London's iconic bus makes a comeback - the Routemaster

Commuters in London will get a much smoother ride early next year when the new Routemaster buses go on the road and in time for the Olympics. More..Return of the Routemaster: London's iconic bus makes a comeback

Check out how cool it is..

Map of the Week 9-12-2011: Geographical Art at the RGS

Drawing made with GPS tracking in Hyde Park near the Royal Geographical Society headquarters in London.  It has the letters “RGS” and this year’s RGS/IBG conference logo mapped out.

“I record all my journeys with GPS to map where I have been and how I got there.  It is a form of personal cartography that documents my life as visual journal....The GPS model was created as a physical reference to a history of geograms that can be traced back to the Nasca Lines made in Ancient Peru and the chalk figures carved into the English landscape. In both cases they were made by either clearing a path by the removal of stones or of topsoil over large areas. They revealed signs, not entirely visible from the ground, projected towards the skies like symbols on a map to be seen by the gods,” Jeremy Wood, artist

“Artist Jeremy Wood will be in residence at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in London this week as he turns Hyde Park into a blank canvas for almost 1,500 delegates at the Society’s annual International Conference [August 31-September 2, 2011].

Using global positioning system (GPS) satellite technology, Jeremy creates art works by turning his journeys by foot, bicycle and train into fascinating shapes, patterns and words. Tracking his every move for the last nine years, Jeremy is never without the GPS devices that inspire his art.

'The theme of this year’s conference is the ‘Geographical Imagination’ and I want geographers to show me what they can create,' Jeremy said. 'The images I’ve created over the years explore people’s perception of open space – the places they can go and places they can’t are all reflected in the images. Buildings and other restricted areas become blank spaces while roads and other routes are filled in to reveal the image.'

Using Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens opposite the Society’s headquarters in London, geographers attending conference from across the world will be able to create their own works of art. Select images will appear Jeremy’s website (www.gpsdrawing.com).

Jeremy first had the idea for his GPS art when flying back to London and tracking the places on the ground below with his GPS device. Trapped in a holding pattern above London’s Heathrow Airport, images began forming on his GPS screen and it wasn’t long before he realised the application for this down on the ground.” Text from “Walk this way for geographical art,” at

http://www.rgs.org/NR/rdonlyres/F34818CF-D6CD-4DD1-A026-4512E12A54E9/0/110901Walkthiswayforgeographicalart.pdf

Example of a GPS drawing by Jeremy Wood from the GPS Drawing Gallery.  The University of Warwick campus map was drawn on foot at 1:1 scale with 238 miles of GPS tracks walked over 17 days. From: www.gpsdrawing.com. It gives new meaning to the term "full scale map!" 

"'Traverse Me' is a map drawn by walking across campus with a GPS device to invite the viewer to see a different landscape to that which surrounds them.  It questions the possibilities of where they are and inspires a personal reading of their movements and explorations of the campus.  I responded to the structure of each location and avoided walking along roads and paths when possible.  The route was recorded with GPS technology and was walked in stages over the 300 hectare site.  My shoes turned brown in the dry fields and they turned green in the long grass.  The compass rose and the globe were paced out over cricket pitches, and the scale was measured along a narrow tractor rut.  I collided with objects and buildings, barriers and footpaths, and traipsed over the tops of multi-story car parks.  Security was called on me twice on separate occasions and I lost count of how many times I happened to trigger an automatic sliding door,"  Text from: http://www.gpsdrawing.com/maps/traverse-me.html

And this one is truly incredible - it was done at Uffington - the famous White Horse Hill.  Check it out (there's also a video about the project) at http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/maps/whh-model.htm   “The model displaces our trajectories by a transferral of surfaces. It is a three-dimensional map of our systems of movement within 43 kilometres of walks made over four days. We acted as data collectors by traversing the area in order to generate the material to model the experience.  Our GPS tracks were processed and reduced in scale by 1000 times and printed as templates on cardboard sheets. They included a plan view of the journey (track position), and many strips of various lengths (distance) and widths (altitude). On each strip were score-lines with colours that indicated the varying degrees of change in the direction of the track.”

Gallery of GPS drawings by Jeremy Wood:
http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery.html

Slide show:

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_jeremy_wood/

Malaysian student injured in London

I just read about a Malaysian student being injured in London and when I saw the pictures accompanying the text, I realised these are images from the video clip I saw last night on CNN. I was shocked then that a guy could just take things from his backpack and no one stopped him! Horrors!

Below are video grab pictures showing an injured Mohd Asyraf (right) being robbed by a mob who had earlier pretended to help him.

Asyraf’s parents leaving for England today

The robbery on 20-year-old Mohd Asyraf Raziq Rosli which took place at 7pm London time (3am Malaysian time) yesterday was recorded by someone and later uploaded on YouTube.

