London Geocaching

My 362 class is currently at work on a multi-part cache

Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm Part 1 by rodz (adopted from Daoloth & Tuna) (GC5E4A)
Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm Part 2 by rodz (adopted from Daoloth & Tuna) (GC5E4B)
Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm Part 3 by rodz (adopted from Daoloth & Tuna) (GC5E4D)
Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm Part 4 by rodz (adopted from Daoloth & Tuna) (GC5E4E)
Catastrophe, Calamity, Cataclysm- The Prize! by rodz (adopted from Daoloth & Tuna) (GC5E3C)

[The links above appear to be active, but aren't. I'll check this out. In the meantime, you can go to http://www.geocaching.com and search for these by keyword or by the cache number (last number in parentheses on the right)]

The first four parts take you to various parts of London en route to collecting information that will enable the analytic searcher to determine the position of an actual physical cache. Quite a variation on a theme (though the physical cache is in a Tupperware container).

We actually started with Part 4 which took us to the site of the water pump which was the source of a cholera epidemic in 1853. John Snow, the discoverer of chloroform, by the way, was the physician who actually inferred that cholera was not propagated by "miasma" (bad air), but by something in the water. By turning off the water in Soho, he closed off the source of the epidemic and the death count dropped, a stunning achievement. (It still took several years for the "miasma" theory to be fully abandoned, however.)

A central contribution of Snow was the epidemiological map showing the number of deaths radiating out from a central point (the pump on what was then 40 Broad Street, now Broderick Street). It's possible now to overlay this map in Google Earth, as well as the Greenwood map of 1827 and a London map from the Rumsey collection from about 1842. Stay tuned!

Historical Overlays in Google Earth

It's long been my desire to looks at the same overlay in Google Earth with one or more colleagues either synchronously or asynchronously. I think I've figured out how to do this.

There is a georeferenced map of London from 1842 from the Rumsey collection. If you are in Google Earth, you can add the overlay from the Rumsey link, but it is clumsy. What happens is that a kmz file is served from the Rumsey site. It appears under Temporary places. Any one who "sees" this layer has to do this. It is not automatically done in a tour (when you do it). For it to happen, you have to instruct a person how to have it happen. This is true of the Placemarks you create as well.

You of course can send the *.KMZ or *.KML files as attachments and instruct the recipient how to activate them. But it is nice to do this in Google Earth. The yellow placemark files are HTML-capable. So you can insert a URL to the kml/kmz files -- if you have a place to serve them.

What I did was use Google Sites from which to do this. The link is associated with the Blog page. The page itself contains a number of KML/KMZ files. Clicking on them will serve them to the Temporary Places area. Clicking on the 1843 map will do this. Clicking on St Lukes Links brings up the Sites page where you can choose which file to activate first.