Maps on Monday - Where are the RS Aeros in North America?

The RS Aero Class Association website has a map showing the locations of every place in the world where one or more RS Aeros have been delivered. Above is the section of the map for North America. Each "pin" on the map represents a location - some of which may have many RS Aeros.

Given the obvious difficulties of gathering data from every RS Sailing dealer in the world on the location of their sales I suspect the map may not be 100% accurate and up-to-date but it does give a pretty good impression of where the RS Aeros are.

At the RS Aero Atlantic Coast Championship in Newport earlier this month we had RS Aero owners from UT, CO, NC and FL not to mention from more nearby states such as NY, CT, MA and RI.

By the way that RS Aero Class Association website has all sorts of useful information about RS Aeros including a calendar of upcoming regattas, reports and results from past regattas, a forum, lots of photos and videos, class rules etc. etc.

What Was God Thinking When She Made Australia?

You will never look at Australia the same way again.

From Amazing Maps @amazingmap on Twitter.

Guide to English Pubs

My son is in England this week.

I hope he gets the chance to enjoy a few evenings in typical English pubs.

This map might help him. Each blue dot on the map represents one of the 29,195 pubs in the UK and Ireland. Thanks to Brilliant Maps for this excellent pub-crawling guide.




We dragged this son and his brother away from England when they were only 10 and 8 years old respectively. So they never experienced the dubious pleasure of coming of age in the English pubs like the menfolk of my generation did.

English pubs aren't what they used to be.

There used to be a lot more of them for one thing.

Apparently there were 99,000 pubs in the UK alone in 1905.




Wait. Does that map show some "pubs" in France too?

Quelle horreure!

American Exceptionalism

Hmmm!

I never knew that the rest of the world had all gone Celsius.



Thanks to Fascinating Maps @BestWorldMaps on Twitter for the map.

Magna Carta

We haven't had a Maps on Monday post for a while so as today, 15 June 2015, is the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta let's have some maps related to that.

Magna Carta was agreed by King John of England and a group of rebel barons at Runnymede, near Windsor, on 15 June 1215. Although Magna Carta was somewhat limited in scope, dealing with such issues as the rights of the church and protection for the barons from illegal imprisonment, the political myth of Magna Carta as a document guaranteeing widespread personal liberties persisted until well into the 19th century. It influenced the early American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies and the formation of the American Constitution in 1789.

This strip map from a 1675 "road atlas" of England and Wales published by John Ogilby shows the routes that would have been taken by the king and the barons to the field at Runnymede where the Magna Carta was signed. The king rode down from his castle at Windsor and the barons crossed the River Thames at Staines, where a "wooden bridge" is marked on the map.

Researchers at Cambridge University have recently created the first digital maps of the travels undertaken by King John and of his successors Henry III and Edward I during their reigns. It turns out that John was pretty much always on the move raising taxes and holding court, trying to hold on to his authority in spite of the challenges from those pesky barons.




And what does all this have to do with sailing?

Not a lot.

Except I think every sailor has at some time lost a "personal treasure" overboard. A cell-phone. A pair of sunglasses. A favorite hat. Yes?

So show some sympathy for King John who lost most of his personal belongings, including the Crown Jewels, as he and his retinue and their pack-horses crossed one of the tidal estuaries which empties into the Wash.

Oh, and for all my American readers, did you know that every American president except one, is descended from King John?

Can you guess who the exception is without going to that link first?

And what is the most valued "personal treasure" that you have lost to the ocean depths?

Ocean Kayak Hikes Lakes… Oil?

It's been a while since we had a Maps on Monday post. Courtesy of my usual source Amazing Maps (@Amazing_Maps on Twitter) here is a map of the most popular word used in online dating profiles by US state.

It's no surprise to me that the two states in which I spend most of my time, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, both have the word OCEAN. I guess I chose the right place for my retirement?

Although I would probably be quite happy in Oregon, Idaho or Vermont (KAYAK), Washington (HIKES) or New Hampshire (LAKES) too.

But OIL? Who puts "oil" in their online dating profile? Whatever rocks your boat, bubba.

Wind

US Wind Generation Capacity by Year

in Megawatts of Installed Capacity

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the contiguous United States has the potential for 10,459 GW of onshore wind power. The capacity could generate 37 petawatt-hours annually, an amount nine times larger than current total U.S. electricity consumption.


Hmmm!

'Straya

Vikings

The Vikings were sailors.

They sailed from their homeland in Scandinavia across the Baltic, the North Sea, and over the Atlantic to Iceland and Greenland and even to North America. They worked their way around the coasts of France and Spain and into the Mediterranean.

Today's Map on Monday shows the areas settled by the Vikings from the 8th to 11th centuries. In the 9th century they invaded the north-eastern part of England led by such romantically named leaders as Ivar the Boneless and Eric Bloodaxe. That's the part of the world where my family comes from.



I am pretty sure I am descended from Vikings.

Why else would I be so drawn to sailing and to wearing a hat with pointy horns?

Who knows - I might even be descended from Eric Bloodaxe?

Perhaps I should change my name to Bloodaxe?

I think I'll go for a pillage now.

Sunshine

My American friends always get on my case about how much it rains in my home country of England.

They are wrong. I delight in pointing out to them that the average annual rainfall in England at 33.7 inches is actually less than it is in my adopted home of Rhode Island which "enjoys" about 46 inches of precipitation a year.

But as the map above so clearly demonstrates, every one of the lower 48 states in the USA does experience many more hours per year of sunshine than the United Kingdom (and most of northern Europe.) Even here in New England, tucked up in the far north east of the USA, our sunshine totals are comparable to Italy and Greece and northern Spain.

