Map Making

I’ve always loved maps and always wished I could draw my own. But they’ve never come out as I would like. Eventually I cheated by buying a plastic stencil of Great Britain and another one of Europe. I still have all my technical drawing stencils but I have no idea what happened to these ones.

My most successful maps were the ones that didn’t have to look like anything recognisable, particularly the ones I drew of the locations in text adventure games such as Zork or Planetfall (right).

Despite having drawn these maps over 30 years ago I still have them all (22 of them) along with the odd transcript of key pieces of text.

If you’ve never played a text adventure then you might not know that they describe a location “you are in a mysterious wood”, some objects “there is a rusty dagger here” and tell you where you can go “there is a path heading north and south. There is a spooky cabin to the east.”

You interact with the game by typing commands “take dagger”, “go east”, “kill ogre with dagger”, etc. The trick to success often relies on getting back to a place that you have been to before to pick up a crucial item that you left behind. Hence, the need for a map.

If the game mainly uses the four (or eight) compass points to move between locations it’s relatively easy to make a map but as soon as you come across “up” and “down” things get tricky. You can’t draw the “up” location above the current location if there is a “north” and worse what if there is no “north” so you draw the “up” location there only to discover the new location has a “south” where the previous location is already drawn on your map.

Where to draw the first location on the page is also tricky. I always started in the middle of the page but if you were on the west side of the world then you might run out of space on the right and end up with a huge blank space on the left. I have a few maps made on two pieces of paper stuck together with yellow perished sellotape.

Years later in the late noughties I went back to drawing geographic maps when I discovered OpenStreeMap. This is a service like Google Maps but where the maps have been created by volunteers. The map was very sparse in the early days which left lots of scope for me to add to it.

I attached my GPS to my bicycle handlebars, put my camera around my neck and cycled around all the residential streets in Epsom. Back at home later I uploaded my tracks and used the photos to annotate the map with street names – you can’t copy them from commercial maps because they create intentional spelling mistakes to identify copyright infringements.

When I approached 40 my wife suggested we went on a significant holiday and the first place that came to mind was Machu Picchu. When she asked if I was serious I said no, but after a lot of thinking I couldn’t come up with anywhere else so that’s where we went.

Why am I telling you this in an article about map making? Well it turned out that nowhere in Peru existed on OpenStreetMap so I took my GPS with me. When we went on the train from Cusco to Machu Picchu I propped it in the window and recorded the train line all the way there. When I uploaded it after the holiday it was the only thing to exist apart from the waterways which had been donated by a mapping company to seed the project. Today there is a complete map of Cusco and the train line has probably been improved by others, removing my authorship from the notes – but I know I was there first, not quite like Hiram Bingham but you know what I mean.

Staycation

I’ve just finished reading Mail Obsession by Mark Mason where he describes a trip around the country to visit all 124 post code areas in the UK and I thought it would be interesting to mark off on a map all the post code areas that I’ve spent the night, a bit like those scratch off world maps you can get.

 Turns out I’ve lived in three (bright green) and stayed at least one night in 46 others (orange). That leaves 78 (pale green) where I haven’t slept but I’ve probably visited most of them on the mainland except for the very north of Scotland.

Three places doesn’t sound like a lot of places to have lived in nearly fifty years, especially compared to a modern family who are more inclined to move for education and work. In actual fact I’ve lived in five places – two in CF, two in KT and BD where I grew up.

Mark provides an interesting fact for each post code area he visits but I’m not sure I can provide the same levity of choices for the ones I’ve lived in – they are more nostalgic than humorous.  

Bradford (BD) was the home to England’s first IMAX cinema screen in 1983 when the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television opened (now the National Media Museum). All I ever remember seeing were Discovery style information films, nothing like the spectacular Batman film The Dark Knight.

Pontypridd (CF) where I went to Polytechnic used to have the world’s longest island platform railway station. A bit excessive for today’s short trains.  We once travelled on the train to Cardiff on Five Nations day when Wales were playing France with some North Wales friends of ours who had the annoying habit of talking to each other in Welsh. Half way there some local South Wales passengers got on and one of them asked me if our friends were French!

