Okay, this is neat. Stanford has created what is effectively Google Maps for the Roman Empire.
What it shows you is the principal routes of the Roman World: the road network, the main navigable rivers, and the hundreds of sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coastal Atlantic.
The tool then attaches both time and expense to these routes (which would have been used for the transportation of goods and people, but also for general communication across the Roman Empire).
So if, for example, you are curious about how many days and how many denarii it would have cost you to deliver an important dinner invitation from Roma to Alexandria during the summer months of antiquity, you now have an online tool. It's about 14 days.
I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?
Google collects this data from of our phones.
It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).
So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.
I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.
Google Maps recently introduced a new feature that allows you to search for electric vehicle charging stations by plug type. Here's what it looks like when I tried it here in Toronto:
While helpful, it demonstrates two things. One, there are too many plug types and that's a problem for EV adoption. Nissans and Mitsubishis use CHAdeMO, BMWs use CCS, and Tesla has its own proprietary plug, for example.
Two, this is one the main reasons why Tesla is so far ahead when it comes to EVs. They've been very purposeful in building out an expansive network of charging stations so as to avoid what is very clearly a chicken-and-egg problem. You need great EVs and then places to charge said vehicles.
As of January 2021, Tesla operates over 2,105 Supercharger stations worldwide with over 1,094 stations in North America, 589 in Europe, and 423 in Asia/Pacific. This is how you start to compete when there are over 160,000 gas stations in the US alone.
Okay, this is neat. Stanford has created what is effectively Google Maps for the Roman Empire.
What it shows you is the principal routes of the Roman World: the road network, the main navigable rivers, and the hundreds of sea routes that crossed the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the coastal Atlantic.
The tool then attaches both time and expense to these routes (which would have been used for the transportation of goods and people, but also for general communication across the Roman Empire).
So if, for example, you are curious about how many days and how many denarii it would have cost you to deliver an important dinner invitation from Roma to Alexandria during the summer months of antiquity, you now have an online tool. It's about 14 days.
I was searching for a location this morning on Google Maps and I came across the "popular times" chart that many of you are probably familiar with. It shows you how busy the location you're looking at tends to be throughout the day. But this time around, I noticed a pulsing "live" dot and it got me wondering: How live is live?
Google collects this data from of our phones.
It is aggregated and anonymized Location History data from anyone who has opted in on their Google Account. If you're using Google Maps and have your location services set to "always", you can actually see a timeline of the places you've visited -- even if you haven't explicitly navigated to them (see above).
So the short answer is that the live data is really live. If there's a spike in the busyness of a particular venue -- one that doesn't match historical busyness patterns -- the Google network can pick it up.
I'm fascinated by this kind of city data because I see it as part of the future of city building. Why not use more data to inform the way in which we plan and build our cities. Retail data, traffic data, migratory patterns, population densities -- all of this and more is now available to us.
Google Maps recently introduced a new feature that allows you to search for electric vehicle charging stations by plug type. Here's what it looks like when I tried it here in Toronto:
While helpful, it demonstrates two things. One, there are too many plug types and that's a problem for EV adoption. Nissans and Mitsubishis use CHAdeMO, BMWs use CCS, and Tesla has its own proprietary plug, for example.
Two, this is one the main reasons why Tesla is so far ahead when it comes to EVs. They've been very purposeful in building out an expansive network of charging stations so as to avoid what is very clearly a chicken-and-egg problem. You need great EVs and then places to charge said vehicles.
As of January 2021, Tesla operates over 2,105 Supercharger stations worldwide with over 1,094 stations in North America, 589 in Europe, and 423 in Asia/Pacific. This is how you start to compete when there are over 160,000 gas stations in the US alone.
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