Jonathan Crowe

My Correct Views on Everything

All Online Maps Suck

• Maps, Tech • Comments

This is something I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I should have written it last December, during the hullaballoo over Apple’s maps, but I’ve never been one to strike when the iron is hot.

You’ll recall that there were a lot of complaints about Apple’s maps app when it launched with iOS 6, replacing the previous app that was powered by Google Maps. The map data didn’t match the user experience: it was a first-rate app that used second-rate data. Apple oversold the experience and failed to meet the high expectations of its customers. It was a problem that no other online map provider had ever had to deal with before, not least because no one had launched a new map service with the same amount of hubris, nor the same amount of scrutiny from day one.

But many of the complaints about Apple’s maps verged into hyperbole. The notion that Apple’s maps were uniquely bad compared to other online maps was frankly unfair. Because when you get right down to it, all online maps suck. They all fail in some way, somewhere, and some more than others — and if the maps you use seem fine to you, it’s because they suck somewhere else.

Apple, after all, didn’t invent map errors. Map errors have a long history; I’ve catalogued dozens of them over the years. Maps got people lost long before iPhones sent people into dangerous regions of Australia; satnavs’ blithe directions have been leading credulous drivers into bridle paths, ditches and railways for as long as there have been satnavs. There is no such thing as an error-free map. And the alternatives have their share of them.

Take Google Maps. By the time Apple booted it off the iPhone, Google Maps had become the gold standard of online maps. Deservedly so: Google had spent considerable resources getting them to that standard (and not inconsiderable resources telling us how much they had worked on those maps). Not for nothing were people demanding its return to iOS.

The thing is, Google’s maps weren’t always good. Google’s maps have a long history of sucking from time to time. But people have short memories, or haven’t been paying attention. Google was fixing its mistakes when most web map users were still using Mapquest, most drivers were using satnavs from Garmin and TomTom, and most people didn’t have smartphones.

Some of Apple’s map errors had a familiar ring to them. The warped 3D images ridiculed in Apple maps — a function of two-dimensional satellite and aerial imagery being applied to three-dimensional terrain — were a long-established feature of Google Earth. And Google ran into all kinds of trouble when it began replacing map data from Navteq and Tele Atlas with its own data in 2009 — the same map data it touted so much last year. There were errors all over the place. The change was called premature and “a significant step down in quality.” But even before that, when Google switched from Navteq to Tele Atlas in 2008, I unearthed all kinds of new errors in my neighbourhood; switching to its own data a year and a half later fixed many of those errors but created new ones.

In hindsight, you can see Google’s business logic: switching to its own mapping data, rather than relying on maps provided by companies with competing interests, like Nokia (who owns Navteq) or TomTom (who owns Tele Atlas), carried significant strategic advantages that outweighed the short-term hit to its map quality.

Building your own maps in order to avoid relying on a competitor: now where have I heard that before?

Moving along. What about OpenStreetMap? At its best, OSM can be better than any other online map. At least that’s what its proponents say, citing an example like some zoo in Germany as an example of how good open source mapping can get. And, like Google, they have a point. OSM can be pretty good. I’m a heavy contributor to it, so I have a dog in this hunt: I want it to get really good.

But at its worst, it’s the worst online map there is.

For example, last week I spent a surprising amount of time adding highways, rail lines, towns and even lakes in central Saskatchewan, an area of surprising emptiness in OSM even though there is lots of high-resolution imagery to trace (to say nothing of CanVec data available for importing). I couldn’t do much more than lay down the grid and guess at some of the land uses (churches, schools and retail and commercial areas can usually be figured out from imagery, names can’t), but while I left the map in better shape than I found it, there are still hundreds of person-hours of work left to do in that area.

The problem with OSM is also its strength: it’s entirely dependent on the attention of volunteers. Where there are a lot of volunteers, the map is invariably excellent. But where there aren’t any volunteers, the map is empty. For every Germany there is a Saskatchewan. While OSM is unbeatable in several areas of the world, it’s safe to say that the other online maps have at least acceptable coverage of medium-sized towns in Saskatchewan. Which is to say that OSM is not uniformly good — not yet, not by a long shot.

So couldn’t you use OSM where it’s better than the alternatives? Stitching together map data from disparate sources isn’t exactly easy. Roads and other features might not be perfectly aligned from source to source, and the metadata isn’t necessarily compatible — ask anyone who’s tried to import open government data into OSM how painless a task that is.

A final example. Yesterday I clicked on an address in Facebook for an event in downtown Ottawa. It opened in Microsoft’s Bing Maps, which gave me a location in Greater Sudbury. Why it did so I have no clue, except maybe that Microsoft is being too clever with its IP address detection (my ISP is Sudbury-based). For the record, neither Apple (on my iPhone) nor Google (on the web) had any trouble giving me the right location.

Every map, no matter how good overall, has weaknesses.

This is not new. Paper maps were never free from errors, after all, and with satnavs, even the best onboard maps would become less reliable if you didn’t purchase the updates.

But online maps are different: we’re using them much more often than we ever did paper maps or even satnavs. We haven’t just delegated our navigation skills to them: we’ve integrated them into our maps and websites, we rely on them for transit schedules and business listings. They give us a false sense of security and a false sense of reality: we forget that the map isn’t the territory.

We used to be more tentative with our paper maps or our friends’ directions. We tended to think about it more, rather than blindly follow.

We’ve decided that knowing where to go is no longer our problem, and getting lost is no longer our fault.

This might be a bit premature.

The Imaginarium Geographica

• Book Reviews, Maps, Science Fiction & Fantasy • Comments

spacer My search for examples of maps being used as a fantasy fiction trope brought me to the works of James A. Owen, namely, his Imaginarium Geographica series of young-adult novels, six volumes and counting. This series takes multiple myths, fairy stories and more conventional works of fiction, from many different eras and traditions, and tosses them together in a mythic bouillabaise. Its setting is the “Archipelago of Dreams,” where every imaginary place — “Ouroboros, Schlaraffenland and Poictesme, Lilliput and Mongo and Islandia and Thule, Pellucidar and Prydain”1 — can be found.

It sounds very meta, but it doesn’t succeed at all, at least not for me. I’m afraid I couldn’t manage past the second volume.

So many different characters and writers are thrown together that the whole fails to cohere. There are no characters who do not turn out to be some famous writer or well-known character. Not only does this make character development all but impossible, the plot becomes one surprise reveal after the other: mystery character X will end up being anyone from Mordred to H. G. Wells. At the end of the first volume, the three protagonists — Jack, John and Charles — turn out to be C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, but, like many of the other allusions and reveals, it’s unnecessary: with all the breathless hugger-mugger that takes place they could have been anyone else without a single change in the text.

Now in a crowded jumble of every myth and fantasy trope, character and writer prior to the 20th century, there is bound to be some reference to maps. And there is: the three protagonists are designated the keeper of the Imaginarium Geographica, an atlas that serves as a key to the entire archipelago. The phrase “Here, There Be Dragons” is used by John as a Rosetta Stone to unlock the various languages used on the map. In the first novel — also titled Here, There Be Dragons — they’re up against the Winter King, who, when he conquers a land, its map becomes shrouded in shadow. “He thumbed through several pages until he came to one of the vanished maps. It was a yellow-tinged sheet of parchment, like many of the others, but taking the place of the illuminations and notations were several large, indistinct smudges, as if the drawings had been hastily rubbed out.”2

But in the end, the Imaginarium, along with the Cartographer the protagonists visit more than once, is just one trope among many competing for the reader’s attention. It’s as though Owen is trying to juggle a dozen balls while performing as a one-man band on a high wire, desperately trying to maintain the attention of an audience who can’t sit still for more than a few minutes.

  1. James A. Owen, Here, There Be Dragons (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), p. 21.
  2. Owen, Here, There Be Dragons, p. 112.

False Colour Mercury

• Astronomy & Space • Comments

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Mercury isn’t normally this colourful. This is a false-colour mosaic built from images taken by the MESSENGER probe through several different narrowband filters during its colour base map imaging campaign. The colours accentuate differences in the composition of Mercury’s surface rocks. Caloris Basin is at the upper right in this view. Here’s the other side of the planet. More information here. Image credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Carnegie Institution of Washington.

2012 Nebula Ballot Announced

• Science Fiction & Fantasy • Comments

The nominees for the 2012 Nebula Awards, voted on and presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, were announced this morning, and I’m pleased to see some of my favourites from the past year make the final ballot, including (but not limited to) Aliette de Bodard’s “Immersion” and Andy Duncan’s “Close Encounters.”

I’m also delighted for my friend Leah Bobet, whose excellent debut novel Above made the ballot for the Norton Award for young-adult novel.

Clarkesworld leads short fiction publishers with four nominees, followed by Asimov’s and Tor.com with three each. Aliette de Bodard has two nominations; Ken Liu has three.

As I did for the last two years, I’ll be blogging about the works in each category; unlike past years, I’ll try to do all the novels as well: we already own four out six. (But, with 12 nominees, there’s no way I can cover the Norton Award ballot.) Stay tuned.

