Bird Flu

A map of the spread of H5N1 cases from the BBC, including poultry and human cases, with an overlay of bird migration zones.

The spread of a lethal strain of bird flu in the past two years has sparked fears of a new pandemic.

Although more than 150 people have contracted the H5N1 virus, experts point out that cross-infection to humans is still relatively rare, and usually occurs where people have been in close contact with infected birds.

Many scientists fear it may be carried by migrating birds to Europe and Africa but say it is hard to prove a direct link.

But as H5N1 spreads west from its original hotspot of south-east Asia, there is mounting concern that it may combine with a human strain to produce a mutation that is more dangerous and difficult to combat.

The Visible Earth

“A catalog [sic] of NASA images and animations of our home planet.”

The world’s oldest map

From Measure & Map:

In 1961, James Mellart, then the assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara, began a dig at a place called Catalhoyuk, due south of Ankara. The object of his interest was a large artificial mound, which preliminary work had suggested was some 5000 years old…

This is the very dawn of human civilisation, and means that early Catalhoyuk would have been contemporaneous with the first agriculture and the first attempts at domesticating animals.

It was also about 3000 years before the first writing. The beginnings of the historical (or probably better-termed ‘recorded’) period are said to coincide with the creation of writing by either the Babylonians, Sumerians or Egyptians, or maybe all three in parallel, around 3500 bc…

So Mellart and his co-workers did not expect to find, on the plaster in one of the rooms, a map showing the town, in detail, and an erupting volcano.

U.S. Military Deployment 1969 to the Present

Each year since 1950, the U.S. Department of Defense has provided on its web site detailed information about the deployment of American troops around the world. A study of this data shows how the U.S. military’s size and scope has changed over the past 35 years: from its peak in 1969 as a conscripted force of 2.4 million troops, heavily dispersed around the globe, to today’s all-volunteer force of only 1.4 million, concentrated in a handful of countries.

Broken down by administration, this data reveals how different administrations have approached geopolitical conflict. For instance, almost 750,000 U.S. troops were present in the East Asia and Pacific theater at the height of the Vietnam War, but when America declared war on Iraq twenty years later, only about 70,000 troops were deployed. When the U.S. participated in the NATO-lead war in Kosovo in 1999, air strikes were substituted for large numbers of ground forces and no more than 13,500 troops were in the immediate area-that is a fraction of the more than 200,000 troops deployed in the Middle East as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Phishing and Crimeware Map

The Anti-Phishing Working Group works to prevent internet fraud of various kinds. For all you real-tine hi-tech crime nerds they’ve made this:

The Phishing and Crimeware map displays the most recent data collected by Websense Security Labs (WS Labs) and provides a historical look into where Phishing and Crimeware related websites are hosted on the Internet. Upon discovery, each site is looked up via its IP Address to track the country of origin through the appropriate IP registrars and plotted on the map. The data is updated approximately 15 minutes after discovery.

Mapping the Future

Population Action International, a group concerned about global overpopulation, has released their map of the world that projects changes in world population density from now until 2025 based on UN demographics predictions. The map shows much expected growth across China and the Indian subcontinent but more surprisingly shows rapid depopulation across Eastern Europe as the population moves West and North.