OK so I have surrived about 10 days without the internet, but the draw of the internet cafe was too much. So I find myself having a great cup of the best coffee portugal can provide while checking my email, and having a chat to a Aussie girl about the cricket. Amazing places internet cafes – the modern post restante!
A sad reflection on that part of the British character that is so resistant to change… City of York council are called to account reports the BBC for using metric measurements on footpath markers.
It seems that it is only the UK and the United States that continue to use miles and feet as measure of distance, and in the UK the situation is really confused, we buy fuel by the litre, measure distance using miles, and buy frozen food by the kilo !!
As someone taught only metric measurements 30 years ago in a UK school, I often wonder if we will ever join the rest of the world ?
BTW OS maps have been metric since the mid 1960’s
Looks like I’m going to be having a busy September, following my vacation I’m back to talk at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Cambridge and at a event we are holding at the OS called Terra future. The events although in many ways very different are both focusing in on the increasing use of information, and geographic information in particular in mainstream applications.
Steve Chilton has put together a very interesting agenda for Cambridge, and I’m looking forward to debating public access to mapping data with the evangelists of the “open geodata’ movement including Steve Coast and Jo Walsh co-author of Mapping Hacks.
Terra future, later on in the month looks at the role of location information for all business markets over the next decade, with a eye on developments in information technology and the expected changes in society as these impact on users of GI. Speakers include Peter Cochrane ex-CTO of BT and author of a must read blog on silicon.com, Richard Scase, Prof. of Organisational Behaviour at the University of Kent; and Jayant Sharma – Oracle Corporation’s technical director for spatial products development.
These really are exciting times to be in the GI industry, who would have thought even a few months back, that so much interest would be generated by a few web mapping applications and how much these events would fire peoples imaginations as to what is possible.
Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.