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PDF map of the NYC subway system, showing what is and isn’t operational as of 10/31: http://bit.ly/To8Hx3

I figure someone in the future writing a story about this situation (fiction or non-fiction) will want this for reference.

Coming back from the Norovirus or whatever it was that had me screwed up for a big chunk of last week; staying away from anything greasy (lots of butter, say) seems to have kept the worst explosions at bay, and my appetite came back…still had stomach cramps at the dangdest times.  I think that’s past, but energy-wise, I’m still running on low power ( Read more... )

AP has a map here (interactive flash) on local economic conditions; my home county (DuPage) has (in the last two years) seen unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies double, and we’re nowhere near the bottom.  Check it out.

Just a followup note here from me on a topic broached earlier in my LJ version of the journal about the Chinese explorer Zheng He.   I was gassing on about ‘we need fresher AH situations’ and Steve Silver brought up the idea of Zheng He’s expeditions finding Australia and colonizing it (as it would have looked pretty empty to the Chinese).

I said ( Read more... )

An online, detailed map of Henry VIII’s London and Westminster.   (pre 1530s)

Add in an 1801 map of the area, with some country detail.  Also, an 1801 London map, and a 1799 one.

Coming Anarchy also highlights multiple historical places with the same name; Albania, Iberia, Alexandria,  various African nations, and Guinea.  They don’t have one for Galicia, but they ought to.

From the Coming Anarchy site: projected maps of Europe in the future and the former Yugoslav areas, along with their tag on microstates.  Personally, I strongly doubt some of this; France has been doing a thorough stomp of its minority groups (linguistics-wise, especially) for the last 100+ years to Make Everyone Parisian, and the Bosniak Muslims ( Read more... )

I’m looking at a point in the history of the Kingdom of Qin during the Warring States period that would have most easily short-circuited the Qin efforts to conquer the other kingdoms and establish an empire.  Suggestions welcome.

What I’m looking at is that the idea of China as a unified imperial state is nowhere near a certain thing, and that it ( Read more... )

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Some GIS professor thinks that by using his systems for tracking flora and fauna that he’s figured out where Osama bin Laden is.   I think it’s crap, but he might find the ghost of Marlon Perkins.