French and Italian meteo, I'm onto you

This blog entry started out about weather prediction but turned into a rant on economics, partly because the media is going crazy about the EU debt crisis again and partly because it's hard to pass through multiple countries without subconsciously comparing them, but here goes...

So, I saw the following in France over three consecutive days:

Day 1 French forecast: sunny, calm, Force 2
Day 2 French forecast: sunny, calm, Force 3
Day 1 actual weather: Force 6 wind, rain, thunderstorm

Day 2 French forecast: Force 6 wind, rain, thunderstorm, small craft advisory

Day 3 French forecast: sunny, calm, Force 3

Day 2 actual weather: sunny, no wind, but with big waves

Day 3 French forecast: sunny, no wind, but with big waves

Day 4 French forecast: sunny, calm, Force 3

Day 3 actual weather: sunny, with Force 3 winds, no waves

It's easy to tell how the weather prediction system works in France: they simply forecast yesterday's weather for tomorrow, and forecast the seasonal average for all days thereafter. This system must work really well when the weather is not changing drastically every day, and it usually isn't. But when there is a storm passing through, this is the absolute worst forecast strategy.

Perhaps this situation was an anomaly. Perhaps Météo-France does not consist of 3700 idle bureaucrats suckling at the teat of the great French Republic. Perhaps their computers were down, or perhaps they were all on vacation because it was the Bastille Day weekend when I was paying attention to their forecasts.

But the situation was much the same in Italy. They said it would be sunny and nice, and we had Force 7-8 winds with Force 9 gusts. Then they predicted Force 7-8 winds with gusts up to Force 9, and we had calm weather.

Weather prediction in the Med is not really rocket science. Especially in the summer, weather patterns move from the northwest down towards the southeast. You can just pick up the phone to your buddy who lives a few hundred miles northwest of you, say "alo Jean-Michel/Pierre/whatever," ask him how the weather is up there, and forecast that weather for tomorrow. If you're too lazy to make that phone call and forecast your own weather for tomorrow, you're doing it wrong!

To their credit, the Greek forecast is often spot-on. It's time to replace the French and Italian meteo offices with an HTTP redirect to the Greek website. That simple 302-redirect message would save about $1B/year immediately, not even counting savings from the pension plans and retirement packages to come later. There, I just did my part to help fix the great big European debt crisis.

As an aside, there is a lot of stereotyping and criticism of Greeks in the press these days. It's as if the whole world is on the side of the rentiers who loaned money to the Greek government, criticizing Greeks for being lazy, for instituting plans that allow government workers to retire at age 37, for having a large beaurocracy, and so forth. For all these people who are being so critical, I have one observation and one question.

Observation: I traveled through Spain, France and Italy on this trip. I saw absolutely nothing, either culturally or structurally, that would distinguish these countries' work ethics from each other. Frankly, all of Southern Europe seems stagnant, full of beaurocratic barriers and generally non-competitive to me, and, based on previous trips, I think this observation easily covers Northern Europe as well. Young people do not attempt to invent new things; they seem to want to migrate to finance centers to become cogs in the money-shuffling engines, or get slow jobs in the public sector or, if they are tech savvy, become mid-level managers in a tech company where they stop being creative. And everything works at a snail's pace. Try exporting anything out of France, and call me back when you've prepared the necessary paperwork. Or let me know if/when you've fully satisfied the requirements for a "translated document with apostille" required by the EU states (I have a diploma in Latin, and finding a certified Latin translator has been a bit difficult, to say the least). Commodity items whose prices I checked on this trip (e.g. things whose identical duplicates can be purchased elsewhere in the world, from outboard engines and cameras down to wires and electrical connectors) cost roughly 30-100% more in the EU compared to the US, and I can only attribute this to friction within the system. To make it concrete, it costs as much to extract an outboard engine from customs and sell it in Europe as it did to manufacture it from raw metals (WTO ensures that the price differences are not due to tariffs; and the profit margins seem similar in the EU because they seem to lead similar lifestyles as their American counterparts). That's insane. And I had the benefit of having been to India in the middle of this trip. The energy I saw there is just nowhere to be found anywhere else in Old Europe.

