Sean Gillies Blog

It's another ridiculously nice day here in Fort Collins. The second in a row with 70+ (F) temperatures. It's positively vernal. I'm back from a somewhat muddy lunch hour run on my regular route, and the ponds that were completely iced over just two days ago are clear. I even saw a snapping turtle sunning itself on a half-submerged log. Meanwhile at Joe Wright, just an hour west of here up Highway 14, we've got a well above average snowpack that should provide for a long Spring ski season.

Lee Martinez Park, my trailhead, is one of the top features of Fort Collins. It butts right up against the Northwest corner of downtown adjacent to the Cache la Poudre River. Upstream are a series of City natural areas, and an ambitious trail system that may eventually reach the mouth of the Poudre Canyon some 20 miles to the NW. As you can see in the Google (and DigitalGlobe) imagery, the Poudre River Corridor and Lee Martinez Park bring a bit of the wild right into the heart of the city. We're really fortunate that undeveloped land remains on the edge of Fort Collins, and it seems like much of it to the NW might be preserved. Southwards, towards Denver, it's a lost cause.

Another nice springtime feature of Fort Collins is the New Belgium Brewery's Biere de Mars. I don't think it's quite as spicy as it was back in the day, but it's still one of the most unique and gamey mass-produced beers on the market. As far as I'm concerned, March on the Front Range could go on forever.

I'm a bit late in pointing out this story on the National Geographic site concerning the geographic literacy of young (US) American adults. The story is cleverly illustrated with an image of the globe showing only the United States. A slightly more nuanced map of the world from the perspective of the average US citizen went around the blogosphere in 2004, before geospatial blogging caught on.

I tested myself (18 for 20), and made the common mistakes explained at the bottoms of pages 31 and 34 (see the report). There are some interesting results in there that didn't make the headlines. A majority grossly overestimate the population of the US, with 29% guessing that there are more than a billion of us! Less than 1 in 5 know that Mandarin is the most used natural language. Only 11% correspond regularly with anyone outside the US.

The biggest cycling stage races of the year are upon us, and that means that the TDF Blog bumps Planet Geospatial from the top of my blogpile. Last year I reviewed the official 89th Giro and 93rd Tour maps, but there's no significant changes this year: the Giro map is a little more brown, the Tour map remains the same gold.

The TDF Blog points out that the Tour route is emerging on Google Earth Hacks. By next year, the designers of the race websites will have realized that they need to supplement their drab itineraries and profiles with KML files.

I've been saving this news for my 200th post. My new position is the software developer for UNC-CH's Ancient World Mapping Center, and I'll be working on the AWMC's Pleiades project. Pleiades (the daughters of Atlas) continues the work of the Classical Atlas Project. I'll be building a system -- and helping to build a community -- to update the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.

Pleiades will be built using PostGIS, Python, and Plone. Our software will be open source, and developed for reuse by similar future projects in the Digital Humanities. I'll be using many of my favorite tools, and applying them to a completely new domain. Pleiades will be a driver of new developments in the Python Cartographic Library and PrimaGIS, and help steer the Plone community in the right geospatial directions. On top of all of this goodness, I'm going to get to learn a ton about Greek and Roman history, epigraphy, and Unicode. Members of the steering committee are keen to see Pleiades data in Google Earth or World Wind, and this will be a new and interesting direction for me as well. It's a dream job, and I'm still pinching myself.

Via the Google Earth Blog I see that the Grand Boucle has teamed up with Google to address their need for KML. Meanwhile, I'm bummed that Valverde crashed out of the race in stage 3.

Crap, there goes the neighborhood. Please, unless you bring your own lifetime supply of water (and some to share), or are going to start an old-world bakery, or an affordably priced enoteca, don't move to Fort Collins. I'm begging you.

Colorado has a lot going for it, but the xenophobia -- whether homegrown or more recently imported from Texas and California -- is embarrassing.

Place names and class of names are the main points of our upcoming Pleiades milestone, so it's an interesting coincidence to hear about Barry Lopez's book about landscape words on NPR the other evening. Reading the excerpts, I became a little sentimental about the names of my favorite landscape, the Colorado Plateau: slot canyon, dry fall, reef, arch, tank, water pocket.

If you're interested in digital gazetteers and didn't make it to this week's workshop in Santa Barbara, check out the notes of my boss, Tom Elliot.

Update: interesting ideas coming from the Ethnophysiography Project.

My old hometown Jazz routed the Mavericks last night for Jerry Sloan's 1000th win. For now -- and for the first time in my memory -- the Mountain West, led by the Phoenix Suns, Utah Jazz, and Denver Nuggets, is the NBA's dominant geographic region.

GeoCarta's Roger Hart just reminded me of something I miss: the Great Salt Lake. Follow the links through his blog to the USGS's new bathymetric maps of my favorite little inland sea. Back in the day, I fished for perch and sailed in Gunnison Bay. Evaporation from the lake contributes to the annual 500" of snow dumped on Alta. Sea Monkies (Artemia franciscana) frolic in the smelly, briny compartment south of the railroad causeway. The modern lake is a remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville, which suddenly poured into the Snake River about 14,000 years ago. Estimates of the flow during the flood event are as high as 33 million cubic feet per second.

The image to the left of ancient and modern lake levels is from an online class at the University of Utah.

My boss just pointed out to me that Google's book search has new Gutenkarte-like maps at the end of the page. Oops, sorry about page 326. Good thing this book wasn't destructively digitized as in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End.

Over the weekend I went on a few virtual vineyard tours in preparation for WBW #30. In Germany, on a slope above the Moselle, facing the town of Wehlen, I found the Wehlener Sundial. The vineyards around the sundial are hot, steep, rocky, and worked almost entirely by hand. I know very little about German wines, but found the 2002 Wehlener Sonnenuhr Reisling-Kabinett from Dr. H. Thanisch to be a fine introduction. I haven't yet read a good explanation for how the Moselle winemakers can get such ripe-tasting, fruity wines with only 8-9% alcohol. Good stuff. The physiography of the Moselle region is equally fascinating.

Today is the 30th Wine Blogging Wednesday. I've been meaning to jump in for some time now but wasn't adequately motivated by the recent themes. This month's virtual wine tasting party theme is New World Syrah. We're big fans of this grape in my home, and have been keeping a bottle of 2003 L'Ecole Nº 41 Columbia Valley Syrah since last summer. This seemed like a perfect excuse to open it, and indulge in some unabashed wine geekery. Being a GIS blogger, I've tried to do something that I haven't seen much of in wine blogs: use Google Earth to help tell the story of the wine. So, start up Google Earth, hit this KML link, select the top-level folder, and read on.

I'm off on vacation for a few days after finishing the latest Pleiades site migration and release. Our master KML file is now at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/nwlink. That's 304 places in ancient Lycia and Pisidia (southwest coast of modern Turkey) from map 65 of the Barrington Atlas. There are 102 map pages to go, and we'll eventually have about 50,000 ancient places (with extensive bibliography) online next spring. In case you have a Barrington Atlas handy, the map 65 grid is available at http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/BA065grid.kml.

It will take a while for Google's index to catch up with our changes, but thanks to mod rewrite and a little scripting, anything you find through a Google Earth search is properly redirected to our new URLs.