Red Planet Blues

• Book Reviews, Science Fiction & Fantasy • Comments

spacer Red Planet Blues, the latest novel from Robert J. Sawyer, is an expansion of his award-nominated (and rather good) novella, “Identity Theft” (2005), which makes up the first ten chapters. Red Planet Blues is a murder mystery set on Mars in first-person noir mode: Mars’s lone gumshoe, Alex Lomax, must solve disappearances and murders among a Martian population of fossil hunters (Martian fossils fetching hefty prices back on Earth), many of whom have uploaded their consciousnesses into sturdier, artificial bodies. Behind the crimes is a lost motherlode of Martian fossils; whoever rediscovered the site would be very, very rich.

Sawyer wrote part of the book while in residence at Berton House, and the tinge of Klondike gold is both deliberate and unmistakeable. Red Planet Blues is engaging and pleasant reading, its plot filled with lots of fun and satisfying twists and turns. It benefits from a relative absence of the on-the-nose philosophical discussion that can occur in Sawyer’s novels: much was left unsaid about the implications of transferring a consciousness into an artificial body, but I think this is a topic Sawyer has tackled in previous work.

I’m not an avid mystery reader, but Red Planet Blues does feel like a very light shade of noir: science fiction has gone much darker than this. Sawyer’s detective, while he likes his boobs and his booze, is more three-minute egg than hard-boiled. The atmosphere is thin on Mars. But I would not be at all disappointed if Sawyer continued in this vein; I enjoyed it more than I did his last novel, Triggers.

Red Planet Blues is out next month; I got an advance copy at World Fantasy last November.

Buy at Amazon (Canada) • author’s page • publisher’s page: Canada, USA

Shawville’s Elementary School May Stay Open

• Education, Living in Shawville • Comments

Reports through the local grapevine and in the local media suggest that Shawville’s elementary school may remain in its present location, rather than moving to share space with Pontiac High School. From what I understand, nothing is final or official yet, but there is a proposal to shuffle several other programs around (e.g. adult education) to fill the elementary school’s vacant wing, and sell a building in Campbell’s Bay. At the same time, there is a plan to start up a French immersion program that could bring back English-eligible children whose parents enrolled them in the French system to get a good grounding in French (because this is Quebec, silly). I also suspect that the logistics involved in making two schools fit in one building were more complicated than the Board initially expected, making it easier for them to consider this option.

Previously: Will Shawville’s Elementary School Be Relocated?

Fifty Equal States Redux

• Maps • Comments

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In 2010 I blogged about Neil Freeman’s reimagined United States where the 50 states were redrawn so that each state had the same population. (That map had been circulating for a few years prior to that.) Neil has since produced a new version at the same address, with new boundaries and state names on a nicer map. Though it’s just as thought-provoking. Via Kottke.

Python Season: The Results

• Reptiles & Amphibians • Comments

So Florida’s controversial Burmese python hunt has come to an end. The final tally? About 50 snakes. That doesn’t seem like very many given the huge numbers of pythons — up to 150,000 — estimated to be infesting the Everglades. Wildlife managers say it’s in line with expectations given the season, snakes’ cryptic nature and the inaccessibility of some python-rich territory (Everglades National Park, for example, was off-limits); others believe that the python problem is exaggerated, or that signing up 1,500 or so amateurs to look for them isn’t much more than a PR exercise. Via Kingsnake.com.

Previously: Python Season; A Plague of Pythons.

Lunar Gravity Map

• Astronomy & Space, Maps • Comments

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NASA has released a free-air gravity map of the Moon: “If the Moon were a perfectly smooth sphere of uniform density, the gravity map would be a single, featureless color, indicating that the force of gravity at a given elevation was the same everywhere. But like other rocky bodies in the solar system, including Earth, the Moon has both a bumpy surface and a lumpy interior. … The free-air gravity map shows deviations from the mean, the gravity that a cueball Moon would have.” Gravity data comes from the GRAIL mission, with the digital elevation model provided by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter laser altimeter. Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio.

Ankh-Morpork on the iPad

• Maps, Science Fiction & Fantasy • Comments

Terry Pratchett once declared the Discworld unmappable (“There are no maps. You can’t map a sense of humour.”); all the same, there is now an interactive map of principal city Ankh-Morpork for the iPad. Tor.com reports that “the map is dotted with itty-bitty little people walking around Ankh-Morpork, doing their Ankh-Morpork business. Walking around, being themselves. … While many of these figures are indistinct civilians, the city is full of characters from the Discworld novels. Of course Death is there … ” Costs $14; requires iOS 6.

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