Best of the Blogs – 15 August 2017

By on 15 August, 2017

Each week, Spatial Source finds the best that the internet has to offer.

The Border That Stole 500 Birthdays

Borderlines

Late last year, some 500 inhabitants of Samoa had their birthday stolen. In a curious experiment in collective time travel, the entire Pacific island nation skipped Dec. 30, 2011, resulting in the seamless succession of the 29th by the 31st. By sacrificing one day — and those 500 birthdays — Samoa was able to hop back across to the Asian side of the International Date Line, bringing its calendar in line with Australia, China and other major trading partners.

How to Predict an Eclipse Without a Computer

Atlas Obscura

Human beings have been predicting solar and lunar eclipses for almost 2,000 years, long before they knew what exactly was happening or why it is meaningful. These days, we have a pretty good understanding of when they’ll take place: NASA has plotted out every single one for the next 1,000 years or so (and the previous 4,000). But if you don’t want to rely on the experts, what are your options for predicting a solar eclipse yourself?

What New York Subway Stations Actually Look Like

CityLab

Subway stations’ complex tunnel systems are a mystery even to most regular riders. Architect Candy Chan’s new X-ray maps demystify the paths in and around them. Chan hopes that her X-ray-esque images can help travellers navigate these concrete mazes more intuitively, and provide urbanists and city agencies with more information about how spaces are used. In the future, she hopes to add more details and expand her analysis to Brooklyn. And perhaps one day, she’d like to consolidate all her diagrams into an app: A digital atlas of subway nodes, of sorts. In the meantime, she’s pulling back the curtain on spaces that are very much a part of the commuting experience, but often not regarded as such.

Antarctica’s Ice Hides 91 Newly Described Volcanoes

Atlas Obscura

Antarctica is home to lots of penguins and seals—and plenty of secrets locked in, or under, its ice. Scientists have recently uncovered a few more things the continent was hiding, including 91 previously unknown volcanoes, and some of the world’s largest proteins.

This Startup is Changing the Way Travel Time Search is Done

Geoawesomeness

Calculating the time it takes from A to B, is rather easy – most mapping applications including Google Maps and Here have this feature, so a simple solution might be entering the address of the office and finding out how long it takes to one of your preferred rentals with your preferred mode of transport. Now, imagine doing this for ten properties? Still manageable. How about 50 properties? Surely, there has to be a better way to do this.

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