Of course, it is an even year. The Giants win again. See you in 2016!
Author: James
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San Francisco Giants to World Series – Again…
It’s an even year so that means one thing, the San Francisco Giants win the World Series. Terrible we have to wait until Tuesday for Game 1 but it will be here soon.
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U.S. Maps Based on Where Baseball Players Were Born
Just in time to enjoy during the League Championship Series, Slate a has new maps showcasing where baseball players were born:
Since 1900, the states where the most baseball players have been born are California, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New York, and Texas. The states with the least are Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Alaska. Here’s a map of America if we were to divide the country into 50 states with the same number of baseball players born in each:
Gooseland is an empty wasteland of frozen ballfields and broken dreams. I grew up in Trammellia which probably explains why I’m blogging about this map instead of being in it.
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40 Maps That Explain the Internet
I have no idea what a map story or story map is but I do love maps. Timothly Lee over at Vox has compiled 40 maps that show the growth of the Internet since 1969.
The internet increasingly pervades our lives, delivering information to us no matter where we are. It takes a complex system of cables, servers, towers, and other infrastructure, developed over decades, to allow us to stay in touch with our friends and family so effortlessly. Here are 40 maps that will help you better understand the internet — where it came from, how it works, and how it’s used by people around the world.
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Nokia’s Here Auto Tries to Innovate
Interesting article on Engadget:
The latest version of Here Auto, launched at the Paris Auto Show, has very few rough edges. It’s designed to think ahead of you, learn your habits, work with other devices and present information and options in the least distracting way possible. That’s Nokia’s goal, anyway – to see if it succeeded, I took a tour around Paris in the company’s Range Rover demonstrator.
Self aware in car mapping. Sounds interesting but a demonstrator doesn’t mean care companies are going to jump on board. My 2014 Toyota 4Running has a completely out of date navigation system that I’m stuck with. Toyota seems to have signed deals with Yelp, Bing and Facebook to get POIs which I can’t decide is better or worse than just having a whole Nokia system. Apple and Google are getting car integration but they don’t seem to be doing any better than Nokia.
I suspect most of us will continue to use Google or Apple Maps in the car on our smartphone or tablets for naviagation. At least Siri talks through my bluetooth…
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The New York Times College Football Fan Map
The New York Times released a new map showing which college football teams the people root for from data it got exclusively from Facebook.
Like the other sets of maps, these were created using estimates of team support based on each team’s share of Facebook “likes” in a ZIP code. We then applied an algorithm to deal with statistical noise and fill in gaps where data was missing. Facebook “likes” are an imperfect measure, but as we’ve noted before, Facebook likes show broadly similar patterns to polls.
The map is highly detailed and the accompanying article goes into different rivalries. Teams such as Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame appear in counties all around the country. A fun map to explore this Saturday! At least Arizona is dominated by the better University.
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Google Maps Engine API Goes V1
It’s hard to believe that Google Maps is over 9 years old. I think back to how online mapping was done before it came and it was an ugly cruel world. The fact that I used MapObjects IMS to actually create applications tells you everything you need to know how bad things were. But as great as Google Maps was, it wasn’t always easy to get your data into it to create your own maps. That was Esri’s “thing”. Google Maps Engine has been around for a couple years but the API just went V1.
Today we’re launching the Maps Engine API v1.0: you can now do any CRUD operation on Maps Engine data via the API. The API is fully covered by our service level agreement (SLA) and deprecation policy. There is also a great set of new tutorials and documentation to help get you started.
Heck, even Safe FME supports Google Maps Engine for data upload. Putting your data on Google’s cloud. Google Maps Engine is sort of the Google My Maps for 2014 with it’s free tier. I’ve been playing around a bit with Google Maps Data Layer but I have to be honest just putting this data into Google Maps Engine itself sounds pretty good as well. You can expect a lot of playing Google Maps Engine from me this fall.
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Open Data…
This should be the mantra of any open data website:
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Nokia Maps to Arrive on iPhone and Android
So it looks like Nokia is going to bring back their mapping application to iPhone and Android.
The Finnish technology supplier will soon release free-of-charge map apps for mobile devices running Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS platforms, Nokia executive Sean Fernback said during an interview.
Without a need to prop up their failing mobile hardware business, Nokia seems to realize their best asset is mapping. Probably time to rename the company Navteq1 and get their map on all platforms. There is no shortage of free mapping applications on both platforms (including Apple Maps and Google Maps) so there will have to be something to get people to not use the default mapping application. Curious to see what this is for Nokia. Plus we’ll get to see if they use that crazy HERE branding.
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Everyone calls them that anyway ↩
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Baseball Ballparks in GeoJSON
Update: Mexican League and Eastern League are done. That means we’ve got all the Majors, Triple-A and a third of the Double-A stadiums mapped.
I’ve been working on getting all the MLB and AAA baseball ballparks in GeoJSON on GitHub. MLB1 parks are done and I think I’ve got all the AAA parks thanks to Wikipedia but I’m still missing most of the Mexican League which is a AAA league. I’m also hoping to complete the AA and A ballparks as well. If you can help, just fork the repo and submit a pull request with the new ballpark.
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Ignoring the fact I had the Nationals still playing at RFK ↩
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