The Brunch Table

Lately, it seems like great cartographically-oriented discussion forums are springing up all over the place. First, there’s Jonathan Crowe’s Map Room blog, which consistently turns up nifty things like this collection of ancient map images. Then there’s the wonderfully-named geowanking mailing list, which is full of electronic map tinkerers swapping tips and fresh-baked tools. Finally, Owen Massey is doing a nice job of kicking off a new LiveJournal community called Cartographica with interesting links like this one about new vs. old bus maps in London. (Tip for non-LiveJournal people, you can get an RSS feed of any LJ user or community by tacking "rss/" on to the end of its URL.)

It looks like some folks at Columbia–apparently inspired by all this Friendster business–are out to settle the “six degrees” question once and for all.

A recent article at Wired News about solar energy initiatives in San Francisco linked to this interesting dataset concerning the amount of sunlight that makes it through the everpresent fog in various areas of the city. Unfortunately, none of the links to the actual data files that I tried actually worked. Update: The contact listed on the site had this to say about the data:

The data files are currently under revision will not be reposted until corrections are completed.