According to The Star, the 75-second video showed the first-year Kaplan University student, who was bleeding in the mouth, being robbed by a group of men who had initially pretended to help him.

Mohd Asyraf Raziq is now being treated at Royal London Hospital for a broken jaw and disjointed teeth. Because of his injuries, Mohd Asyraf's mother Maznah Abu Mansor was not able to talk to him though she is relieved that he is doing alright otherwise. I wish Mohd Asyraf a speedy recovery.


Related articles:
Generous well-wishers donate £22,000 to Malaysian student whose jaw was broken as online campaigns spring up for riot victims and heroes

London riots: Man charged with robbing Asyraf

British riots: Millions feel for Asyraf

Injured Asyraf says Britain is great

London Calling - The 2011 Riots

Locations of some of the violence in the London environs, August 2011. 

OK, after my very extremely civilized time in London a couple of weeks ago, all hell has broken out, and I really don’t know what to make of it all.  I have e-mailed my friend in London, Natalia, who lives in Brixton and works in the City, mainly to find out if she is OK, and get her take on what is going on.  Her response was not reassuring, including an anecdote about a youth’s threatening behavior towards passengers on the train she was on, and her packing up what we in NYC after 9/11 called a “go-bag.”  Not cool. And as usual, the media in this country are not telling us any useful information.  

August 8, 2011

August 9, 2011

Here is a Google map of Day 2 of the riots. 

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=212059469427545728757.0004a9f106d4a554a3cfb&msa=0

and August 6-9, 2011

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/ms?msid=207192798388318292131.0004aa01af6748773e8f7&msa=0&ll=51.558503,-0.055275&spn=0.114195,0.298691

The Guardian is keeping an updated Google map in their "Data Blog - Facts are Sacred" page at  http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-incident-map

Here is a blog about what’s going on in Birmingham, too, including videos.  http://birminghamriots2011.tumblr.com/

Oh, and this just in, an interesting essay appeared yesterday in the blog New Geography at http://www.newgeography.com/content/002376-britain-needs-a-better-way-get-rich-than-looting?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Newgeography+%28Newgeography.com+-+Economic%2C+demographic%2C+and+political+commentary+about+places%29

Britain Needs a Better Way to Get Rich Than Looting

This is The Seventh Lunar Month

Bad news sells (newspapers). Indeed. Some say to stay away from reading the papers. But then again, how else are we to get news if we stay away from papers and the media. These are the places we get news from. Unfortunately, there is more bad news than good news these days. These are just a couple of the happenings around the world today.

1. London burns. I have a couple of girlfriends who are in England as we speak. I hope the city they are in is not affected by this rioting violence happening in various parts of the country. This chaos does not augur well for a country gearing up for the 2012 Summer Olympics less than a year away.

2. The share markets all over are going south, first in the US with Stocks Suffering Sharpest Drop Since 2008 and the trend spreading to Asia, including Malaysia. Last time I checked at 12:30PM, the FBMKLCI closed at 1461.21 (-35.78). Is a recession in the offing? May be a good time (as any) to further tighten your belts or if you have cash to spare pick up some good stocks (and gold) which has hit a record high?

These are just two examples of bad (understatement) news around and affecting most if not all of us. It's tiring to talk about negative events. Things, bad things, happen this time of the year, the infamous seventh month of the lunar calendar. Gosh, do I sound superstitious or what! No, I'm actually not superstitious, maybe a little, but being of Chinese descent and growing up in a Buddhist/Taoist environment, Chinese family traditions and customs are part of my life.

Anyway, there is this prediction of the seventh lunar month that I read and the events happening right now around the world seem to ring true. According to the reading, this seventh month is set to see more severe negative energy in the world, much more severe than that of previous seventh lunar months. There is prediction of frequent or worse natural disasters, diseases, violence and freak incidents.

On the personal front, this being the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival, best to avoid dark and secluded places and places with negative connotations including hospitals. Children are more vulnerable to the negative effects of such places, so best to avoid bringing them to places with negative Ying energies. This month especially is where (stray) spirits hang around all over. One thing I've often been told as a child is to avoid street corners and junctions especially when night falls lest we bump or rather they bump into us. The seventh month is not a good month for auspicious events including engagements and weddings or moving house, etc. It's even not a good month to go swimming. Old wives tale perhaps but still, better be safe than sorry.

The seventh lunar month began on July 31 ending on Aug 28. From now until the 15th day (Aug 14), you may come across elaborate prayer setups and stage shows. These are normally arranged by business organizations made up of local business owners and they are specifically for the hungry/stray ghosts that are free to roam the earth just this time of the year. Front-row seats at these stage shows are usually left vacant, reserved for the spirits. By midnight of the 15th day, i.e., Aug 14, they would all have to return to where they come from, the underworld.

