The Geek Atlas Companion

The Geek Atlas has been out for a year now, and there's been an iPhone version for a while.

But now there's a special companion application for the book: The Geek Atlas Companion. O'Reilly developed this as a counterpart to the book.


My favorite part of the application is the ability to find places from the book that are near you. The application has all 128 places in it with their coordinates (just like the book) and using the iPhone's GPS it can give you a list of places near you. Each place has a small summary of what you'll see there, but not the complete book text. The application is designed as an add on and not a replacement for the book itself.

A fun part that O'Reilly developed is a quiz based on the book. Multiple choice questions lead you through some of the science that's covered in The Geek Atlas.

Finally, there's a strong community component where users are encouraged to upload their photographs of locations in the book. The application gives rapid access to other people's photographs of the locations.

An interview with me about The Geek Atlas

This appeared on CNET this week:

Last week, Graham-Cumming took 45 minutes out of his schedule to sit down and talk over instant message with me about the book, his approach to traveling as a geek, and why his shyness didn't stop him from getting the British government to apologize for its terrible treatment of the famous scientist Alan Turing.

Q: Welcome to 45 Minutes on IM. How did you come up with the idea for the "Geek Atlas"?

John Graham-Cumming: I came up with the idea while working in Munich when I visited the Deutsches Museum. I had never heard of it, and I discovered it's a fantastic science museum that clearly rivals places like the Science Museum in London and the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I thought to myself: someone must have written a travel book for nerds. A Lonely Planet for Scientists. I really wanted it because I was embarrassed that I didn't know about the Deutsches Museum. That evening I made a list of places I'd been around the world and came up with about 70. From that, the idea of the "Geek Atlas" was born.

Read the rest here.

Sun, sand, sea and... science

The kind folks at The Times let me be a guest blogger and write about a fascinating corner of England that contains what I've termed the Telecom Triangle:

Sea, sand, sun and... science. Science? With the better weather finally arriving on British shores thoughts of summer holidays aren't far from many people's thoughts. But most people are unlikely to be planning to include scientific attractions in their itinerary.

Yet there's no need to switch your brain off while taking time off this summer. The world is dotted with sites of scientific interest and many of them are worth visiting. Having spent my working life travelling and sneaking off for scientific side trips I've compiled a guide book, The Geek Atlas, for the technological traveller.

If you're staying in Britain this summer then look no further than Cornwall for three sites of outstanding scientific interest. Not far from Land's End is a telecommunications triangle of places that trace the history of long distance communications.

You can read the rest here.

A fascinating little beastie

Back in 2004 I was living in New York and commuting between New York and Washington, DC on the Acela. I was working in a fairly rural part of Virginia and was lucky enough to accidentally experience a once in 17 years event: the emergence of Magicicada Brood X.


(Picture from Wikipedia)

Now I realize that most people probably don't think that being in a place where millions of large winged insects appear from the ground and make a deafening noise in search of a mate is fun. But Magicicada is so cool that it's hard to miss their emergence. And Magicicada loves prime numbers.

For that reason, Magicicada Brood X (which lives along the Eastern coast of the US) is place number 127 in The Geek Atlas. Your next chance to meet the little beastie is 2021.

This particular brood spends 17 years underground living off the sap inside the roots of trees. Once ready to become an adult it burrows upwards and climbs its tree. Then when high up in the tree it molts and spreads its wings.

Once ready to fly it makes a humming sound which, given that millions emerge all at the same time, fills the air with an incredible din. The female cicadas make a clicking sound and between the humming and clicking the males and females find each other and mate.

They live only a few weeks above ground and new baby cicadas fall to the grown and burrow to the roots to start another 17 year wait.

To get a feeling for what it's like to be around when Magicicada makes its appearance, here's Sir David Attenborough:



There are other cicadas that live on a 7 and 13 year cycle. All these cycles are based around a prime number of years. The hypothesis is that the cicada uses a combination of emergence en masse and a prime numbered cycle to avoid predators. A prime numbered cycle means that the cicada rarely meets a predator and mass emergence would overwhelm any predator around.

A prime numbered cycle avoids predators because it doesn't have any factors. Suppose that the cicada had an 18 year cycle, any predator that peaked every 2, 3, 6 or 9 years could synchronize with the cicada and always meet it and eat it. By having a prime numbered cycle the cicada rarely meets a predator and predators have a hard time synchronizing with it.

For a more detailed look at the prime numbered cycle, you can read the paper Prime Number Selection of Cycles in a Predator-Prey Model.

PS If you've enjoyed this, consider buying my book.

London Transport Museum: Acton Depot Weekend

This past weekend the London Transport Museum held an open weekend at its Acton Depot where they keep a collection of trams, trolley cards, buses and underground trains, plus all the associated equipment. They only open the depot twice a year so this was a chance to see some things that are rarely open to the public.

I didn't include this museum in The Geek Atlas but after a visit it's likely a candidate for a volume 2 since it is packed with interesting stuff.

Like a really big collection of old underground signs:


Or shielding used while constructing the tunnels for the London Underground:


And speaking of the Underground, here's a power control panel with meters indicating hundreds of amps and some serious on/off switches:


And a lovely mercury arc rectifier used to turn AC into DC (the Underground uses 630V DC power).


And here are the wheels of a 1930s trolley car:


And here's the control panel from an Otis elevator:


But the highlight was a ride on the prototype Routemaster RM-1 bus. I forgot to photograph it, so here's a picture from Wikipedia: