FANTOM PLANET

That’s right. First Law of Geography, from Dr. Waldo Tobler.

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. [Tobler, 1970, p.236]

Not to be confused with my First Law of Cartography.

If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.

Prior to attending Redlands,Tobler’s First Law wasn’t in any curriculum I experienced. Then again, mixing geography, poly sci, civil engineering, and art together, it could have been lost in there somewhere. Still, I’ve been in the profession for, oh, ten years and it never came up at work.

That’s why I’m writing this post. How many of you know this? A quick survey of my class, half of them hadn’t. I’m curious about the rest of us.

On another note, Dr. Tobler is going to be at ESRI this Wednesday for the U. of Redlands MSGIS Colloquium on the topic of, “Modeling and exploration of spatially continuous potentials and associated cartographic representation via vector fields of the geographic migration of people.”

Whatever that means?

I’ll be willing to ask questions if you want. Just comment. Or, if you’re at ESRI on Wednesday, just show up and ask him yourself.

This week is homecoming at the University of Redlands and with all of the fires going on in the area the University has decided to cancel the fireworks display for its centennial celebration.

I’m glad they canceled the fireworks. I wouldn’t have been able to seen them through all of the smoke that’s out here. Even if they were only 25 feet off the ground.

I wonder if the fireworks will be canceled for the Olympics next year too?

Right now, looking out of the classroom window through The Bunker’s courtyard, the smoke is blocking out the Sun.

“So, this must be what Beijing is like?”

Good thing I’m in The Bunker.

For the those afflicted with Twitter, I got this tweet from Julian Bond:

http://twitterwhere.mattking.org/ is actually quite neat. RSS of Tweets from N miles around a place.

It’s pretty cool, building off of the concept of Twittervision. This tweet finder builds a RSS feed of notifying you of tweets around an area. Yet, it looks like Julian already nabbed the name ‘TwitterWhere.”

I can’t wait for the TwitterGeoSpam.

Living in Redlands for two months already has been. . . uh, an experience.

If you’ve consumed any sort of news media this week, you’ve seen that we’re experiencing some fires here in California. The news sparked my parents to call last night, and others to email this morning, to see if we’re ok. Supposedly, the East Coast media machine is making this look like California is going to burn off into the ocean or something. They’re probably right, which sucks for the nearly 300,000 people displaced by the fires already.

At least the wind has shifted and died down this morning.

“Well, mom. I’m ok. Here’s a map.”

Now, I have a final to take.

The MSGIS program here at the University of Redlands is located in Lewis Hall. Lewis Hall is an environmentally ‘green’ building. Built into the ground using heat pumps for cooling and heating, covered with dirt, native grasses, and even has a transparent photovoltaic array to generate its own power for lighting. It’s pretty slick.

Of course, Lewis Hall has become, to me and my fellow colleagues here, known as “The Bunker.”

It resembles something out of Return of the Jedi. . .

One of the requirements for graduating from the MSGIS program at the University of Redlands is to participate in at least four workshops. We just received word that David Maguire is going to provide a workshop on return on investment (ROI) methodology.  From a professional perspective, this is an awesome opportunity to learn from Dr. Maguire and ROI methods from a GIS perspective. Of course, you’re probably wondering if it will be ESRI-centric. It was developed for ESRI, but I hope that it can be applied to organizations using any GIS technologies and processes.  That way no matter where we go after Redlands (or anywhere else), we can apply the methodology to our future endeavors.

The ROI Methodology workshop has a website at http://gis.esri.com/roi.

Quickly going through the BBC Headline feed this morning I came across the report that BBC plans to buy Lonely Planet. Sure, it’s not as exciting as the Nokia purchase of Navteq, but it’s something along those lines. . . Right?