So the question: It's not as if the folks who loaned money to Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain went through an anonymizing "microloan" service which masked the name of the loan recipient. They knew perfectly well to whom they loaned their money. They knowingly undertook the risk of not getting paid back. They actively chose to ignore other developing markets, with demographics that are young, eager and willing to work hard, and place their bets on Old Europe instead (yes, I'm looking at Turkey in particular, and every other country on the EU fringe, along with the manufacturing giants in the far east). So why is everyone, and I mean just about every talking head on TV and every idiot who has been granted real estate in newspapers, criticizing the sad-European-country-du-jour (Greece at the moment, but Iceland, Ireland and Spain have all been there recently) for being lazy/not saving enough/not investing well and demanding prompt payback along with severe austerity measures, damn the consequences? Since these noisemakers cannot be receiving kickbacks from the bond holders who actually loaned the cash, I can only assume that they're like the poor underclass in the US who votes Republican out of a desire to identify with the rich and powerful.

Anyhow, I've seen nothing that makes any EU country 'better' than any other. France has a tiny handful of sectors that bring in money; the rest of the country seems to be running a successful wealth redistribution scheme. England is buoyed by the finance sector, and I cannot name a British invention that came after the radar. One could go on and on, so I won't, except to note that economic growth seems to be a function of demographics first and foremost, and it's a pity to see people ignore groups of highly productive people who needed capitalization in favor of people whose only accomplishment was to vote for their neighbors' bad songs in the European song competition, and then get upset at them.

Fishpens and how much I hate them

There has been a new development in the Mediterranean in the last decade and a half: people are plopping down ugly fishpens in every gorgeous bay. Let me count the ways in which this is a bad idea.

First, fish from fishpens tastes like mushy paper. It's well-known that most people (and all Americans, without exception) do not have any idea what good fish tastes like (by the way, there is no exception for "oh, I'm an American, but I was born in <insert country with a fishing culture>." By the time someone acquires the citizenship, they've lost the taste. In fact, the citizenship test might as well omit the question about the cause of the Civil War and replace it with "can you name more than three warm fish dishes?" and whoever can gets sent back to their home country for being insufficiently American). So you can feed your regular Joe Schmoe white crap doused in oil and they'll think it's ok. But really, it's not ok. Do a taste test with farmed salmon (whose meat is actually pure white and has to have artificial coloring added to make it look like real salmon) and wild-caught to see the difference. 

Second, the pens cause enormous pollution. I won't belabor the point, but the guys who operate these things love to, or have to, overfeed the fish, and the excess fish food goes through the pen and decomposes on the seafloor along with the fish-poop that their fish constantly produce. It's like these guys find the nicest spots, and put poop in it.

Third, and the reason why I'm writing this: the pens are never lit or marked. These things are barely above sea level, difficult to see when it's dark and wavy, and generally in the way. In the pic below, you can't really see Port de Rosas but it's on the upper right behind the hill, and the fishpen is the messy sprawling structure on the upper right, on the direct approach to the only port. That's like hanging your laundry to dry directly downwind from the runway, at 1000' feet. Every landing plane will have to dodge your dirty underwear on its approach. A light with a battery and cheap solar charger costs $100 bucks. People buy them for their lawns, and they do not intend to make a living off of their lawns. Place a damed light on one corner. Or maybe go wild and get four for four corners. It'll protect your fishpen, too.

Finally, not unrelated to the third point above, the pens occasionally get damaged. Maybe in a storm, but just as likely, when someone plows into them because they're not lit. That releases thousands of foreign fish into the ecosystem. So far, this has been benign -- the releases I've heard about have been of salmon. The poor salmon must be very confused, as their bioclock would compel them to search for the bucket in which they were artificially born and raised, and not finding it anywhere, to ultimately die in vain. But the moment someone starts raising bonitos or bluefish, an accidental release will wreak havoc on an ecosystem.

Anyhow, the EU has regulations for everything. They even tried to dictate to Turkey just what the ingredients of yoghurt ought to be. This is so absurd I don't know where to begin, except to say that the word yoghurt is not German, English, French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian or whatever it is they speak in Luxembourg, nor was yoghurt invented by a committee at The Hague. I don't tell anyone how to wear their lederhosen, so I expect the dude with the lederhosen to keep his respectful distance from me on all issues related to yoghurt. Anyhow, someone needs to come up with some regulations for fishpens pronto.

Fishpens on the upper right, on approach to Port de Rosas

Navigating Towards Better Maps

     

Bing map, circa 2011
Accurate but useless

I've been thinking about how to improve on modern maps and charts (in case you're wondering about the difference, maps are for land and charts are for oceans). What prompted this was the realization that today's charts, created by armies of very smart people working for large corporations and governments with the aid of huge computer clusters, are strictly worse than the ancient charts created by people who did not even have slide rules.



