By the way, sorry for being away for so long – I’m trying to make up for it now with some live-blogging. :p

The project is planned to be the largest urban renewal of the city in nearly 400 years, and is much debated. In particular the so-called “barcode” project, a series of relatively tall buildings along the seafront, is the focus of much controversy.

However, many people find it hard to properly visualize how the different proposals will fit into the landscape. Naturally, as all that has been on display so far has been 2D photos and videos from the architects’ models. And of course, with this kind of information one may always question why the architects chose to display their models from a certain angle, and not another.

With 3D models which can be rotated and viewed from all angles, this doubt can be removed, and the public will be in a better position to make up their minds about the project. As Google Earth is a program that is available online free of charge, it is my hope that in this way all those who are interested can get access to more, and better, information about the project.

The idea is inspired by a similar project presented by Gerhard Fischer, professor of design at University of Colorado at Boulder. His group invited a number of beauraucrats into a 3D studio in order to show them visualizations of controversial building projects in the city. The beauraucrats claimed that if they had had this kind of visualizations 30 years ago when the projects were up for approval, many bad mistakes would have been avoided.

I set up a page with information about how to open the Bjørvika models (unfortunately the information is only in Norwegian… I guess this is strictly weegie business .

Apparently Google maps have decided to do something about the time it takes for their maps to get updated with changes in the roads. At least I just noticed that if you ask for directions from my dear home town Volda to the islands right west of it, google will instruct you to take that brand new road through the deepest undersea tunnel in the world, the Eiksund tunnel. My heart is bursting with patriotic pride! The thing is just that the tunnel doesn’t exist yet.

Vis større kart

Well ok, I guess it technically exists already, but construction is not finished and the road won’t be opened for another few months. It was supposed to be opened a month or so ago, but has been delayed until March. So what I wonder is, has Google started to insert data from upcoming construction work in advance, in order to make sure their maps are immediately up to date? That would be quite cool, of course. But in that case, why have they still not updated the maps for Nylandsveien in Oslo, where the new roundabout was supposed to have been in place nearly half a year ago? (One of the busiest intersections in the great kingdom of Norway, for those of you doomed to live in less Scandinavian corners of the world.)

Vis større kart

Apologies for being so local, but then again this blog IS about location-based media… And if Google have started to get data from our open standard-loving government in advance, I would like to know: How much did they have to pay for it?

Needless to say, Open Street Map is correctly up-to-date in both the cases above: No tunnel yet, but roundabout where it should be.

The site is still under development, but it’s open for signing up and exploring. So far it looks quite neat. Norwegian only, though.

Most beautiful of all, they have until 2014 to – hold on – reformat old documents.

This provokes all kinds of nice images in my mind, of grumpy old beuraucrats sitting in front of their Amstrad PCs and retyping 10-year old meeting protocols with two fingers in Open Office. Ok, to be honest I think my mental image is actually something more like the opening sequence of Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and I guess it doesn’t have much to do with how this process is done… Actually I kind of suspect that this entire job could be automated, so I’m not entirely sure why the government needs six years to reformat docs into odts. But why be a spoilsport, this is a happy moment. Go Norway!

Trust me, I have no problem seeing the entertainment value in this, and I really hope I’ll be able to get hold of a t-shirt with a black horse penis on it before I go down to the police station to renew my passport. In the shape of a rebus, I think – or would that be too subtle?

However, I also find my internal “hipocrite” lamp flashing uncontrollably. Apart from the occasional (but thankfully infrequent) beating up or killing of black suspects, we know how much the police still love the n-word, even in their official files. At the very least it seems that the two are equally precise in their descriptions: the black person calling the police officer a “racist” and the police officer logging the other as “negro”. The difference is of course that in court the racist will be in the witness stand, whereas the negro will be in the defendant seat. Apparently the cases are frequent, but normally “solved” with a regular fine.

So if your working for a racist institution, or at least one that still has not been able to convince a large portion of the population that that is the case, do you have a right to be offended if someone calls you a racist? To me this just illustrates that the greatest taboo we have in public discourse currently is not to express racist sentiments, but to point it out when someone does. Calling someone a racist is much more risky – at least legally – than calling someone a negro. (By the way, it would be quite interesting to see how the prosecutor would handle it if someone called a black police officer “negro”…)

“Racist” is the most tabooed word in the Norwegian language, and I suspect in the English as well. To me that is highly ironic, as I have a hard time understanding how one could be human without being a racist. As far as I remember from my first-semester introduction to philosophy class, prejudice (pre-judgement) is a prerequisite for thought. And though I know Gadamer (and ultimately Kant as well, I guess) used the concept in a wider sense, I just can’t see why racial prejudice should be excluded from that formula.

But then again, maybe thought isn’t a prerequisite for being a lawyer/police officer… Ok, that’s just me being childish.

Let me rather finish my rant by pointing to todays nice article in the Guardian about race politics in the American presidential race (nice pun, huh?). For those of us who are for once a little bit excited by Barack Obama’s surprise victory in Iowa (and for the record: I am primarily happy because I don’t want la casa blanca to turn into a family mansion – and if I could vote, I’d probably be rooting for another white, old male (Nader, Chomsky or any other obvious loser)), it’s apt to be reminded that “he has the role of an inadequate and ineffective balm on the long-running sore that is race in America. His victory would symbolise a great deal and change very little”, in the words of Gary Younge. And if you thought (like me) that perhaps this was the first time a black (ok, mulatto) candidate wins a nearly all-white state in the democrat nomination, apparently it’s not (Jesse Jackson took Michigan in 88).

And, most importantly, the Guardian piece gives an important contribution to the world’s collection of ‘simple yet kind of nice Karl Marx one-liners’ (no, I’m not in that Facebook group yet, but please invite me): “Men make their own history. But they do not make it just as they please.”

Now this lovely introduction was just to let the world know that in between all the stomach activities I managed to officially put Volda on the map. The Open Street Map, that is.

I borrowed my brother’s GPS (and car) and went for a spin, and came back with a .gpx trajectory that with a few adjustments turned into a neat little map of the area’s highlights (i.e. downtown Volda and Ørsta plus the roads to the two ski resorts – my entire universe for quite some years). And you know what? It was really fun!

I’m beginning to see what this entire Magellan/Columbus/de Gama/Marco Polo/Neil Armstrong thing is all about. I think I’ll become an explorer when I grow up.

For those of you interested in becoming like me when you grow up, here’s the OSM wiki.

The service requires consent from the owners of the cell phones, so of course the partner could refuse to be localized – but that might in itself require an explanation.

Of course another use of this service is for worried parents to watch where their children are going. I’ve been told similar services are gaining popularity in the US and Japan.

It would be interesting to see if this kind of service made people leave their phones at home more often… or start being more honest to each other? I guess it is more likely that the service gets hacked, or that the whole idea will flop.

But there is an interesting dynamic, which I guess is common to most surveillance technology: The availability of the technoloy itself makes it hard to say no. Because if you have nothing to hide, there is no problem, right?

Perhaps there is another possibility: I just learned of a Telenor study (yes, once again in Norway) which tried to answer the age-old question: How many phone conversations start with the three small words: “Where are you?” (It’s amazing what you can do with a government research grant, no? )

Ok, so the study only looked at text messages. But interestingly, only 1,4% contained the big question. So maybe people won’t be that eager to pry on each other after all?

When you get it right, the questions get harder (what the heck does ‘avouch’ mean?) – but the interesting thing is, that for each correct answer the game’s sponsors donate 20 gram of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme.

Ok, so there are better ways to create sustainable development, but as a kind of timekiller with a conscience, this one’s not too bad, no?