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Daily Archives: June 25, 2010
Bette Davis Eyes, Karl Malden Nose
Strange Maps: 468 – Crime Topography of San Francisco
San Francisco’s iconic topography – with grades of up to 31% – is as much a tourist attraction as its cable cars or the sea lions at Fishermans’ Wharf. But the city’s hilliness is more than just ankle-biting eye-candy. Its elevation, mainly in the city’s centre, is responsible for a 20% variance in annual rainfall throughout its eastern and western precincts, with bay-fronted neighbourhoods in the east also significantly less cold, windy and foggy than those facing the ocean.
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These maps present San Franciscan peaks and troughs of a different, less savoury kind. Although the information they convey is as real as the city’s actual orography, these infographics express incidence of crime rather than elevation above sea level. By mimicking cartographic methods of height demarcation, the mapmaker has hit upon a visually very arresting method to frame raw crime statistics in a geographic context.
The Leroy Anderson Effect
Metronome Synchronization
Putting them on the board allows them to couple, so vibrations from each can interfere and the most efficient energy transfer is when they are in phase. I’ve read that this trick was exploited by sellers of pendulum clocks, back in the day — by hanging the clocks on one wall, they would similarly tend to synchronize. This would give the customer the impression that all of the products were high quality clocks when that was not the case, though you could not tell from the pricetag — the poor clocks were being driven by a few good ones.
(Leroy Anderson was the composer of The Syncopated Clock)