Loosely Assembled

Cross post from the Platial Blog:

Now is your chance to beat the imminent rush and export your full archive quality KMZ maps from Platial. We are in the last stages of testing 2 new export tools and would appreciate your participation and feedback.

The 2 new tools are a full KMZ exporter with all uploaded images embedded (any images that were added to the map via the flickr tool or as a web based image link will continue to link out) as well as a newly formatted KML version with image hosting provided by GeoCommons.com.

To enable the 2 new export modes, simply append ?export=1 to the end of any map url. This should work for visitor maps (/mapv/) as well as normal ones (/map/).
http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095 becomes http://www.platial.com/map/Cable-Access-Highlights/10095?export=1

Note: this will enable a new KMZ and KML link in the map header area

These export tools are applicable to any map on platial.com, so if you appreciate someone else’s map, feel free to grab a copy (with the exception of a user places map (the map of all your places), in which case, it will only be available to that logged in user.

Feedback is welcome as commentary here on the blog, on the getsatisfaction page, or via the Platial feedback page.

Known Issues you can avoid commenting on:

• With very large maps, anything over 2000 points, using the KMZ version sometimes comes out with an empty file despite taking a really long time to process
• some date ranges on geocommons hosted images are missing

Thanks,

Jason

Also, You can expect a few more announcements in the next few hours and/or days about Platial. Might want to start following @platialmaps for breaking news :)

This video actually has very little to do with geography, but I do find it interesting that there are specific places, micro regions, where longevity is dramatically higher than the global average. In this TED Talk, National Geographic writer Dan Buettner discusses some interesting common denominators of these long lived, healthy and happy clusters of humans.

There isn’t actually anything very surprising in terms of specific details, but where I see the value of these findings being transformative is in various scenarios such as urban planning, architecture, community development, families, tradition making, suburbia 2.0, retirement, economic development, health care reform, and more.

China is building handfuls of cities from scratch, I wonder how many, if any, of these common denominators have a chance at being intentionally incorporated. When new cities are being designed, is there a “creative brief”?

(via open culture blog)

Great video from Derek Sivers about assumptions, opposites, logic, history, and thinking.

The example about Japanese addresses finally gives some context to the alternative global coordinate system Geotude, basically recognizing and giving names to the spaces between the lines.

This talk by Will Self starts out slow, but really gets cooking a few minutes in.
He’s talking about walking from London to New York and how to explode your many micro worlds.

I have been fascinated by “place cells” recently, and it seems the press has just caught on as well this week with many articles in major outlets covering the phenomena. I guess it takes a spectacle to get people to write headlines about science, and this VR setup for a mouse is just that.

Basically they are watching the mouse’s place neurons activate differently depending where it goes inside the virtual environment. The same patterns emerge when it returns to the same places.

I have read a similar story with fMRI and humans, but I guess what’s different here are direct neural sensors, and real time physical movement (it’s hard to get a mouse to use a joystick like the humans did). The physical movement piece is critical in learning how proprioception contributes to the activity.

There is also a video on the linked page, worth taking a peek at too.

(Via @kernull.)