This style of map based on Reuleaux geometry inspired Cahill Butterfly projection maps in the early 20th century.

Image taken from page 84 of 'A larger history of the United States of America to the close of President Jackson's administration ... Illustrated, etc' published 1885

#2: A very nice illustrated Edinburgh map, still showing agriculture in the city centre!
Image taken from page 279 of 'Cassell's Old and New Edinburgh ... Illustrated, etc' published in 1880


#3: The Earth as imagined by the Greeks in the time of Homer (not Simpson, the other one!). Interesting to see how they got the Mediterranean pretty spot on in mapping terms. 
Image taken from page 18 of '[The Countries of the World: being a popular description of the various continents, islands, rivers, seas, and peoples of the globe. [With plates.]]'


#4: A really detailed map of the Balkans - love the simple use of colour for internal political boundaries. Also note the European side of Turkey (Eastern Thrace) is called Rumilla - something I cannot find any links to on the web? Research for another day..
Image taken from page 159 of '[History of the Russian Empire from its foundation by Ruric the Pirate to the accession of the Emperor Alexander II ... With ... engravings.]'


#5: An interesting collection of lakes and inland waters in Eastern Hemisphere (shame they didn't have the plate for the West included in the collection). Shows the truly massive scale of both the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
Image taken from page 101 of "[Appleton's European Guide Book illustrated. Containing ... maps, etc.]" published in 1879


I may put up a second blog post in a few days with other types of images - but I love maps so this was an obvious first choice.

There are so many interesting plates/scans in there that you really have to go and take a look yourself if you have any interest whatsoever in illustration or early graphic design.

Next year the British Library are going to launch a crowdsourcing ability or app so that anyone can go and look at the collection, and append notes to the diagrams/illustrations etc

Thank you British Library!

CANCER RESEARCH UK

January. That time when everyone flails around trying to stick to New Year's Resolutions.

I've been here before. I'm sure you have too?

This year is different though.

I noticed on my facebook page that a few people had been joining up to a new drive by Cancer Research UK called the DryAthlon. Simple idea. For the month of January, Go Dry. No alcohol. Get friends to sponsor the effort and maybe ask people in your local or out and about for donations.

I'm in.

Here's my page

Polko's Dryathlon

A good idea. And this year I will stick to my resolve. The support from the DryAthlon team is brilliant - earning badges for sticking to the plan. Regular emails to keep the momentum going - the first weekend is nearly over and I'm happily drinking lots of tea. Discovering new ones in fact. And happy to be away from the alcohol for at least the month.

I set a modest target of £200 and I'm 59% of the way there. I suspect it'll get harder as the month goes on but I'll be posting to facebook and twitter regularly to nudge a few people - some may call it pain in the bum, I call it money for a good cause!

So, I'll update soon.

For now, many thanks to those that have already seen fit to donate.

And just in case you want to - follow the link above or simply text to 70070 (free) with the following format in your SMS message:

POLK99 £x where x is the donation amount. I'd be happy with a £1!

If you want to join in, here's the Cancer Research UK Dryathlon info page

P

BE CAREFUL OUT THERE..

Everybody is aware of personal security when they approach a cash machine these days, perhaps less so when loading the car with groceries at the supermarket or returning to your vehicle in a car park after hours.

But most people use common sense and are prompted by the environment (dark corners, late night car parks) and remain safe. In the cosy surroundings of your home or bed though, things are a little different.

Once you logon to facebook and chat away with friends you loosen up a little. Everybody does. It's natural. So the helpful Veracode blog came up with this brilliant web security infographic..



Infographic by Veracode Application Security

99 PROBLEMS...

 
A growing trend on the web / social media globe is the 99% website.

It's a tumblr blog that hosts people who upload a picture of themselves and their pitiful downtrodden story of how life's hard at the moment.  You get the idea... The website intro says it all, including..

