Tracking and Graphing Walks

There are a variety of ways to show cycling and hiking tracks. Bikely is an excellent way to share tracked routes, but you usually need to put in turns from your raw GPX track. Motionbased has the neatest player, but it works only on the Internet Explorer, though this might change in the future.

I'd like to embed the Motionbased player in this Blog-page, but I think that's a bit trickly. In fact, there are three players, one in Beta. But I can include the "Link to this page" to a graph of my walking around the Tower of London. The Old Mint area (Part I of the Multi-Cache we are doing) is to the right.

If all goes well, when you launch the above link, it will take you to a Motionbased launch link where you have thumbnail of the route (around the Tower) and some choices about how to play the link. Motionbase's forte is their SVD player, which does not, alas, play on Firefox.

The thumbnail should also get you to the SVD player page. Coming up will be some thoughts about the trail apps for the iPhone.

The iPhone as a GPS Device

The iPhone is a tantalizingly useful GPS device. First of all, it is being used with one hand tied behind its back, as it were. This is because I've turned off data-roaming for the present. This is because I've exceeded my 7 MG pro-rated quota by a meg or so. I'll have 20 megs as of April 7th, but it is very easy to use 1-2 megs at a time getting a map under the pulsing blue dot.

What is interesting is that the the roaming 3G continues to take GPS fixes via UK Vodophone. I don't think there is an additonal charge for this, but it hasn't shown up in the usage stats or in the ATT wireless online statement (though it runs several days behind). The iPhone mapping app (integrated with Google maps) typically would gather the needed information by wi-fi and display a route over a detailed map. I would often calculate a route (as I did this morning) and then head out.

But with data-roaming turned off and no wi-fi, no map fills in. BUT the blue dot continues on along the route-track! The track will continue, as will the blue dot, off the edges of the known universe, i.e., off of the stored map surface. But the route remains intact, along with distances and turns, just over a gray background. This means the the iPhone does work WITHOUT data roaming turned on. Quite efficiently, too. The battery remains charged for a long period of time.

It's fun, too, to suddenly discover the map filling in under the route! This occured near the Fengchang restaurant when my iPhone captured a free wi-fi hot spot - automatically, as always. Suddently, I had my map overlay (or underlay) in the vicinity of Regent's Park. I could see the park and park features there. Alas, the phenomenon didn't last long and I was back to gray surface, but again with my route track and directions intact. The iPhone would be full-featured as a GPS unit if it passed by a series of wi-fi hotspots (would Panera's ever alternate with Starbuck's -- ah well, Starbuck's is still mostly T-Mobile, which is not free). But the routing feature even over a gray background is still useful.

My Garmin 60Csx, by the way, was quite frustrating on this outing. It was slow and was continually baffled by tall buildings. It was possible to "find" a particular restaurant (though the Fengchang was not in the database) or tube stop, but it requres quite a bit of time inputing the inquiry information and the Garmin doesn't give stable, consistent responses. As a result I had quite a long detour near the East Aldgate underground to which I was directed because of the closing of the Circle, District, and Hammersmith lines this Sunday.

A couple of days ago, I approached the Tower of London from Aldgate and snapped a picture of Traitor's Gate when I got there.

Canal Walk

North Gower Street is not far from Regent's Park, where I started a walk this morning to the Primrose Hill area. London has a truly surprising amount of open space in the many parks. Regent's Park includes Winfield House which is the Ambassador's residence and where Barack Obama stayed recently.

While walking from North Gower to Primrose Hill, I passed by the Fengchang Chinese restaurant which is on the Regent's Canal. After summiting Primrose Hill, I looked forward to lunch there and found it uncrowded, pleasant with good food. A Thai-style Basil Chicken with white rice was 13.50 BP including service. After lunch I dropped down to canal level from a stairway a bit west of the restaurant.

I headed east to get to the Camden Town Underground station. It was wonderful to walk along the canals again, but I did have some misgivings since this was Sunday, the day of the Camden Market which has continued to grow since I was last in London in 2004. The Camden Town Tube station is often overwhelmed. So I hoped for the best. Here is a shot of the canal just east of the Fengchang restuarant.

The Canal route is really a shortcut to the Camden Town Station and I soon found myself in the Camden Lock area and the beginnings of the crowds from the market, not lessened by being well into the early afternoon. The crowds were good natured in the vicinity of Camden Lock 17. [Above]

At the Saatchi - Monumental Pop Sculpture

The Saatchi does have a room with some non-traveling exhibits, including this monumental paper sculpture depicting modern sloth. (Yes, sloth.)

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!

The Tate Modern -- No More Rothko Room!

The Tate Modern no longer has that wonderful set of Rothkos in a single room. In fact, it only has a single Rothko, now at least. The rest are heading to Japan for an exhibit.

There are still some wonderful things here, including an example from Francis Bacon's early work in the '30s. I'll be returning to the Tate soon. We'll see about pictures.

In London -- The New Saatchi

I learned early on that the Saatchi Gallery, nicely located next to the London Eye, had moved. In fact, a new building has been built and opened near Sloane Square in Chelsea. But it does not, as I learned, include the Marc Quinn and Damian Hirst pieces for which the gallery had become famous.

The physical space, layout, everything else about the new building is just awesome. It is huge, full of light, regular, large exhibitions spaces on two floors with great lawn space in front. But the exhibition philosophy has changed. There will now be rotating exhibits every three months or so. The Marc Quinn self-portrait in frozen blood is no longer available. The Chapman Brothers, Hirst, others are all gone or in storage. What is on exhibit now are works by Iranian artists (YIA's after the YBA's of yore).

My favorite piece of this exhibition was a room full of "shrouds" constructed of aluminum foil. They could be of figures praying, or hunched in death. (Remember the shrouds in "Black Hole" the movie?) [Right]

But the view from the front is in many ways more interesting. The ghostly "nothingness" of the faces becomes apparent. [Left]

I was interested to discover that the Saatchi permits cameras and pictures. I think this is a good thing, though I happily didn't see any flashes.

Among other images I remember were those deconstructing the image of women. Again, Shrouds were prominent, but instead of faces were items of domestic enslavement: a broom [Top -- an iPhone picture, excuse the fuzziness!] , an iron, and so on.