Take Anaximander's map, arguably the first comprehensive map of the known world. Who is Anaximander, you might ask. He's the philosopher who invented the concept of "infinity." I always thought that whoever invented zero was cool (try doing multiplication with Roman numerals if you disagree), but recently realized that whoever invented infinity must, by definition, be infinitely cooler. Well, Anaximander is that guy, and he's amazing. Xeno, with his paradox about the racing hare and turtle, gets a lot of credit for infinity-related issues, but Anaximander preceded him by 200 years, introduced the concept, gave it a name, and didn't get sidetracked by some stupid paradox involving talking animals. Not content with inventing the idea of infinity, A-man looked at fossils of his time and speculated that men evolved from fish. Before the Tea Partiers converge here and start ranting against evolution, keep in mind that A-man could not have denounced all this "reasoning-based" reasoning and simply followed creationism, intelligent design, and Christianity, because he lived 600 years before Christ was born. And as if doing all this back then wasn't enough of an accomplishment, he then predicted that there would be an earthquake, that the citizens of an entire city should sleep out in the country with their weapons, that they would otherwise be killed by the quake. And there actually was an earthquake that destroyed the said city. Let's just say A-man knows his stuff.

Mappa Mundi, circa 1300
Chock full of useful information

Anaximander drew one of the earliest known maps of the world. It did not survive, but it's a safe bet that it was full of inaccuracies. The landmass must have been all out of proportion. Major features were likely missing, and because he combined maps from different sources without common reference points, he likely duplicated some rivers and mountains. It didn't help that he believed the world to be shaped like a cylinder (actually, this was a major accomplishment at the time, as it allowed celestial objects to dip below the horizon. Previous models had the ancient world floating in a basin with water, but what contained the basin?). In any case, you can bet that A-man's data was not collected with millimeter radar mounted on satellites, not registered against the World Geodetic System (WGS-84) to capture the imperfections of the sphere that earth exhibits, and nor was it processed by armies of cartographers and brilliant software developers. He did it all by himself, with ink on parchment or deerskin under candlelight.

But we know that A-man's map was immensely useful and had tremendous impact, because people still talk about it to this day. And the reason behind its success is simple: it had a fucking purpose and he knew what that purpose was. He drew the map to help further trade between Greek city states. He could distort areas that he wanted to make appear closer to each other. He could distort regions if he were running out of parchment and wanted to keep everything on the same sheet. He could center it any way he liked, and he chose to center it on Milet, Turkey, his birthplace and a frequent stopover point on traderoutes of the time. His map, just like the maps drawn for the next 2000 years, must have contained tips for the traveler, as well as useful drawings of the wildlife one might encounter. In short, it must have been incredibly inaccurate, but had impact because it was engineered to suit the needs of its audience.

Contrast this with today's maps. Accuracy has become the sole, the only, the exclusive goal for cartographers. We've become such slaves to accurate rendering that we've forgotten that maps are drawn for a purpose. And if you keep in mind that maps are not evaluated by some abstract Ministry of Truthful and Consistent Drawings, but actually used by people with a purpose, it's easy to see that almost all current maps fall far short of actually helping the users accomplish their mission.

Greenland towering over every  continent

First, let's start with the projection. We can probably agree that a basic purpose of any map is to give a sense of the relative sizes and positions of geographic regions. Yet the Mercator projection used for most maps is absolutely horrendous. The farther you are from the equator, the more distorted things get, and no normal human being without severe astigmatism can compensate for the weird torque that a Mercator projection applies to the globe.  For instance, most people think that Greenland is a huge island. But look at the evidence. If it were a huge island, it would undoubtedly contain lots of precious resources, and we wouldn't let a two bit country with an army of only 22000 people (I'm looking at you Denmark) claim the whole place. Any established soccer hooligan can round up more than 22000 people on a good weekend, with a reserve force of 30000 if it's a three-day holiday weekend, and another 50000 if Liverpool is involved. You don't need nukes or even bombs to kill off 22000 people; you can just redirect the urban runoff from any developing nation and they'd drown. If there was a giant landmass bigger than the US and Africa (as it seems from a Mercator map), and it had only 22000 European soldiers defending it while they spent their leaves in coffee houses that openly served hash, it's a safe bet that the "Islamo-terrorists" that the Danish right wing press is so worried about, and keeps on goading into action with cartoons, would have overrun the place. Clearly, Greenland can't be that big, but if you look at a modern map, it looks bigger than the biggest continent. Cartographers will claim that the map is accurate and your perception is wrong. This is precisely the problem: your perception is the only thing that matters, and cartographers have lost track of their purpose.

Cartographers have an unhealthy
fixation on long cylindrical objects
such as radio antennas and towers

Second, let's look at what cartographers put on maps. Nautical charts are the worst offenders here, as they typically feature only depths and leave out most details involving terrain. To be fair, they also include features like radio towers because cartographers think that you could somehow tell apart the tower's puny blinking red light from all the nearby Coca-Cola signs, and thus believe them to be useful for navigation. I guess they would be, if your goal was to get to a radio tower. I want to get to places. I want to learn what I would see as I look around. I want to find the most happening place, with the most interesting people. I want to know what people are like in a town. And guess what: I can handle imprecise information. I'm human, I was bred to deal with uncertainty and imprecision. Give me a sense, even if it's biased, of what it's like to experience a location. If you don't know, put a serpent there or whatever, just like the old-timer cartographers, so I know you don't know. But don't fill up all available surfaces with satellite pics, your catalog of all poles higher than 10 meters (why do you have such a catalog anyway?), or low-res photographs fat American tourists took at various spots. This is really a problem of ranking relevant information, and you guys are living in the age of Alta Vista and Webcrawler. Help me with my destination, not the route. Help me with ranked, relevant content; don't just display any and all geographical content that matches my search. Who makes the best sobrasado in Mallorca? Where can I order a paella for one person? I really want to know (and incidentally, why can't the Spanish industrial apparatus manufacture a paella pan smaller than for two people?) A map is a medium that should be uncluttered, and maybe even blank, by default, and what you choose to put on it should depend on what the user is trying to accomplish.

Who could possibly care?

Third, look at the way cartographers display their data. These guys plot tons of data every chance they get. They just can't resist the appeal of data bling. Look how meticulously they plot depths throughout the globe. Yet most people could not give a rat's ass about depths greater than the depth of their keel. Since pleasure boat keels are under 2m, the details of the subsea surface up to a few meters deeply matters to people, and the rest, none at all. There is a huge difference between a bay that is mostly 2m with occasional rocks up to 1m and one that is a solid shallow 1m. Whereas it's just not important if, out on the high seas, depth goes from 3876 to 4124 meters. Ok, there are a few exceptions: if you're fishing, then the location of the continental shelf and seamounts could be important. Also, if you're looking for a burial ground for Osama, then you need to find a really deep spot. Those are the only two exceptions, and one of them is no longer relevant. Notice that oceanographers and submarine captains are not among the exceptional cases. If you're commanding a submarine, I hope you splurged for the extra charts package at the rental counter, so you'll have good charts that cover everything all the way up to crush depth. And if you're an oceanographer, you'd better be using different maps than the ones I use for navigation -- that's like an astronomer trying to use my toy stereoscope from third grade. If cartographers had not lost their sense of purpose and audience, they'd have learnt to use a log scale to present lots of detail for the shallow areas. Because that's what normal people need and want. Stop plotting irrelevant data like a first-year grad student.

If this is not part
of your route calculation,
you're doing it wrong

Fourth, maps are used for travel over time. The world changes over time. Why can't the map take the passage of time into account? I would think that helping someone get from point A to point B is a pretty important part of the reason why people use charts. So here's a trick question from left field: What's the fastest path from point A to point B? I know all you budding software developers who are fresh out of CS100 are itching to use the PlotLine function. And I know all you seasoned developers are reaching for the PlotGreatCircle function. But because a substantial percent of people who ask this question are going to be sailing, the right answer depends on an extended weather forecast. For a sailboat, you have to simulate the boat's trajectory over time and take the weather at the boat's position into account to determine the route. This is pretty difficult for a human, as you have to integrate the boat's speed to track its position and simultaneously query a meteorology database for the conditions at that location. This is precisely the kind of thing for which we invented computers, so get to it already! If you think this is too niche a request, how about just changing the satellite pictures to reflect seasons? Those super-clear pictures taken on a crisp, cloud-free day in October are no good when trying to figure out if the hills are going to be colorful in June. And this actually matters to people who want to figure out how a place will look when they visit.

What is this? I don't even

Finally, why is the default screen centered on Wichita, Kansas? I've never been there, and I plan to, with a bit of luck, die without ever having to visit. Even the people who live in Wichita, Kansas couldn't care less about Wichita, Kansas, or else they'd agree to pay a bit more in taxes and make it a better place. Put the darned center on top of someplace I could possibly care about (hint: red states are definitely not in that set). Even Milet, Turkey would be a better spot.

Some might say that I'm being unreasonable, that these feature requests are too difficult or costly to implement. To them, I ask: is it really much harder for you to add these features to Bing or Google using your 3.0+ GHz 8-core desktop than it was for Anaximander to invent infinity, theorize about evolution, successfully predict an earthquake, and draw the first world map?