After graduating I followed the work and ended up living in the South East. Hampton Wick (KT) was the first place we lived. This was the home of George & Mildred from the TV sitcom of the same name. It was a real surprise to discover that the place they lived was not fictional as I’d always assumed. And even more of a surprise that a few miles away in the same post code area was Surbiton where the Good family lived in The Good Life, another favourite sitcom of my teenage years. I was sure that was a fictional place in London’s suburbia.

We also discovered that the list of railway stations where Reggie is delayed on his way to work in The Fall and Rise of Reggie Perrin are real and pass through the KT post code area – Norbiton, Berrylands and Chessington North.

I don’t think we are likely to live in any more post code areas but there’s plenty of scope to stay the night in others, however, our next staycation is in Alnwick which is in the already slept in Newcastle (NE) post code area.

Frank Gelder's D-Day

When I was a kid there was always talk of a box of stuff in my Nan and Granddad’s loft with something in it that explained why my Granddad was estranged from his siblings. When he died I got the task of climbing into his loft to clear it out. I’d forgotten about the fabled box but as soon as I saw it the memory came flooding back.

It contained life insurance policies for his brother and sister which must have been the cause of the falling out, but the most interesting thing was a pocket diary for 1944.

It was the sort with a week to a double page with a weekly notes section to fill the 8^th space. He’d filled it in from 1^st January until the 21^st October with the exception of May. There’s no indication of why he skipped May or stopped writing in October. There’s one additional entry post October on 3^rd December but it only says ‘Rain’.

The pages from 8^th to the 21^st of June have been torn out. We have no idea if he removed them because he didn’t want anybody to see what he’d written about the D-Day landings of whether the government had censored the diary by removing them – not sure who suggested that but it sounds like it could be true.

At the beginning of the year he is on training manoeuvres which he calls ‘stunts’ in Thetford, then Lowestoft, Inverary and finally Bournemouth before heading to Southampton and the crossing to France on D-Day.

The most striking thing about the training time is how often he goes to the ‘pictures’ (the cinema) and how excited he gets about visits from/to my Nan – he mentions how much he loves her on many pages. ‘I love my wife very much,’ he says on the day he goes back to camp after a two day visit home to Bradford.

On 6^th June he says the following: ‘D DAY Invasion started. One of the last to land. Sergeant ??? shot in the head. It was hell.’ I haven’t been able to decipher the name of the Sergeant who was less fortunate than my Granddad – he was shot in the head on 5^th July ‘Two more prisoners. Shelled again. Plenty of strafing. Hit one on helmet, souvenir.’ I find it really hard to comprehend him calmly describing this terrifying incident as a ‘souvenir.’

He advanced across France, through Belgium and was in Holland when he stopped making entries.

On 2^nd September they passed the WWI battle fields and memorials, ‘Off again. Passed through Amiens. Quite a lot of bomb damage here. We are now on battle areas of last war. Saw the Vimy memorial.’ I’ve been to the Vimy memorial and it’s a very emotional place, can’t imagine what it would have been like seeing it in my Granddad’s circumstances.

Amongst the harrowing entries: ‘Dead cows all over. Stinks of death. Rained a lot. Fed up,’ ‘Lost some of my best pals while we've been here,’ ‘Felt rotten after Abie was killed. One of the best lads I've known,’ there are some more uplifting entries: ‘Went to rest camp. Marvellous night’s sleep,’ ‘Went to pictures, had a lovely bath. Quiet,’ ‘Jerry withdrawn fast at last. We've got him moving,’ ‘Breakthrough jerry going back,’ ‘Getting ready for moving again. It's good to know that we are winning,’ ‘People here very happy to see us. Filled our trucks high with fruit, tomatoes, lemonade and beer.’ That was in Brussels on 5^th September, my Granddad would have had the lemonade not the beer.

There’s also this strange entry: ‘Saw some women collaborators have hair shaved by FF.’

If my Grandchildren find this in a box in the loft when I die I would like them to know that I too love my wife very much. 

Student spend

When I went to polytechnic (I usually say university because it’s easier to say but although it is a university now technically I went to polytechnic – the reason why is another story) I kept a diary for the first 10 weeks which was almost the whole term. I wrote in it every night before turning the light out and recorded the time of the entry, therefore the time I went to bed.

Bearing in mind that I’m in bed before 10pm almost every night now-a-days I was surprised to see how late I used to go to bed. I thought late nights was something the modern generation did thanks to late night opening (the pubs had to close by 11pm when I was a student) but apparently not.

I also recorded everything I spent every day and that showed something I would also associate with modern day students but if I’m honest I knew was just as relevant to me too – the amount of money spent on alcohol.

If I remove my rent from the chart then it’s almost 25% food and 25% alcohol.

I would say the reason for it was that I didn’t have anything else to do, my course work was trivial and there were only four channels to watch on TV (and as I never watched ITV that cut it down to three) but my friends had lots of course work to do (they were always in the library, somewhere I never went) and I’m pretty sure I didn’t go to the pub on my own, so maybe it was just the thing to do.

 I always tell people that I didn’t start reading fiction until I went to university (sorry polytechnic) but I didn’t buy a single book in my first term, the £28.64 of reading material was mainly newspapers (the American football paper First Down) and one book off my course’s reading list (the only one I bought in five years).

The other thing I tell people is that it only rained twice in Wales, once from January to June and once from June to December. As I recorded the weather every day in my diary I can see that I wasn’t exaggerating too much, it rained on 35 out of 73 days which is 45% of the time.

What things cost in 1986 (very nearly 30 years ago) is also interesting:

Lager                        82p

Can of pop                25p

Loaf of bread            38p

Corned beef              87p

Toilet roll                 52p

Swimming                75p

Take-away burger    68p

Pie and chips            89p

Chinese take-away £2.25

I’ve kept a diary on other occasions over the years but I haven’t recorded any statistics in any of them – shame I would like to have compared. I can say though that I’ve never spent as much on alcohol since!

Science Geek

I like to think of myself as a prolific reader but I’m not sure what metric to judge myself against. I’ve kept a record of every book I’ve read since I started reading at university – there wasn’t a lot else to do – that was 30 years ago. I’m currently up to 674 which is 22 per year. For the last few years I’ve also been recording my reading on Goodreads.com and it shows that I’ve read an average of 39 per year in that time.

I read fiction at home and non-fiction on the train to work. Most of the non-fiction books are about science and maths and when I get to work I bore my colleagues with the wonderful things I’ve learnt.

I like science books with good long chapters that describe the topics in detail – I don’t like those books with short snippets of information detailing why penguin’s feet don’t freeze and why elephants can’t jump.

I’ve read so many that it’s getting hard to find books with topics that I haven’t read about already. I’ve just finished reading Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension by Matt Parker and it was a mix of things I’ve come across before such as the proof of why there is an infinite supply of prime numbers, where to find non-Euclidean geometry and details of a 4D object that can exist in our 3D world.

But it contained quite a lot of stuff that I haven’t read about before such as knot theory, the sausage conjecture and how to make a computer out of dominoes.

The latter must be interesting because instead of the usual tolerating nods from my colleagues at work I got a ‘that’s cool’ response. I agree it is cool too, but not very practical because it took Matt and his team over six hours to construct a computer to add a pair of three digit binary numbers together and worse still it could only be used once. If it didn’t take that long to construct it would be a great tool for teaching kids how computers work, but as it is it’s nothing more than a curiosity.

If you look up the sausage conjecture you will see that it refers to arranging multi-dimensional spheres or hyperspheres into a shape that can be wrapped using a minimum amount of paper. However, for those of us who can’t visualise more than three dimensions, this problem can be considered in three dimensions as how to arrange oranges for wrapping.

It turns out that lining the oranges up in a line (a sausage shape) is the best arrangement for 56 or less oranges and a cluster (or haggis) is better for 57 or more. I haven’t been able to find anything that tells me why the transition should happen at 57. I think I could do the maths for the surface area of the sausage but not sure how to work out the surface area of the non-sausage shape. It must have something to do with Pi I guess.

If you are wondering about the other things I’ve mentioned (you’re probably not) I will elaborate:

A non-Euclidean geometry is one that doesn’t comply with Euclid’s five postulates (rules) and the easiest one to visualise is the one that removes the fifth postulate – the parallel postulate. Consider the lines of longitude on a globe, at the equator the lines look like they are parallel but when you extend them north or south they meet and are therefore not parallel. These geometries defy everything we learn at school, if you draw a line between too points on a globe the shortest distance is not a straight line (it’s a curve) and if you draw a triangle the inner angles do not add up to 180 (it will be larger).

The 4D object is a Klein bottle. It is a bottle that only has one surface i.e. it doesn’t have an inside and an outside. It can only truly exist in 4D but if you cheat and allow the surface to intersect itself you can construct one in our three dimensions.

I love the proof that there is an infinite supply of prime number because it is so simple – if you can accept that all numbers can be constructed by multiplying prime numbers together e.g. 8 = 2 x 2 x 2, 75 = 3 x 5 x 5 that is.

Let’s assume that there are only 3 prime numbers in the world – 2, 3 and 5. If we multiply these together (2 x 3 x 5 = 30) and then add 1 we know that we can’t now construct that number from the known primes because it doesn’t divide by any of them (the +1 ensures that). Therefore, there must be another prime. A proof like this is called “reductio ad absurdum” i.e. prove that something is not correct to show that the converse must be correct.

I’m not sure what I learnt about knot theory other than it’s difficult to comprehend and that we are all tying our shoelaces inefficiently. Matt describes a way of constructing a pair of loops, passing them under each other and pulling to create the same knot as usual without going around the tree.

Celebrity Encounters

I recently heard somebody say ‘There’s nothing more satisfying than crossing things off a list.’ I’m not sure I agree but my wife certainly does, she loves making lists and judging by the Christmas present she bought herself with her vouchers, it’s the making of lists not the crossing off that she loves. She bought Listography: Your life in lists.

One of the lists is Celebrity Encounters and she has a surprisingly long list. I’m not sure my list would be as long.

My first celebrity encounters were all rugby league. My favourite player was Ian Van Bellen and after the match I used to run on the pitch and ask for his tie-ups. I don’t really remember him but I have a vivid memory of the Germolene smelling tie-ups which hung on my pin board for many years.

Some years later my dad worked for our local club Bradford Northern in their marketing team and his job primarily involved driving the high profile players to fund raising events. It was at a time when I was trying to sell my second computer (an Atari 800) to buy my third (an Atari ST) and as Northern were managing their lottery using paper and pen I wrote a program to do it on the computer and hoped I could sell it them.

I turned up at the office one day to present what I’d done and it couldn’t have gone worse. Terry Holmes (one of the first and most famous players to make the switch from amateur Union to professional League) was there and after I’d presented my management program he asked if I had any games with me. As everything was in one box I did and we ended up playing Track n Field for the next hour. As you’d expect of a professional sportsman he was very competitive and I recall him running around the car park with his arms above his head whooping when he beat me and set a new record.

They didn’t buy the computer – they were probably worried that all it would be used for was entertaining Terry and the other players.

My final rugby league celebrity encounter was in a toilet at The Stoop just before Bradford Bulls played London Broncos and Brian ‘Nobby’ Noble (the Bradford coach) walked in and stood at the urinal next to me. We didn’t talk and we certainly didn’t shake hands in the circumstances and no, I didn’t have a peek if you were wondering.

I didn’t talk to the next celebrity I encountered either. One year we went to the Prom in the Park event in Hyde Park and sat behind us on the grass, enjoying a picnic before the music started was Clive Anderson. He was with his family having a day out and it didn’t seem right to interrupt and say hello, so I manoeuvred myself into the right position so that when my wife took a photo of me, Clive was in the background.

