On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

CBC: Is (Part of) Ottawa an Island?

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 01:18:57 GMT

For our consideration:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1420-this-is-ottawa/episode/16099420-is-ottawa-an-island

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Mapmaking: Starbase 20?

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 02:48:20 GMT

So I was looking at maps of the FASA-Trek roleplaying game as well as Memory Beta entries today while I job-searched. Had a thought about where Starbase 20 might be in a map that tries to fit FASA's Triangle region into a largely-Mandel-compliant design...

https://www.deviantart.com/dewline-ottawa/art/Screen-Shot-2023-10-26-at-7-21-31-PM-990589585

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Maps: Updating the "Short Air Hops" Map

Sun, 26 Mar 2023 13:19:31 GMT

Does anyone remember any scheduled short-run connections that I should be adding to this one?

Yes, I'm switching over to Affinity Designer or Inkscape from Adobe CS4 from here onwards.

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Maps: Projected Sea Level Rise?

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 18:12:09 GMT

What's your "most credibly sourced" maps for such concerns these days?

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WIP: Air Route Map - Canada - 14 Sept 2022

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 14:30:33 GMT

This is still a work in progress. I am not happy with legibiity of the place names, not yet. I've switched most of the labelling over to Helvetica for now, pending a decision on what to switch the labels to.

If you know of any communities and connections that I should add to this map, please tell me!

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Graphic Design: Canadian Air Transit Mapping - Work In Progress

Sat, 20 Aug 2022 23:20:34 GMT

This is part of a map I've been designing with help from assets from Maptorian. I was inspired by a map in the old Dent's Canadian School Atlas devoted to Canadian airline connections across the country, as well as by a recent job interview for a graphic design position.

I'm making this with Adobe Illustrator CS4, in case you're wondering.

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Books: The Atlas of Imagined Places

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 02:21:03 GMT

I gave myself an indulgence on the weekend: The Atlas of Imagined Places.

Five thousand or so fictional places, and the author and cartographer putting this book together tried to figure out where they'd all be. Don't even try to figure out how to string together the backstories of how all these places from different fictional universes could co-exist. Just enjoy and debate the placements. I will.

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Trek: Mapping the 32nd Century

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 01:46:20 GMT

Does what I've put in the spoiler cut look right to you?( Spoiler image from DSC:The Examples )

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Star Trek: A Suggestion to Add to the Line of Calendars

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 20:32:44 GMT

Okay, Universe Publishing - a division of Rizzoli International - has licensed the rights to publish calendars inspired by the visual history of Star Trek. Currently, they publish calendars drawing upon TOS, TNG, DSC and PIC as well as a "Star Trek Cats" calendar, dressing assorted actual cats up in Trekkish garb, and the "Ships of the Line" calendar, which depict visuals of the various ships of the several series, as well as designs meant to co-exist in that universe with the "canonical" designs.

I'd like to suggest to the people running Rizzoli one more idea for that line of calendars: please take a cue from Star Trek: Star Charts by Geoffrey Mandel and company, and Star Trek: Stellar Cartography by Larry Nemecek and assorted artists (incl. the aforementioned Mandel), and launch a calendar series that can fill in some of the gaps left by those two volumes.

I am unsure as to whether or not to list what topics I'd want the artists commissioned to work on the proposed calendar to address, as I expect I'd be going into spoiler territory re: series being actively produced in Toronto, Los Angeles, Vancouver and elsewhere at the moment. If you're interested enough to name them yourselves in the comments below, however...?

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Emergencies and Polarization

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 02:53:22 GMT

A friend pointed out this article in The Daily Beast tonight.

Long story short, it's about concerns about political polarisation as an addictive force getting in the way of properly dealing with the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Climate Emergency.

I say that addiction is being actively encouraged and enforced by elements of the new fascist international in order to entrench their preferred people in power in dozens of nations across the planet. Solving either crisis properly means throwing away their current "advantages" against human civilization.

Anyway, it may be that the sabotage-by-addiction hasn't fully taken hold, not in the degree intended yet. Pointing to evidence of that...here's the Yale map the article talks about:

https://climatecommunication.yale.edu/visualizations-data/ycom-us/

And I have a problem with this assertion by Thor Benson: "But those initiatives won’t go anywhere if the next president simply reverses them like the previous one did—and they will have no qualms with doing so if half the country gives their consent."

Half the country? (In this case, the United States.)

All the Wrong People need is 25-30 % of their country to actively go along and to keep at least half the total population from showing up for any side(s). That much, I'd already seen during the Stephen Harper years here in Canada. And the Republicans seem all too keen to keep taking advice from Harper in his current International Democrat Union chairmanship role.

(I do wonder what he really thinks of Trump: useful idiot, or someone more dangerous than planned?)

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Font Names and Maps

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 19:00:02 GMT

So I'm reading this one at the moment:

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/united-fonts-of-america

It's a commentary about a map detailing places across the USA that have had fonts - or knockoffs of better-known fonts, more likely - named after them. Said map being authored by one Andy Murdock, co-founder of the Statesider newsletter.

Getting to my point: I'm now wondering how many fonts are named for Canadian places. I know a guy who's had a habit of naming some of his fonts after places across Canada, Ray Larabie. You may remember my past recommendations of his Typodermic-brand fonts here in this blog.