For families that are not in business, they can pray outside their homes by the roadside. This act of kindness and generosity is optional but it is believed that once a family starts this tradition, it would have to be a yearly affair. Joss-sticks and candles would be lit, food, underworld currency, gold and silver ingots and clothes are the usual offerings. Other than the food, everything else would be set alight. This is the only way, the offerings can be received. This prayer ritual is carried out either on the 14th or 15th evening of the seventh lunar month depending on the dialect clan the family belongs to. Other than the family carrying out this ritual, people normally avoid going near the prayer site so as to avoid bumping into the spirits.

Today is the 10th day of the seventh lunar month of 29 days. Nineteen more days to go before we go into the 8th month, the joyous month of the Mooncake Festival or also known as the Lantern Festival which falls on Sep 12. On a brighter note, mooncakes are already on sale. I saw them on sale at Genting Highlands even in July!

Whatever..
Take care and stay safe, Everyone!


Image source: The Star

My visit to the Royal Geographical Society

The Royal Geographical Society brass plaque on a large sturdy double wooden door – no, surprisingly, this is NOT the entrance! (although it may have been at one time)

Lastly, but certainly not least in my travels to England, was my visit to the Royal Geographical Society in London, established in 1830 to promote the advancement of geographical science, and counts amongst its Fellows some of the most illustrious explorers and geographers of the past nearly two centuries, including Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Henry Morton Stanley, Robert Scott, Ernest Shackleton, Richard Burton, and Edmund Hillary.  Although the history of the Society was closely linked to colonial exploration in its early years, having absorbed both the African Association and the Palestine Association, the Society's current mission is to be at the forefront of geographical research by funding contemporary geographical research projects rather than major exploratory expeditions, a recent move that proved quite controversial amongst some of its Fellows. 

The Society’s headquarters is right outside Hyde Park, on Exhibition Road (just down the street from the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, the Imperial College London, the Victoria and Albert Museum of art and design, and many other cultural institutions - kind of like Fifth Avenue’s Museum Mile in NYC).  Exhibition Road was so named at the time of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in Kensington Gardens/Hyde Park in 1851, (you know, the one with Joseph Paxton’s famous “Crystal Palace,” that set the bar for World’s Fairs ever since).  The Road is all under construction right now, in a transformative effort to make the area a world class tourist attraction (in time for the London Olympics 2012).  Apparently the design recently won the New London’s Place-making Award.  See http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/subsites/exhibitionroad.aspx

The RGS Headquarters, view from the courtyard

The RGS headquarters are steeped in history, and it was more than slightly awe-inspiring to wander around the halls where so many “onlys” and “firsts” were casually displayed.  Amongst the things I found pretty amazing to see were the following: 

§  The Matteo Ricci world map, created in China in 1602.  This map was highlighted in my post about the Method of Loci – the Memory Palace.  The one here at RGS is the original!  See http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/06/method-of-loci-memory-palace.html

§  “The World on Mercator’s Projection, by Judicus Hondius, 1608, the only example known, Purchased by the Royal Geographical Society in London, 1919.”  So says the brass plaque affixed to the frame.  Just hanging in some under-lit random hallway!

§  “The World on the Stereographic Projection, by Joan Blaeu of Amsterdam, 1650, the only complete example known, Presented to the Royal Geographical Society by Lieut. Gen. Sir Arthur Paget, GCB, in 1920.”    

The 1602 Ricci map, barely visible in this photo behind VERY reflective glass, incorporating and replicating the image of Fellows drinking tea under the portrait of Sir Edmund Hillary across the room.  

 There are also many portraits of eminent and lesser-known Fellows of yesteryear - in the Tearoom, for instance, just casually hanging above the table with the coffee pots, is a wonderful oil painting of a Fellow and his wife in “Arabian dress” - James Silk Buckingham, and his wife Elizabeth Jennings, labelled on the frame as: “James Silk Buckingham, traveller and author, 1786-1855 & his wife in Arab costume of Baghdad in 1816.  Painted by H.W. Pickersgill, R.A.  Presented by H. Swayne Drewry, Esq. 1916.” 

