Category Archives: May

Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development Day (141/365)

Posted on by

Yes, this is a real day. And yes, it is an official United Nations Day. And … if this name wasn’t contrived via committee, I don’t know what was. Let’s try and break it down.

“Cultural Diversity”… okay… following so far.

“Cultural Diversity for”… starting to lose my grip on what this could mean. Is it “for” as in solidarity of what’s coming? Hmmm… ?!

“Dialogue.” Okay. That’s okay. I understand that. But “Cultural Diversity for Dialogue”? Shouldn’t it be “dialogue for cultural diversity”?

“… and Development.” Dialogue and development? Like both things together?

So are we talking about capitalists that talk? (I’ve met many.) Or perhaps people talking about buildings? (I know they are out there.) And what kind of development?

Nuclear bomb development? (Iran is probably for this type of dialogue.) Or Trump Tower development? (I am happy Sydney said “no” to more discussion.)

Oh… I see, upon going to the UN website and reading the definition (i.e., having Google Gemini summarize it for me), the UN committee that came up with this day meant “sustainable development.” Of course! That will help…

Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Sustainable Development. What?!

So we have the United Nations promoting cultural diversity so that people talk about {fill-in-the-blank] development. Of all the problems in the world, I must admit… the fact the UN spent time coming up with such a poorly named day does not give me confidence moving forward into the future. And I say that as a UN supporter broadly.

The problem comes down to bureaucracy and bureaucratic language.

This day will not solve or heal anything. It’s as dumb as Odometer Day. But it because of its weird bureaucratic title, and the inclusion of numerous touchy “buzz words”, it sounds more important. It’s not. It’s padded some politician’s and probably academic’s CV somewhere.

So for today’s map, I’ve decided to poke fun at bureaucratic language and sugarcoating of real word problems in esoteric buzzwords and names like this one. I used a data-scraping data agent to create a dataset that indexed every major country’s visa openness (i.e., dialogue and open for development and diversity) and indexed every countries linguistic diversity and then subtracted these metrics from one another to see which countries walk-the-talk (and are diverse with their immigration, not just words), which only talk but aren’t inviting, and which fall in between.

What does it all mean? I don’t know. But I find the map less confusing than the UN’s write-up about what this day is supposed to mean. So I’ll take that as a win. Plus, this maps was wicked fast to make. I am glad to wash my hands of it. After all, I have to start thinking about National Air Maintenance Technician Day tomorrow. That one really has me confuzzled.

Don’t forget to be super diverse today, presumably to promote more dialogue, perhaps about how Disney developed the Mandalorian and Grogu movie… or what?! These days are getting out of hand.

View Map Here

Web Map GPT Prompt

(This was a text. I uploaded a JSON I had my data maker create. The first output was messy. So I asked Web Map GPT to critique itself based on a simple screen capture (i.e., it couldn’t possibly see all of the issues). It found 20 flaws. I asked it to correct them. It did. There are still some issues. But I am satisfied. This topic has consumed enough LLM tokens and become ecologically damaging enough to stop here.)

Actual Prompt

Can you please create a web map with the attached dataset(s) that essentially achieves the outline pasted below.

—

project:
title: “The Global Diversity Welcome Mat, Located Behind the Visa Desk”
subtitle: “A satirical atlas of cultural diversity versus actual border openness”
alternative_titles:
– “Dialogue for Development, Subject to Entry Requirements”
– “Bring Your Culture, But First Bring Paperwork”
– “The International Symposium Will Now Review Your Visa Application”
map_type: “interactive choropleth web map”
tone: “satirical, polished, data-literate, bureaucratically absurd”
purpose: >
Visualize the gap between a country’s internal cultural or linguistic diversity
and its practical openness to incoming visitors, using a calculated
Performative Openness Gap.

Continue reading →

World Bee Day (140/365)

Posted on by

C’mon – this is a gimme. Let’s see what AI can do in terms of creating a hex-binned map of bee distribution.

I have to admit I had a few goes with this one. The idea of proportional hex-bins seems outside the scope of what AI can currently do without making an utter mess. I settled, instead, on just a honeycomb pattern for the countries.

Bee map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

For World Bee Day I’d like to lean heavily into a map- of the world, showing data about bee distribution hex-binned in a honeycomb pattern. Each honeycomb should show a country.

Malcolm X Day (139/365)

Posted on by

“Malcolm X Day is an American holiday honouring the life, legacy, and impact of civil rights leader Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), typically observed on his birthday, May 19. It commemorates his contributions as a vocal advocate for Black empowerment, self-defense, and human rights.” – straight from Wikipedia and I couldn’t really open this in any better way.

Malcolm X map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Malcolm X Day is an American holiday honoring the life, legacy, and impact of civil rights leader Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), typically observed on his birthday, May 19, I need a serious map that illustrates his contribution as a vocal advocate for Black empowerment, self-defense, and human rights.

National Reese’s Day (138/365)

Posted on by

Don’t get me started…Reese’s. Bloody DISGUSTING. What is it about them that is even vaguely palatable? Butter, inside sickly sweet chocolate (which isn’t even real chocolate). Nope. Keep them America. Celebrate them if you must. I’ll be enjoying a small chunk of Galaxy, or Dairy Milk instead.

Reeses map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

Please create a map of the USA to celebrate Reese’s chocolate cups. I personally find them disgusting but some people love them. Create a graphically impressive map covered in Reese’s chocolates. I don’t mind a patch of vomit with someone throwing up, but equally you’ll need to show people enjoying them too. The important aspect is the juxtaposition.

World Baking Day (137/365)

Posted on by

Some of these days are absolute gifts for a little mappy silliness and here’s one of those days. World baking day? Let’s just make a map made out of locally specific celebratory cake. TWO minutes this one took. And all those people who consider AI is never going to challenge their jobs well just take a look – can you use ANY other tool to make this map in even close to 2 minutes and a prompt.

I was chatting to my co-conspirator Ian the other day about some of the findings of our experiment to date and it’s really a question of perspective. Yeah – we could all feel threatened by technological change, but if that were the case I’d have been unemployable upon graduation with my skills in scribing, placing letraset, and using the darkroom. But I had to pivot. GIS. AML, MapBasic, GUIs etc. Then coding came along, and now instead of a picture saying 1,000 words we’re back to having to use our geographical nous to DESCRIBE the geographies of the maps we want to create. Sure, it’s a technology that is emerging but it’s moving FAST, and if you’re thinking that it’s sloppiness is going to help preserve your job then just think of every technological change and its impact upon map-making. Always 2 or 3 steps backwards before mass adoption and moving forward.

Anyway, have a piece of cake.

Cake map

Original Prompt (ChatGPT)

It’s world baking day! Time to go a little crazy with an artistic map of the world envisaged as cakes of all sorts of different types. Maybe time to make the continents and countries look like cakes synonymous with those places. And position the map on a baling sheet covered in flour, jam, cream and chocolate chips. Add whatever additional baking paraphernalia you want. This is supposed to be a fun celebration cake!

National Learn to Swim Day (136/365)

Posted on by

Swimming is a crucial life skill – it could quite literally save your life. I enjoy swimming and had multiple long distance and life saving awards from my early years. Not sure why I had to rescue a solid brick from the bottom of the deep end of the local pool fully clothed but I guess if i ever see a brick in trouble I could effect a rescue.

Anyway, here’s a map of the history of swimming the English Channel. I never attempted it – far too much like a miserable thing to do, not least dodging ships in the busiest passage of water on the planet but people who’ve given it a go (usually for charity) have my admiration.

Swim map

Original prompt (ChatGPT)

Please create a map of the English Channel and show the history of crossings made by swimmers. Please include male and female record swims, the first known crossing, and any key celebrity swims. Augment the map with images as appropriate.

There were a couple of iterations needed to improve the actual path of the route itself.

National Endangered Species Day (135/365)

Posted on by

It’s world asphalt day. What? Y’know, we’re trying to bring a sense of playfulness to many of the maps in this series but c’mon – asphalt? Go celebrate John McAdam if you must but I plumped for a map to raise awareness of the world’s top ten endangered species instead. That said, the naming of tar-macadam is a fun one…

Engangered Species map

Original Prompt (Gemini)

Please create a map of the world showing the top ten most endangered species. It should include pictures of the animals, as well as a pattern of their range or distribution.