"We are the 99 percent. We are getting kicked out of our homes. We are forced to choose between groceries and rent. We are denied quality medical care. We are suffering from environmental pollution." and other moans.

There's been a lot of press coverage of the blog and how it's a great example of social media enablement of 'the people', ordinary people who want to tell their story and make their voice heard. The 99% of people who do. Apparently.

Trouble is, not many people are listening.  Neither are 99% of people so motivated to try and stand up for things around their world.  We see this every day - how soon the UK riots and the issues they threw up have been buried into the midst of time?

There's a good analysis of it on The Economist's own blog site here.  Basically showing how people are very ready these days to find the facebook page and hit the 'like' or 'become a fan' button.  By doing so, they think that they are making their mark in history.   In actual fact they are probably just making one Mark a very rich man by adding to the masses of data that facebook hold on everyone's likes and dislikes - valuable data to sell on to those who want to sell us something.

A better indicator of social concern the article argues is the #hashtag trend.  If people on twitter are marking up their posts with a specific hashtag, then that must be an indicator of rising popularity. Trouble here too though as people change the hashtags as things get subjectified.  What started as #UKriots might become #Manchesterriot or #riotpictures #rioterspics #cleanuptheriots etc etc  The trend moves and becomes less easy to follow as time evolves.

The 99% website may be better.  To upload you have to upload your photo, type your story into the browser and have in the pic your story actually written in ink (shock horror).  Not many of the pics are in legible writing of course given that they are mainly from people who spend 99% of their time tapping on keyboards rather than with pen in hand (I must also take some of the rap for being like that these days - though anyone who went to school with me will tell you my writing is and always has been pretty crap - left handed you see, that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

So, if it picks up the pace.  If 99% of people do make tracks there and start writing about how their life is crap, it might just make it as a social phenomenon. Me, I'm not putting any money on it.

ONE GIANT LEAP?

  
Today has been a day of waiting.  Waiting for my hearing to come back - which it didn't.  Waiting for the postman - who decided to turn up at the completely inconvenient hour of 2:30 given he had a cheque I wanted to bank today.  Waiting for a new BIG announcement from facebook. Which they delivered at around 18:30 our time.

The latter is probably about as important as life today gets.. so I'll just re-gurgitate from a site I've just read it on.

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Facebook announced a new e-mail service today called "Messages," though they're insisting that it's not e-mail.

We are also providing an @facebook.com email address to every person on Facebook who wants one. Now people can share with friends over email, whether they're on Facebook or not. To be clear, Messages is not email. There are no subject lines, no cc, no bcc, and you can send a message by hitting the Enter key. We modeled it more closely to chat and reduced the number of things you need to do to send a message. We wanted to make this more like a conversation.

The service will also be organized around your friends, putting their e-mail, or messages or whatever, into one inbox, and everything else into another. A different version of Google's "priority inbox" they introduced recently. Facebook is also saying they will store all your messages, forever, from whatever source, be it SMS, chat or e-mail.

I'm intensely jealous of the next generation who will have something like Facebook for their whole lives. They will have the conversational history with the people in their lives all the way back to the beginning: From "hey nice to meet you" to "do you want to get coffee sometime" to "our kids have soccer practice at 6 pm tonight."

They're going to be rolling out the service over the next few months, you have to wait for an invite, and then you'll be able to invite your friends. Now we get to see who Facebook thinks is important.

I'm waiting on my invite then. Come on FB!!

 

WHAT A SCORE!

I play Scrabble on facebook (or Lexulous to use it's correct name) and ventured into a random game against a stranger for the first time today...

Thing is, I was handed an amazing first set of tiles that made up an eight letter word (the maximum) that scores double points on the first go usually.  This time though my first word (MALARKEY) extended right out to the end of the board where a triple word score space lies!

134 points in the first go of the game!

I think this is one game I have an advantage in!

Shame it wasn't a game against any friends as I could have impressed them (hence the post here! ha ha) 

Let you know how it ends...