This article says that Sudan, one of Africa’s war-torniest countries, wants to remake its capitol cities in the shape of its animals. This is not unlike Dubai’s massive island building geography.

WHY IT WON’T WORK: On the face of it, it appears to be a preposterous idea – the idea of Africa’s least effective state with few resources working to create a new massive scale of rebuilding against the natural organic process of city growth that normally occurs in the 3rd world.

WHY IT MIGHT WORK: Sudan’s poverty is a hindrance but also means that it requires very few resources to accomplish a project like this – and as China is a large investor in Africa and particularly Sudan, they might see this as an opportunity to strengthen ties and promote growth in the region.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR GEOGRAPHERS: Lines on maps have always meant more than physical boundaries. They are cultural, political, economic boundaries as well. Maps create our world, so it’s natural that we want to reshape our world to please the maps. Check out Strange Maps for more anthropomorphic shapes in maps, like the Finland design below.

A cute and funny movie about a problem all GIS folks have had: projection misalignment. Isn’t it cute when anthropomorphic creatures talk about GIS??

Geography Journal Club

Where did Tobler’s First Law of Geography Come From?

When: October 7, 2009, 12:15 – 1pm

Where: ELA 314

—-> FREE PIZZA! <—–

Ever wondered where Tobler’s First Law of Geography came from? In our first meeting of Geography Journal Club, we’ll discuss the origin of Tobler’s First Law of Geography: the paper, it’s methodology, and it’s impact. We’ll also put the paper in context, talking about who Waldo Tobler is, where he worked, and how he fits into the discipline. Finally, we’ll also discuss it’s impact, what the law means now, and how it could be improved.

What is a Journal Club?

• A Journal Club discusses important journal articles. Articles could be  “classic” works of the discipline, introduce an important methodology, or discuss a key topic in our field. Any paper is fair game as long as it’s geography-related and interesting enough to talk about!
• Each week, a student will email out a paper in advance for the others to read and lead the discussion. We’ll take turns so that no one gets overloaded.
• A key part of a journal club is to allow students to work on presentation skills and provide a place for students to have respectful and engaging discussion.
• It’s also a good way to prepare for comps!
• When you lead a discussion, you should provide a summary of the article, discuss it’s background (time, author, location), and lead the discussion by asking critical and thought-provoking questions.
• Anyone is welcome!

An interview with Susanne Freidberg, a geographer from Dartmouth. She discusses her new book, Food Deserts, about areas such as Detroit, Notice the not-so-subtle dig at geography at the start of the article – clearly, people don’t know what geographers do!

Want to start working with Open Source GIS? Don’t want the hassle of installing Ubuntu? But you DO want the hassle of installing VMWare?

Then this project is for you: the GIS Virual Machine!

The Moving Mean

Strange Maps shows how the population center of the US has moved over time.

Take the Beer Geography Quiz

Check out mental_floss for their daily quiz, tihs time, where is beer from?

Palin for President

Congrats to Michael Palin for his new role as President of the Royal Geographic Society!

The RGS is somewhat equivalent to the National Geographic Society here in the US, except that the RGS also has an academic component called the IBG, the Institute for British Geographers. I attended the RGS conference in London at their headquarters in August, 2008. If you’re in London, you should visit.

My sister will be particularly pleased – she and Palin had an email friendship in the early days of the internet.

The New York Times offers an interactive map of the recession in the United States.

One interesting note are the places that have seen negative changes in unemployment rates, such as parts of Arkansas, North Dakota and Wyoming. Negative unemployment means that unemployment is down. Why?

My guess (the data doesn’t say) is that these are rural areas with small populations, so small changes of out-migration or employment would affect the numbers. White County, Arkansas, for example, is a county of 17,000 people advertising jailer jobs on their website. Their unemployment rate is down 1% to  6.1%. Is that due to out-migration or new jobs at the prison?

From About.com’s Geography blog: The 10 most important geographical events of 2008.