The first map was a pretty good start but there were some issues with the colours that needed correcting so I went with a second iteration

That’s a good start but the map colours need modifying. I only want to see the distributions of endangered species. Any countries that do not have endangered species need to be in a neutral background colour. The legend needs to therefore also be updat4ed to reflect the different reasons for endangerment.

World Orienteering Day (134/365)

Posted on by

World orienteering day. Possibly the most tautological request we’ve made to date – make a map to celebrate the use of a map. I could have gone with a recreation of a famous race or similar but i figured I’d just let it invent a hypothetical race course and give me the map you’d have to use to navigate the waypoints.

Those who know me will note that I was particularly happy with the title this map was given. You reds!

Orienteerring map

Original Prompt (Gemini)

It’s soon to be World orienteering Day so I’d like you to create a map that is styled to celebrate the sport of orienteering. If there’s a way the map itself could be used as a basis for an actual orienteering race then that would be even better.

National Odometer Day (132/365)

Posted on by

I don’t know what’s more bizarre:

  1. So many days named after random and really dumb things like, well, odometers. Or…
  2. So many software engineers publicly insisting that their job is going to remain relevant into the future, because they can do something LLMs can’t.

Yes, I say that to be inflammatory. It’s a conversation starter. (Perhaps a fire starter too… let’s find out. 🙂

I don’t want people to suffer, lose jobs, discover that what they’ve spent 10, 20, 30 years of their lives obsessing over is suddenly not particularly useful. That’s painful. And pain sucks.

But just because I don’t want something to happen (i.e., because something really sucks) doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

Personally, I believe that platitudes and logical fallacies are more damaging to society than recognition and acceptance. I’m purposefully focusing on software devs here, but similar points could be made about GIS professionals and cartographers as well. I address these in my forthcoming book.

Nonetheless, even if my “devs are doomed” perspective proves wrong, which it very well may, it needs to be posted. Particularly because this past week I’ve seen numerous articles, posts, and diatribes online by GIS devs and mid-level GIS bloggers about how traditional dev and GIS human skillsets will be needed and more important in the future. I even had to read a completely daft section in a blog about how our brains will atrophy if we don’t keep coding. (A comment that appears akin to what a mathematician might have blogged about in the 1960s when the first scientific calculators were being produced – your brain will atrophy if you use that thing, keep doing everything longhand!)

I think such arguments are not only wrong; they are dangerous. If you’re a GIS or code-first cartographer who wants to stay gainfully employed and feed your family in the near future, you need to start hitting the proverbial books (i.e., online lessons and ChatGPT, or maybe a textbook? ;-). What we’ve been doing our entire careers was important and valuable. It’s much less so now. It sucks, but it is the situation. A new technology has come along. The workforce no longer needs human beasts of burden to do coding or create a map manually via GUI or CLI.

Obviously, for a couple more years, until LLM workflows are established, human devs and GUI/CLI-based cartographers will still be useful in the workforce. But coding and engineering maps… as a skillset? Skillsets only exist because they are useful. Skillsets go extinct based on market demand – not how much we cherish them.

Which is why I shudder a bit when cartographers chant to themselves at conferences that “Cartography matters”. Admittedly, it’s fun, but history shows that chants and parades to fervent believers spell the end of an institution, not a high point. (Just ask Viktor Orban.)

With LLMs, coding knowledge has no practical goodness of fit for human evolutionary purposes. It’s akin to knowing cursive or, perhaps more aptly, how to take notes in shorthand.

You can learn how to do all of these things – even today. But in today’s job market you’ll never get paid well to do it.

It’s absolutely startling how quickly LLMs have turned the market for coders and web map creators on its head. It terrifies me in fact. I began playing with prompt cartography for fun and quickly saw the writing on the wall. In the last two years, it has advanced more than I could have ever imagined. But it’s also allowed me to create maps in my spare time that blow my mind. I can’t imagine what a full-time practicing cartographer could actually do using prompt cartography full-time today.

Anyway, this is what ran through my head today, as I waited roughly four or five minutes to create the following map.

Two prompts:

  • one to create the dataset.
  • one to create the map.

In fact, writing this blog took longer.

