The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Tom Davis Supports Statehood?
|| 3/23/2007 || 8:52 am || Comments Off on Tom Davis Supports Statehood? || ||

No, not really. But taken completely out of context, this clip sure makes him sound like a supporter of statehood. I actually learned some new constitutional facts. See for yourself:

If you were to watch the full clip you’d see that he’s just another politician compromising equality for 1/3 representation and claiming it’s progress. He definitely makes the case that a strict reading of the constitution says that DC should be a state.

4 years ago today…
|| 3/22/2007 || 3:39 pm || Comments Off on 4 years ago today… || ||

I made this “newsic video” to document Washington, DC’s reaction to the illegal invasion of Iraq. Filmed using sixty 12 second clips from my old Canon s200 digital camera and sequenced in Final Cut Pro, this video showcases the march, detainment, and dÃ©nouement of the day’s free speech exercises. Alas, four years later and the war continues. Sad.

March 22nd, 2003, Washington, DC
Music by DJ Shadow, “You Can’t Go Home Again“
Used without permission.

THE GEOCOLONIAL SLOTS – Match 3 for Statehood!
|| || 9:36 am || Comments Off on THE GEOCOLONIAL SLOTS – Match 3 for Statehood! || ||

Screen shot below features 2/3 – American University Quilt & 1/3 Meridian Hill Park

I mentioned that I was thinking about doing some sort of gambling themed lost project. And after about 7 different random image generator scripts I settled on this one. On Firefox & Safari it doesn’t appear to work as I intended. When attempting to gamble for representation I found that the images were not randomly loading. So you will probably have to manually hit reload for equality. I tried a few different javascripts to directly reload the page, but none worked. So I am stuck with this slightly substandard geographic casino. Casinos are substandard anyways; just like taxation without representation.

This interactive geographic environment consists of the 2 types of map details from my Washington, DC map collection. The folder consists of the {name}-zoom.jpg, {name}-zoom2.jpg, {name}-cut.jpg, {name}-cut2.jpg– related to each map. The Zooms represent central details that geographic tessellations at two different scales. The Cuts are details of places and spaces around the map. The 144 different Zooms & Cuts were placed into 3 folders: right, middle, left. Each time the page reloads there is a 1 out of a 2,865,984 chance of winning statehood!

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Hic sunt dracones!
|| 3/21/2007 || 9:49 am || Comments Off on Hic sunt dracones! || ||

I’ve had a few friends and strangers comment that they loved the story, but they didn’t understand what the name “Here be dragons” meant. Unless you know a little bit about cartographic history, it could mean a lot of things….

This morning I found a good explaination from the MapHist website:

How and when did the notion that old maps commonly bore the phrase “here be dragons” become established in popular belief? Did a Shakespeare or a Byron put it into circulation? It must at least pre-date the publication of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short story “The Learned Adventure of the Dragon’s Head” in Lord Peter Views the Body (London: Gollancz, 1928), in which a character refers to having seen “hic dracones” on an old map [spotted by both Andrew S. Cook and Benjamin Darius Weiss]. Does it pre-date the publication of the text of the LenoxGlobe in 1879? Why dragons, and not one of the other terrifying creatures depicted on old maps? We don’t know.

According to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, “The animal called a dragon is a winged crocodile with a serpent’s tail; whence the words serpent and dragon are sometimes interchangeable.” Furthermore, says Brewer, the word “dragon” was used “by ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages as the symbol of sin in general and paganism in particular. The metaphor is derived from Rev. xii. 9, where Satan is termed ‘the great dragon’.” In this sense, a picture of a dragon on an old map is analogous to a modern map which shows Commonwealth countries in pink, not to a vignette of the Official State Bird, or the notation “unsurveyed area”. As M. Hoogvliet pointed out to MapHist, “The dragon (draco) is a sub-species of the serpents (cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae XII,4,4: “Draco maior cunctorum serpentium …”); most medieval maps have serpents in southern Africa (i.e. southernmost part of habitable world), which derives from Classical Roman authors, e.g. Pliny the Elder and Soninus.”

Read the rest here. Or to summarize, “Here Be Dragons” / “Hic sunt dracones” was placed at the edges of maps showing the edge of the known world. However, I am told there aren’t any maps that actually use the exact text and I have not seen a map with that text on it.

Interactive Inequality #3
|| 3/20/2007 || 9:58 am || Comments Off on Interactive Inequality #3 || ||

Screen shot below features University of South Florida Quilt with Clouds & U St. NE Quilt

Building off the added interactivity in American Stereography #3 and the principles behind Interactive Inequality 1 & 2, this version allows the viewer to choose right or left, citizen or colonist, geographic tessellation or reflection of a location.

