Territorial Masquerades

This game is just too fun and addictive (in a nerdy way) to not deserve a post. But first, how many of you geographers have been through something like this:

“Oh, you’re a geographer. [PAUSE] Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“They still have that?”
“Yup.”
“So do you know all the state capitals?”
“Uhhh—”
“You must have a really good sense of direction.”

Fear not, my fellow geographers… Now you can really show off your geographic badassness by trying your luck at GeoGuessr, an online game in which you’re virtually plopped into a random spot in the street-view world of google maps and you’re supposed to guess where in the world you are. You get to poke around a little. The closer to the actual spot, the higher your score. And it shows you how far off the mark your guesses are. You get five “plops” per game.

Happy May Day! Peter Linebaugh has the most “Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day.”

“Confessions of a Troll…” about power on the Internets or as a friend put it: the Master-Slave Dialectic in the Age of Digital Reproduction.

Also about Internets: Stuart Elden pointed me to a piece on how a lone hacker gave us the most complete map of the Internet ever made (see above). S/he mentions wanting to work on an “Internet scale.”

Having a bad day? Would it help if I put it in (temporal) context for you?

Interesting review by Trevor Paglen of Laura Kurgan’s Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics.

A new biography by Jonathan Sperber on Karl Marx, which implicitly proposes a materialist account of a materialist thinker, has gotten a glowing review by the NY Times and much less favorable one [PDF] from Terry Eagleton.

The University of Arizona has launched the Public Political Ecology Lab with an accompanying blog.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalism (ICIJ) released a massive investigative report based on a trove of leaked documents (larger than Wikileaks’ Cablegate) on global money laundering and tax havens: “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze.”

A New Yorker piece profiling the work of Neil Freemen, an urban planner, artist, and urban geography provocateur: “The Alternative Geography of Neil Freemen.”

Looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues at the Association of American Geographers’ meeting next week in LA!

Building the new surveillance state. And guess what? You’re doing it right now. Scary when it’s all laid out for you.

God-tricking super-max prisons in the U.S.? Or visually representing how prison design and architecture “reflect political discourse, economic priorities, cultural sentiments and social insecurities”—from above, of course.

Can the Calafate speak? Malvinas/Falkland Islands being devastated by invasive shrub from Argentina called Calafate.

LA-bound geographers behold the annotated map of The Big Lebowski! AAGs got you down? Celebrate the film’s 15th anniversary with a tour of the city (thx AT!).

The latest on that crazy Charter City idea in Honduras.

And this is what it’s like to have lunch with Noam Chomksy.