Ah, I digress again! To conclude…

Is today’s map a masterpiece? Absolutely not. It’s a four-minute, one-off puff piece, in journalistic speak.

Is it AI slop? Nope, It’s not that either. It’s better than a lot of graduate student project work I’ve seen, for sure. (And completed in four minutes, not a semester.)

And really… is that not good enough to prove that prompt cartography is going to change everything we ever knew about how to make a map with computers?

Because coming full circle, I’m creating a map about… odometers?!

What the #@$%?!

Who would be able to spend the time to make such a map in any other world? Proof my brain hasn’t atrophied from LLMs coding for me; I’ve been liberated to be more creative than ever before. Personally, I find it absolutely amazing!

Thanks for reading today’s mini-rant. (There was an essay-length version, but I took it out so devs and cartographers don’t show up at my door with pitchforks.)

Oh, and of course, one major caveat I need to mention: I’m wrong – a lot. 🙂

But I just want to counter the current narrative I’m hearing that seems, from my perspective at least, to be a 100% logical fallacy. I feel like I’m watching lemmings follow B-level bloggers over a cliff, and I can’t stomach not saying something.

View Map Here

GIS Dataset Doctor GPT

GPT free to everyone here.

Hi. I’d like to create a map for National Odometer Day. I’m trying to come up with some tongue in cheek maps that aren’t overly complex but still informative.

Continue reading →

World Ego Awareness Day (131/365)

Posted on by

Well, well… here we go. World Awareness Day… an odd one indeed, but one that everyone can relate to. Most of us have dealt with our own egos tripping us up from time-to-time. And I haven’t yet met a person alive who hasn’t felt that someone else’s ego was too big by at least half. (I left Geography at the University of Wisconsin due to one person’s ego suffocating me…)

And my kids often remind me to keep my ego in check when I start ranting to them about humans being nothing more than software running on two-bit DNA code. Something about getting canceled – and being an absolutely insane position. I plead the fifth.

Fortunately, there have been a variety of large surveys done on narcissism and egotistical behavioral traits around the world. Unfortunately, most of them involve self-reporting and self-assessment, which is the surest way to break the scientific method when studying ego, because… well, um… yeah, people’s egos.

Alas, it’s what we have. I collected all of the “scientific” surveys / studies I could find. Then merged the data using Perplexity Pro. Then, because the mini-golf map consumed so much of my energy yesterday, I decided to write a relatively short and flippant prompt for Web Map GPT to decipher and do something with – I also gave it my dataset.

Low-and-behold, the map it produced was, though by no means perfect, half-decent. I decided to have it offer the user numerous color ramps and different classification schemes again.

Understandably, no non-map nerd would ever want that stuff, but I like testing what prompt cartography can allow you to do in about two sentences of text. Plus, I wanted to see it decide which Color Brewer schemes to use. Yes, you can read them; but, no, they rarely look good. The bane of intelligent design, I suppose.

But there’s my ego again… if I don’t like how the Color Brewer colors look aesthetically (and again, they are readable, which is important!), why don’t I create my own version of a color mixer? The Muehlenhaus Color Masher or something?

Hmmm… not a bad idea. Maybe I’ll ask my agents to start helping me build that after dinner.

But first, here is a map of egos and narcissists across numerous surveys that you can pick and choose from.

According to the surveys, German males turn out to be the worst. Again, though, and in defense of German males everywhere, even those living vicariously through their spouse’s name, this was self-reported data. In reality, perhaps what this survey is showing is that German males are the most honest and most other self-reporting males are lying liars who lie… or something?

In other words, don’t read into the map too much. Just enjoy the color selection, and make sure you take a moment to enjoy Ego Awareness Day this year.

Thanks.


View map here.

Web Map GPT Prompt

# Intention
Next week is International Ego Day or something silly like that.

I have collected some data on about 50-plus countries and their unofficial level of narcissism and ego.

Please create an equal earth map of the world with a beautiful layout and legend titled “Ego Checker”.

Create a stylized interactive legend that allows the user to change the classification scheme, number of classes (between 4 and 7), and select from a variety of Color Brewer approved palettes. Include Standard Deviation (diverging color chemes needed), natural breaks (default, 5 classes default), equal interval, and quantiles.

Continue reading →