Fonts named for places like Arnprior, for one example. Rimouski , for another. Athabasca for a third. And so on...

So, where's our font-name map of Canada?

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The Consequences of an "Amtrak President of the USA"?

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:09:01 GMT

From Yonah Freemark of The Transport Politic:

https://twitter.com/yfreemark/status/1377390375854219265

The map attached explains one more positive thing that can be done to slow down or stop climate damage, improve the international economy, and generally make life easier for more people.

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Books I'm Trying to Read - Mid-March 2021

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 23:45:28 GMT

I make no guarantee as to whether I'll be able to finish reading all of these, and several are loans from the local library.

As I Walked About - A Collection of Walking Columns from the Ottawa Citizen - Phil Jenkins
Star Trek: Picard - The Dark Veil - James Swallow
The Information - James Gleick
Glimpses of Cumberland Township - For the Honour of Our Ancestors - Cumberland Township Historical Society
In Defense of Housing - David Madden and Peter Marcuse
Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - Douglas Rushkoff
Cartographic Grounds - Projecting the Landscape Imaginary - Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim
Thunderbird - Jack McDevitt
Tracing The History of Your House in Ottawa - City of Ottawa Archives
Packaged Toronto - A Collection of the City's Historic Design - Matthew Blackett, Wayne Reeves and Alexandra Avdichuk

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Starships and Railroads

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 01:29:05 GMT

Seemed like a good mix of reading material while I had supper tonight.

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MAPS/BOOKS: The Quest for Street Atlases

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 18:57:06 GMT

If you're willing to share: which street atlas brand would you recommend as best for your part of whatever country you call home?

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SPACE/MAPS: Galaxy Map - the 10-Parsec Edition

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 04:30:21 GMT

More good stuff from Kevin Jardine.

Stars with planets are green-circled with numbers of known planets where known. And some extra stuff thrown in that we didn't know we needed to chart...

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1337901467160743939

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SPACE/MAPS: More GAIA-Inspired Goodness...

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 21:00:52 GMT

...from Kevin Jardine at GalaxyMap.org via his Twitter feed!

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1334455740367560707

Maybe useful to some of you?

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MAPS: GIS Day 2020?

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:44:51 GMT

So this is a thing today?

https://www.gisday.com/en-us/overview

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MAPS: Street Atlases I've Come to Value

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 13:58:21 GMT

It doesn't seem right to use the verb "love" here. But these are reference books I've gotten to enjoy looking at, even though I don't use them in the context their publishers intended for them.

Hagstrom New York City Five Boroughs, 1990 Edition.

MapArt Publishing Saskatchewan Street and Road Atlas, 2007 Edition.

I'll add the images for the front covers ASAP, okay? Then, I'll try to explain these choices.

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CULLING: Magazines III - Carto, Le Monde en Cartes

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 18:14:41 GMT

Fighting with Apple Photos to export pix of covers of 39 issues of Carto - le Monde en Cartes, a French-language magazine using maps heavily to explain then-current affairs at the time of publication. I'm looking for new homes for those too now. duncan_mac has expressed an interest, but I don't see how he's alone in having such interests. Here's the Flickr album

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dwight_ew/albums/72157716600770592

Sorry I missed yesterday.

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Orion Spur Map Resources

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:21:38 GMT

If you think a map of the "high points" of the nearby regions of the Orion Arm of our galaxy might be useful to you...

In advance of my presentation this afternoon, here are the links for my 800 parsecs map release today:https://t.co/1CAfPrF0qX pic.twitter.com/430wEW8TGE
— Galaxy Map (@galaxy_map) June 29, 2020

Back to my job search...

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Mapping the Orion Spur, Continued

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 16:23:42 GMT

Kevin Jardine's got another update...

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1277264515273560065

http://gruze.org/galaxymap/map_800pc/225dpi.png

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MAPS/SPACE: More from Kevin Jardine

Thu, 28 May 2020 18:12:58 GMT

It's always going to be incomplete, of course, but this gives a better "broad brushstrokes" sense of the local region of the Orion Arm, right?

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1265714622746759170

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MAPS: Inuit Cartography

Sat, 16 May 2020 13:26:13 GMT

They've had their own versions of map-making tech.

https://decolonialatlas.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/inuit-cartography/

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ASTRONOMY/TREK/MAPS: The Achernar Sectors and a Bit of Rambling Therein

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:54:37 GMT

Kevin Jardine just posted a progress report on his 50 Parsec Map Project today on Twitter. In the course of that report, he notes the proximity of HD 10180 - currently known to host at least six planets and suspected to host as many as three more - to Achernar/alpha Eridani.

Now, where does it get interesting for Star Trek fans?

Here, per a Memory Alpha entry caused by a reference in dialogue in the Original Series episode "Wolf in the Fold", written by Robert Bloch. (Yes, that Robert Bloch. The Psycho scriptwriter. And yes, that episode - adapted by Bloch from his 1943 Jack the Ripper-inspired short story is one of many that we can now see as Problematic in ways that were not clear to the eyes of the dominant factions of American society in the late 1960's.)

Anyway, Star Charts and Stellar Cartography put Achernar inside Romulan-held territories from 2161 - the end of the Earth-Romulan War - to at least 2387, and the destruction of Romulus and Remus that year. HD 10180 would be close enough - 15 light-years distant, per the planetarium-'ware Celestia - to be considered another Romulan holding.

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