Category: General

Evergreen National Highway

Evergreen National Highway was an informal auto trail stretching from Portland, Oregon, to El Paso, Texasthat existed in the United States and Canada in the early part of the 20th century. In the mid-to-late 1920s, the auto trails were essentially replaced in the United States with the system of numbered U.S. Highways.

Above is a thumbnail of the Ohio section of the 1918 AAA Map of transcontinental routes, showing the Lincoln Highway (full route shown below), where my extended family live. As you can see, prior to 1926, not only was the physical infrastructure poor, but the graphical wayfinding was complex and equally poor.

My Year in Cities, 2011

As is my tradition, below is a list of cities I have visited in 2011. I count only cities where I spend a majority of the day or a night in. Cities with an asterisk (*) denote visiting the same city on non-consecutive days.

  • New York City, NY*
  • Columbus, OH*
  • Chicago, IL*
  • Washington, D.C.
  • Bloomington, IL
  • Orlando, FL*
  • Titusville, FL*
  • San Francisco, CA
  • Orange County, CA
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • Mumbai*
  • Jaipur
  • Cleveland, OH*
  • Oxford, OH
  • Delhi*
  • Amritsar
  • Ahmedabad
  • Agra
  • Bridgetown, Barbados
  • North Lawrence, OH

National Park Service Pictograms and Symobls

NPS symbols are free and in the public domain and contain all sorts of symbols and pictograms (or pictographs if you like), including recreation pictographs, north arrows, bar scales, road shields, accessibility, winter recreation, and water recreation. One of my favorites is the dam pictogram above.

Download them in Illustrator, PDF, TrueType Font Symbols and map patterns here: Map Symbols & Patterns for NPS Maps.

The Umbrella Man

View to a Kill

Director Errol Morris has been thinking about truth, and its many facetted face, for a long time. His most notorious recent work is an exhaustive investigation about Roger Fenton’s photographs of the Crimean War, specifically which of a few different photos were taken first, and if any of the canon balls were moved (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 & Additional Resources) and the Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock on forgery by Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein of the Farm Security Administration.

Today he released a short film about the infamous The Umbrella Man at Dealy Plaza, where President Kennedy was assassinated.

For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

Take time to watch the short film, it has an interesting explanation. Oh, and I’ve been to Dallas, and ran out to stand on the “X” where the President was shot. It was a very strange place, especially if you look back to the book depository (above).