We do notice it when we go back to Britain. So many days when we never see the sun. Cool grey days. There's so much I miss about our life in England. But not the grey.

Grey is depressing. Sunshine lifts the spirit.

God bless America.

Maps on Monday

A map of the world showing the only land areas (in green) which also have land on the exact opposite side of the globe - at their antipodes.

The amazing thing is that almost all land areas (the ones shaded dark blue) are opposite oceans. Is this purely to be expected on a planet where water covers more than 70% of the surface? Or is there more to it than that? Who can do the math?

Thanks to @Amazing_Maps on Twitter for the map.

Second World War Shipwrecks

This week's Monday Map comes to you courtesy of Amazing Maps on Twitter and it purports to show the location of all World War II shipwrecks.

I have no idea of its original source or accuracy... although it's probably no more misleading than most of the stuff on this blog. Somebody called R. Moufis apparently created it in 2004, but I have no idea who Mr or Mrs or Ms or Miss R. Moufis is or was, or how he or she found the data for this truly amazing map.

Being serious for a moment on Veterans Day, it's horrific and sad to think of all the sailors who lost their lives at every one of those dots on the map.

Being not serious for a moment... WTF happened to the eastern Pacific? Did it get lost in the war?

And as an afterthought... here is a quiz for you. I didn't have to look at this map for very long to realize that there is one very famous and very well-documented WW2 wreck that is missing from the map. What and where is it?

Maps on Monday

For today's Map on Monday, we have a current screenshot from the tracking page for Scout: The Autonomous Transatlantic Robot Boat.

She was launched successfully from the mouth of the Sakonnet River around midnight on Friday. The blue markers are her GPS waypoints and the line of small blue and orange dots is her actual track. The orange dots indicate the time when she is "drift mode" when her batteries are depleted (which happens at night time or on cloudy days).

Right now she should be headed to that blue marker, waypoint 012, in the bottom right hand corner of the picture.

Obviously she has decided to go somewhere else!

What happened?

The best guess of the team is that there is a bug in the waypoint handling code which is causing Scout to skip many of the waypoints that she should be navigating to. They think she is now navigating to waypoint 044, which is quite close to the Spanish coast, a few thousand miles away.

In any case she has gone too far for the team to go out and recover her now so they are going to let her go for it and hope she finally makes it to Spain.

Viaje Seguro!

Maps on Monday

What's the longest straight line you can sail on earth?

Apparently it's almost 20,000 miles from Pakistan to the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, via the Indian, South Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

I know it doesn't look like a straight line on the Mercator projection, but check out the video.





I wonder how long it will be before someone actually tries to sail it?

Source: kepleronlyknows on reddit

American Rivers

I came across this map of American rivers where river symbols are proportional to the “gage-adjusted flow.” The rivers on the map drawn here have widths proportional to the square root of the rivers’ estimated average annual discharge. Only rivers with discharge above 1,000 cfs are shown.

The original map and an article about it can be found at American Rivers: A Graphic on the Pacific Institute Insights blog and the authors are Peter Gleick, President and Matthew Heberger, Research Associate.

How big is your local river?  Does anything surprise you about this map? How would the Amazon look on the same scale?

I am sharing this work under a Creative Commons License.

Periodic Table of Stuff

Today's Map on Monday is not exactly a map, or perhaps it is in a way. Click here for larger version.

I don't know what you think but this version of the periodic table makes a lot more sense to me than that one we had in school chemistry, the one with elements like Gadolinium, Terbium and Dysprosium. I mean, who has to deal with Gadolinium, Terbium and Dysprosium in everyday life? Whereas Tears, Vomit and Blood are the stuff of normal existence if you are a parent (or grandparent) of little kids. And I am sure we will all see enough of Snow, Frost and Ice before this winter is over.

The only thing I am bit confused about is where are Wd and Dt?

Sandwich Islands

In response to my post about where to escape in the winter, both bonnie and Peconic Puffin suggested Hawaii. It's a place I've never visited. It always seems such a long way from the East coast of the US when other attractive sailing destinations, even warm ones, are so much closer.

Today's Map on Monday is of the Sandwich Islands, which was the name given to the Hawaiian Islands by James Cook on one of his voyages in the 1770s. Cook named the islands after John Montagu (the fourth Earl of Sandwich) for supporting Cook's voyages. The map dating from 1868 was issued for a paper by the Bishop of Honolulu.

So what am I missing? Do I need to add the Sandwich Islands to my list of 1001 Places I Must See Before I Die?

Water Based States

Look at a map of the United States. Between the Mississippi and California almost all of the states are bounded by straight lines and many are nearly perfect rectangles.

It might not have been so if the US government had heeded the suggestions of John Wesley Powell, who in 1890 produced this Map of the Arid Region of the United States, showing Drainage Districts. Powell argued for those districts to become the essential units of government, either as states or as watershed commonwealths.

Makes a lot of sense to me. Water management is still a hugely contentious issue in many of the arid regions out West. Why not organize around watersheds?

Thanks to Strange Maps for this fascinating look at how things might have been. Click here for a larger version of the map.

Jimmy Buffet Doesn't Live in Key West Any More

Dear Sir,
Your post today of the map of Florida was a sweeping generalization about the state that has the most coastline in the lower 48 and some of the best cruising grounds in North America for sailboats. And, in case you didn't know, Jimmy Buffet doesn't live in Key West any more.

Florida

A map that finally explains Florida.

Shamelessly stolen from a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend on Facebook.