I have no idea if this guy Buckingham (1786-1855) was a typical RGS Fellow, but I would like to think he was!  He was the son of a farmer, went to sea at age 10, was a prisoner of war in 1797 (when he was 11!), lived in India and all over the world, for that matter, toured the U.S. and Canada at a time when traveling in the New World was precarious, to say the least, (and he wrote several volumes on America, including “Slave States of America,” and “America: Historical, Statistic, and Descriptive”).  He founded and published a famously liberal and anti-East India Company newspaper in Calcutta (which got him into big trouble with the powers-that-be), wrote travel guides about the Arab world, was at one point a Member of Parliament for Sheffield (for five years), was an economic, social, and political reformer, strong anti-slavery advocate, promoted the repeal of the Corn Laws, abolishment of press-gang practices and flogging in the Navy.  Plus, of all things, he developed plans for a Model City!  (“National Evils and Practical Remedies with a Plan for A Model Town,” published in London by Peter Jackson, 1849.)  From what I can gather, his model town combines elements of Ebenezer Howard’s much-later Garden City design, and what we would today call “co-housing.”  And, best of all, medical services would be free, with doctors paid by the community, working to prevent disease rather than to cure it.  In all, a stand-up sort of person, in my estimation, and one I am proud to be in company with as a RGS Fellow!     http://www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/buckham.htm for the Model Town info, general biographical info at http://www.archive.org/details/autobiographyofj01buck and http://www.xjt60.dial.pipex.com/id127.htm

As well, there are first edition books of the Fellows and other sundry memorabilia on display.  For instance:

A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome, The so-called “Amazons,” The Grand Customs, The Yearly Customs, The Human Sacrifices, The Present State of the Slave Trade, and the Negro’s Place in Nature,

by Richard F. Burton, (Late Commissioner of Dahome,)

Author of “Pilgrimage to El Medinah and Meccah”

“If a man be ambitious to improve his knowledge and wisdom, he should travel into foreign countries,” Philostratus in Appoll.

“Every Kingdom, every province, should have its own monographer,” Gilbert White

In Two Volumes, Vol. I

Second Edition, London: Tinsley Brothers, 18, Catherine Street, Strand

1864

Another amazing aspect of the Society’s headquarters is the Foyle Reading Room, where you can peruse the stacks containing past Society proceedings and journals, dating back to the early 1800’s – in their original editions.  One of the early goals of the Society was to collect information - maps, drawings, and later on, photographs – which then became part of the Society’s library.  It holds about 1 million maps, making it the largest private repository of maps in the world.  There are another million or more books, letters, photos, and artifacts, including Darwin’s pocket compass, David Livingston’s log book and manuscript maps, and slave chains he brought back from Africa.  You can check out the collections on-line at http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Collections/Collections.htm , but in the Foyle Reading Room the staff will actually fetch many of the less fragile items for you to look at, up close and personal.

The RGS began admitting women as Fellows in 1913, this after many intrepid British women explorers had rather grudgingly been allowed to give talks in the Society beforehand, but not allowed to be elected as Fellows.  In a public debate in 1893 on the matter of admitting women as Fellows, (“Can a Lady be a Fellow?”) the then-President of the Society, Lord Curzon, stated: “We contest in toto the general capability of women to contribute to scientific geographical knowledge.  Their sex and training render them equally unfitted for exploration, and the genus of professional female globe-trotters with which America has lately familiarised us is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.”  Meanwhile, Mrs. Bird-Bishop, having just returned from her expedition to Tibet in 1892, was invited to speak at the RGS, and refused, on the grounds that she would not speak in any venue that would not receive her as a member.   

“Women travelers are not supposed to become experts on fish (as Mary Kingsley did), or discover unknown mountain chains (as Fanny Bullock Workman did), or provide statistical information about a country (as Isabella Bird-Bishop did),” from Sarah Mills, 1993, “Discourses of Difference: an analysis of women's travel writing and colonialism.”  The irony of this ban on women RGS Fellows, of course, is that the mid- to late-19^th century was the golden age of women explorers and geographers.  See http://victorianresearch.org/wtravelbib2003.pdf for a bibliography of women travel writers from 1837-1910.  I guarantee you will be surprised. 

At the moment, the Society has mounted a very interesting exhibit of photos taken on the historic visit in 1938 of Princess Alice and her husband, the Earl of Athlone, to Saudi Arabia, (which had just become a nation a few years earlier).  Britain, of course, figured in this story of nation-building by supporting the Sauds against their Ottoman overlords in the Arab Revolt of 1916-1918, while the British were fighting the Turks anyway in WWI.  (You may be familiar with a well-known part of the story – T.E. Lawrence, the dashing British officer known as Lawrence of Arabia, who led the Arab Revolt against the Turks, and was immortalized in the 1962 David Lean/Peter O’Toole film.)

While in the Society’s Tearoom on my recent visit there, I sat near two older lady RGS Fellows, who were having a conversation about where to travel next.  The one started off by saying “well, if I’m still alive next year, I’d like to go to ….”  That’s the spirit!  Always make plans to travel, regardless of how old you are, as long as you can still move about!