 One of my favourite authors is Michael Ridpath and as I collect modern first editions I like to buy each of his books in hardback first edition form as soon as they come out. When he published his fourth book I could only find a softback edition so I emailed him and I was surprised to receive a reply explaining that his publisher thought he would sell more if they skipped the hardback. He also informed me that Asda had commissioned a special hardback run for exclusive sale in their stores. I have one of those. Unfortunately Asda didn’t repeat the task in subsequent years so the next four books I have are softback, then Michael changed publisher and I have four more hardbacks before he changed publisher again and returned to softback only. It spoils the look of my collection but what can you do.

 My most recent celebrity encounter is thanks to my blogging. As my work colleague puts it I showed my appreciation of Dave Gorman by writing a blog to attack his writing. I didn’t see it quite like that, I was just trying to write something in the spirit of his book about his book. Anyway I tweeted him to let him know my latest blog was about his latest book. I didn’t expect him to be interested but I received two replies.

The first explaining one of the subjects I had queried and the other getting his own back by pointing out my grammatical errors in my blog.

I wonder who will be next? One thing is for sure I won’t be going out of my way to find it. 

Dave Likes to Rant

I’ve just finished reading Too Much Information by Dave Gorman and cor does he like a rant. Well we can all play that game (plus others in his book).

 I was quite happily reading the book until I came across the following sentence ‘…in a small section that sits outwith the main text.’ I’ve only ever heard Scottish people say that and I’m pretty sure Dave isn’t Scottish. I made a note to look it up later, however, a few pages further on Dave provides a synopsis of his life:

1971: Born in Stafford…

1976: Attended … school

…

1988: Attends Manchester University but drops out after two years

…

He’s definitely English then, so why is he using Scottish expressions in his writing? I wonder whether he added it to his spellchecker dictionary – I haven’t I’ve ignored the little red squiggle above.

One chapter of his book rants about false advertising and that 1988 statement in his synopsis struck a note. On the front of the book it says ‘One of British comedy’s cleverest men’ but he dropped out of university after two years. So that hardly puts him in the same category as Dara O Briain (Maths & Theoretical Physics), Hugh Dennis (Geography), Stephen Fry (English Lit.) and Rory McGrath (Modern Languages). But it doesn’t matter because it’s in quotes and attributed to somebody who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Dave hasn’t been backwards in letting us know that on occasion he tinkers with the truth to get a better gag, but to claim ‘I can’t recall a single slogan from a single car ad…’ is surely too much. ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ has been on our TVs since 1982. As he has no interest in cars I can believe that he might not know it is advertising Audi but he must know it’s a car advert.

I can’t think of a single steel advert that I’ve ever seen but Dave can, and if I believe what he says it’s because I don’t go to enough (any) football matches. His chapter about steel adverts is asking why somebody who sells something like steel would advertise to the public at a football match and I have to admit I’ve thought the same on numerous occasions in the past but not with regards to Rainham Steel so my beef with this chapter is not with that but the penultimate sentence. After saying that if he wanted to buy some steel he would buy it from somebody else just to spite them he says ‘That’ll learn ‘em.’ – arghhh, I can’t put into words what I think about that, it’s as irritating as Americans using the word ‘bring’ when they mean ‘take’.

You’ve probably noticed there’s a picture of me reading his book above, I did wonder if I was allowed to print a facsimile of his book cover without permission but seen as Dave can’t understand why Google don’t allow film companies to show their browser in films when they make it freely available for the whole world to use, I can’t understand why I shouldn’t be able to show myself reading a book that I’ve paid good money for – especially when I’m fully clothed and not smoking a joint.

 I really enjoyed the book and would recommend it to anybody who wants a quick easy read and likes to say ‘oh yeah, me too’ a lot.

I’m off to the supermarket now to play ‘the birthday game’ and buy a large Toblerone.