Visual Combinations:
145 * 67 = 9,715 = Left
280 * 144 = 40,320 = Right
Total Number of Visual Combinations:
9,715 + 40,320 + 1 (intro page) = 50,036

“Here Be Dragons” syndicated
|| 3/19/2007 || 3:45 pm || Comments Off on “Here Be Dragons” syndicated || ||

The Washington Post story by David Montgomery “Here Be Dragons” has been syndicated.

It was on the front page of life/arts/style section in the Waterloo, Ontario’s “The Record” this morning as “When Maps meet Art” (you can download the pdf here). It was also a feature story in yesterday’s Sunday edition of Southern Oregon’s “Mail Tribune” as “Terra Incognita” and Thursday’s “Canton Repository” as the original title.

Of note is how much content is changed and/or lost as other news editors slim down the story to make it suitable for publication. I’m sad to see how the Dr. Livingstone, I presume reference has been removed. It’s also quite interesting to see how the various media outlets use the maps I supplied the Washington Post.

Interactive Inequality #2
|| || 8:42 am || Comments Off on Interactive Inequality #2 || ||

Screen shot below features Sacramento Quilt & Grant Circle Quilt

When I created the first “Interactive Inequality” I did not have the folder structure created properly to retrieve the desired maps. The colonial side was pulling all the Zooms and the Details (Total: 266) and the represented side was pulling only the Zoom Outs (Total: 147). What made this unique was that the American side would always feature a geometry and the DC side would sometimes feature a non-geometric Detail making the inequality more pronounced.

This new version reflects the new folder structure perfectly. The side that features places where people have two senators and one representative will now feature only their map’s Details (Total: 280) and the side that shows places where second-class citizens reside will also features only the Details (Total: 144). Unlike the Zooms, which I created standardized scripts for, I never followed a specific pattern when making the Details. All I would do was look for a spot on the map that appeared interesting and I would then cut & paste that copied portion into a new page and then reduce it to 800×800 in size. If I would copy a portion that was under 800×800 I would try again. Thus some show a lot of scaling, others show very close-up detailed views of the two different Americas that exist today.

Number of Visual Combinations:
280 * 144 = 40,320

Or as I’d rather put it: 40,320 questions related to how democracy can be brought to Baghdad but denied to the 570,000+ residents in Washington, DC?

top 100 downloaders in the last 5 days
|| 3/18/2007 || 9:37 pm || Comments Off on top 100 downloaders in the last 5 days || ||

I spent an hour this morning going through the logs finding whom downloaded the most content from my website since the story was published last Wednesday. After the fold is the listing of those top 100 byte grubbers. I must say it’s interesting…or at least that I am proud that the Census now counts me; a lot.

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American Stereography #3
|| 3/17/2007 || 7:19 pm || Comments Off on American Stereography #3 || ||

Screen shot below features zooms of Boise Quilt & Pentagon Quilt and RFK Quilt #2 as the background image

American Stereography #3 is an interactive geovisualization webart environment that randomly projects two geographic tessellations side by side. By clicking on either the right or the left image, the viewer can alternate between scales of the original kaleidoscopic aerial photography. The foreground contains only places in America and the background features the reversed scale of places throughout Washington, DC.

Total Foreground Images:
136 = ZOOM-OUT
145 = ZOOM-IN

Total Background Images:
45 = ZOOM-OUT
67 = ZOON-IN

Number of Visual Combinations:
(136*67)+(145*45)+1[intro page] = 9179 + 6525 + 1= 15,705

##ADDED##
I decided to add a SMALL, MEDIUM, and LARGE link to project. I added this so that users can adjust the size of the images displayed on the computer screen. By adding these 3 options the project now has 47,115 different visual combinations

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RSS feeds the hungry & poor
|| 3/16/2007 || 1:51 pm || Comments Off on RSS feeds the hungry & poor || ||

I’m still in the process of adding maps to my store, if you are interested in keeping up date with the maps as they are added subscribe to these feeds:

Square, Diamond, Hexagon, Octagon, Dodecagon, Fractal, and Washington, DC.
I still have a few projection types to add to the store (like Mandalas and the Star Series), so hold tight!

Also, if you didn’t get it yet, you can get the RSS feed for my blog here.

American Stereography #3 should be cool. I also got a fun idea for a lottery type game of sorts…

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: