Sunday, March 9, 2008
Another silly diagramme unearthed by the people at BoingBoing and themed on Dungeons and Dragons whose creator Gary Gygax died recently.
When you look at the full version of the diagramme, you’ll see a rectangle about “people blogging about diagrams”. I am such a nerd!
Flowchart: How D&D is a gateway drug to every flavor of nerdiness: “Wired’s Adam Rogers wrote a lovely, sweeping obit for Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax in this weekend’s New York Times that included this flowchart showing how D&D was a gateway drug into every kind of nerd-dom:
We live in Gary Gygax’s world. The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group…
Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.
Link
(Thanks, Ethan!)
“
(Via Boing Boing.)
Sunday, March 9, 2008
I’ve come back from the open weekend organised by The London Transport Museum Depot in Acton.
Part of it consisted in a tour of all the posters, maps and the original artworks they were based upon since 1908.
These posters were used mainly as promotional material for London (and therefore the Underground), and it was quite fascinating: the diversity of artistic styles as well as the messages conveyed through them.
These posters can be browsed online on on a dedicated web site.
Among the original artworks, there was a special edition of Harry Beck’s London map:
The topology is about the same as the original, but all the station names are replaced by personalities names and the lines name are replaced by careers(engineers, dignitaries, film actors, italian artists,…)
A cross between two lines represents someone who’s known for being more than one thing, which make the whole process quite a challenge 
unfortunately I couldn’t find this map on the online collection but It was quite funny to read and is nice followup to my previous post.
Here are some suggestions for other alternative London maps:
- each station represents an airport and the lines are airline companies
- each station represents a food and the lines are the group of nutriments supplied by the food
- each station represents a london pub and the lines are types of beverage served
Any more ideas?
Sunday, March 2, 2008
World Metro Map by Mark Ovenden
Originally uploaded by Annie Mole
This is a map I’ve just found on Flickr even if it’s quite old news (sorry).
It’s the metro map of the world and that’s so amazing. I do leave in a city with a dense metro system, and looking at this map make my brain start planning some exotic trips the same way I plan my high street shopping
This map is a powerful mind stimulator, kudos to Mark Ovenden.
Londoners will obviously recognize that the network diagramme is based on the London underground tube map:
the topology is almost intact and you can easily identify the central line and the circle and the others where there are supposed to be
It’s also made twice nicer as: Transport For London guards jealously the copyrights on their data (making tube map/status based creations rare and dangerous) and this one is available with a Creative Commons licence!
Thursday, May 3, 2007
Xkcd is at it again and produced an imaginative map of online communities:
When you hover the original small version on XKCD, you’ve got a nice comment from the author.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Buzztracker - World News - 2007-01-12
Almost a year ago, I discover a web site that track global news and represents them on a world map as circles. The larger the circle the more frequent are the news about the place. Buzz tracker also represents inter-references between places in the news articles by a link between two circles.
Using the image available on Buzztracker.org site, I’ve made a small film showing the evolution of the map over 14 days (7 of them consecutive, for the others I have been a bit lazy).
It’s interesting to see that the biggest circles are almost always the same (Iraq, big western cities) but the smaller ones are more mobile.
[QUICKTIME rtsp://streaming.pommetab.com/streaming.pommetab.com/buzztracker.mov 320 257]
images in the film are from buzztracker.org web site and the film is licenced under the same Creative Commons licence.
Thursday, March 23, 2006
While I’m on the subject (London Underground),
there’s a game in town which aim is to guess animals shape by reading the London underground map. I heard about that last year may be and didn’t give any attention until I found myself (thinking of) spotting a kind-of animal-ish shape while looking at the map.
Of course I dismissed such a though instantly blaming the usual suspects (tiredness, end-of-the-day-syndrom, drunken-state, put-your-own-excuse-here,…)
And then I found this web site.
Ok, am I reinsured?
not sure,
let’s say yes, it’s so more fun that way.