My blogging’s been quite dry recently. So here’s something more fun. If you like landscape photography, you’ll love this video (expand to fullscreen if you can):
Stomacher – Untitled/Dark Divider from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.
There’s some more by the same guy here, and an awesome one of the recent Icelandic volcanic eruptions here.
I love the energy of big cities. Sometimes there’s so much it spills over into the early hours of the morning. On a trip to Chicago last weekend we saw Hopper‘s evocative depiction of that straggling energy – when you just don’t want to follow everyone else home to call it a night – in his famous Nighthawks.
I know the feeling, it reminds me of visits to Don Quixote. Not the Don Quixote – Cafe Don Quixote on the Kingsway in London.
Sometimes the 4am conversation at Cafe Don Quixote was reminiscent of the Spanish Knight; other times it was as lonely as Hopper’s nocturnal scene. But there was always people-watching those other stragglers waiting at the bus stop opposite the cafe, and the warm tea always provided just enough energy to survive the night bus home.
[Nighthawks photo by Mollie E Tubbs]
I found the video below on the walkit.com blog. If you’ve ever used Google Maps to get your directions from one city to another, walkit.com can do the same for you if want to walk in any of 12 British cities (more coming soon). It even tells you how many calories you will burn and how much CO2 you will save by not driving. You can choose between direct or less busy routes – the latter option will probably be useful for cyclists too as it accounts for traffic levels. Those options are nice, but what walkers (and cyclists) in hilly cities like Bristol and Sheffield could really do with is a ‘less steep’ option!
So, what’s this video I found? It’s the latest film from Urban Earth, a project to (re)present human habitats by walking across some of Earth’s biggest urban areas. One of the main aims of UrbanEarth is to show what the world’s cities are really like for the people who live there – something that mainstream media can give a distorted or incomplete image of. Each UrbanEarth film is composed of thousands of photographs, one for every 7 steps (5 metres) of a person’s walk through a city. It’s kind of like a walker’s version of Google’s StreeView. They’ve done London, Mumbai, and now their latest film, which you can watch below, is my home town of Bristol, UK. If you know the area, see if you can track the route the walker takes (click the ‘fullscreen’ option if the window is too small).
http://blip.tv/play/go4o3vI6keUo
I have to admit that I had no idea where the route started, but then by the time they got to Totterdown I knew where I was – those colourful houses on the steep hills overlooking the centre of the city gave it away. From there on I knew where I was going. If you’re still lost (or don’t know the area), here’s a map of the route.
Or, you can see the route traced on a ‘map of deprivation’. This map illustrates one of the vagaries of the shape of Bristol’s urban growth. Note the (inverted) crescent shape of the city – the southwest quarter of the city is ‘missing’. This is attributed to the Avon Gorge which cut off the growth of Bristol to the southwest. Not until Clifton Suspension Bridge was opened in 1864 could you quickly and easily access the southwest (rather than trekking down into Cumberland Basin and up the other side. You can also see the effect of the gorge from aerial photography – note how areas around Abbots Leigh and Leigh Woods appear much greener and less urban even though they are only about a mile from the centre of the city. In contrast, look at how the urban area expands relatively contiguously to the east for five or six miles into South Gloucestershire (Oldland, Warmley, etc). These areas aren’t officially ‘Bristol’ but they’re contiguous and have the same postal and dialing codes.
Anyway, that’s enough about the geography of Bristol. If you’re going to be walking around the city in the future, walkit.com may help plan your route (remember it doesn’t account for hills – but luckily it does know where the gorge is), and check the UrbanEarth blog for new films of other cities coming soon (maybe Bath would like to be next).
I like climbing tall things in cities and then looking down to watch the human ants going about their business. Maybe my interest in experimenting with spatial agent-based models is related to this fascination.
The BBC have taken these ideas, of looking down from on high and exploring the dynamic interplay of human activity across space, and produced some incredible movies for a new show. Checkout some of the footage below – looks awesome.
If you’re in the UK, the new series Britain From Above starts at 9pm on Sunday 10th August, BBC One.
Amazingly it’s just over a year since I arrived in Michigan and started my postdoc at MSU. Time flies when you’re having fun, eh? Well, the first few months didn’t fly so fast… but it’s been fairly well shooting by recently. That’s not to say I don’t miss home everynowandthen. Especially when I see videos like this about my hometown:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/university/media/bristol/bristol.swf
[From University of Bristol and DestinationBristol]
But I do remember Bristol – it’s not that sunny ALL the time. 😉
Last week I took a brief snowboarding trip to Utah. After two days on the fantastic Snowbird slopes we explored the area around Salt Lake City a little. One place we visited was Garr Ranch on Antelope Island, home of the oldest Anglo house still on its original foundation in Utah. Perched in the middle of the Great Salt Lake, it was quite a windswept location and impressive that it’s also the longest Anglo inhabited site in the state. A couple of photos from the trip now on the photos page.
There’s been some moving and shaking on my friends’ websites recently (see the full list in the sidebar), so here’s a quick update.
Nicky has added some new t-shirts and hoodies for sale at Creative Current. For the discerning geek… “There are 10 types of people in the world, those who know binary and those who don’t”.
Dom Daher has updated his website and added some of his award-winning extreme sports photos as slideshows. Check the new slideshow at 20millimetre too.
Jamie and Helen and are still on the road but they’ve stopped off in Kyrgyzstan for a while where they’ve been volunteering for The Alpine Fund, “a small, non-profit, non-governmental organization using the incredible mountain resources of Kyrgyzstan to help the country’s most vulnerable youth.” Jamie worked on setting up their fancy new website and blog.
Olivia has still been doing her musical thing – watch out for her on the circuit in London and check out some of her tunes at myspace. Finally, travelorphan has been offline for a while but I’m assured she’ll be back to blogging soon enough…
I’ve just finished watching a video of the 2003 Rugby World Cup Final. What. A. Game.
Played in Sydney, the game kicked-off at 9am London time and we had to get to the pub early to get a good spot to watch. We ended up watching in The Wellington opposite Waterloo Station after trying to get into the Walkabout at Temple – I got there about 7.30am but it had been full since 4am! Such was the anticipation, and the game lived up to it – King Jonny slotting over a drop-kick (with his weaker foot) in the dying minutes of extra-time. But let’s not forget the rest of the team; they were immense.
The Wellington was full of Chelsea fans (they were playing somewhere that day which required taking a train from Waterloo) – those footy boys didn’t have a clue about rugby and my mate Neil and I had to keep explaining the rules to them as the game went along. They celebrated well though – we all did! I can’t remember much about the rest of the day…
Watching again this evening at different times during the game I was shouting at the screen, my heart was pounding, I had butterflies and the hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end. And this was a replay. What a defence we put up that day. Intense. Inspiring.
It doesn’t look like we’re going to do so well this time round though – I’d say the All Blacks and Les Bleus are my favourites to win. I’ll be impressed if England make it to the semi-finals. Hopefully I’ll get to watch some of the games in the pub – no doubt I’ll be explaining the rules to those unfortunately unenlightened about the great game here too. Less than a week until England vs. USA. I can’t wait.
This is Genius. Nice one boys.
Direction not Destination 