I remember the exact moment I first heard 'the map is not the territory': going past Nuneaton town centre, of all places, in my brother's car, probably twenty years ago now.

The term seems to have originated with Alfred Korzybski, a 19th / 20th century straddler, a Polish scientist and founder of 'general semantics'. He seems to share some common ground with Hayek's 'Sensory Order' - that our nervous systems and language structure are the maps we must navigate by. The Wikipedia article above suggests he'd thought a great deal about what this meant for how we should act personally.

It then occurred to me that this was not the first time I had been given a map which failed to show many things I could see right in front of my eyes. All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no intrepreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of my maps.

From E.F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed, quoted in Miller & Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: an Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life

MySociety reported this week that Chris Lightfoot has died. I hadn't heard of him until now, but there were a few links to some of his work, and his blog. There's some amazing stuff. First off are the travel time maps - fantastic way to illustrate the cost of travel, and why building new roads may lead to more traffic as the cost of a particular route drops. It would be good to include such cost decisions in any geographical economic model. I made such a decision myself last week, paying one pound for two blank CDs from a local shop. When they told me the price, I left the shop, but on the way past going back home, the cost of waiting and of travelling to buy in bulk seemed too much: I wanted to use them that night. Less trivially would be the cost of getting food via car versus foot. (And the emergent effects of this: car travel is one of Putnam's main causes of the decline in Social Capital in the US.)

Anyway, it's Chris' version of the political compass - the political survey 2005, based on youGov data - I found most affecting. He discusses here the problems he had with the original political compass site, and here he puts the findings from the political survey in some context.

Here's my results from answering the 32 questions. Chris used principle components analysis to reduce the many dimensions of these questions to the two axes of the political compass. I'm not entirely clear if this method can account for the Iraq war question being on the economics axis, but I'm presuming so. (The comments in his blog post above have a lot of good thoughts on the pitfalls of the questionnaire and the methods used.)

The most striking thing is seeing oneself in relation to others. There's a little dot: 'you are here'. Eek.

Some more map-related findings: a recent BBC story:

As the communal bloodshed has worsened, some Iraqis have set up advice websites to help others avoid the death squads. One tip - on the Iraq League site, one of the best known - is for people to draw up maps of their local area using Google Earth's detailed imagery of Baghdad so they can work out escape routes and routes to block... It's thought that insurgents have also used the map site, examining the detailed images to pick out potential targets.

Google also sends a Google Earth bulletin, 'the Sightseer'. Yesterday's included info on the way some human rights organisations are using it. The American Associaton for the Advancement of Science has some maps comparing before-and-after images in both Zimbabwe and Chad. As it happens, super-imposing them on Google Earth is less than enlightening: their website explains them better. A full list of the AAAS' case studies is here.

Just a quickie: if you a) have Google Earth installed and b) do a search for EPZ Google Earth or Export Processing Zone Google Earth, you can quickly get some links to, e.g. an EPZ in Dhaka, or an Intel factory in the Philippines.

Allegedly. They may not be - and they look like any other industrial estate from the air. But there's a lot of much smaller shack-like buildings around the edge.

Interesting to note that Google has reportedly agreed to blur some Indian sites deemed to be a security risk. This is not unreasonable, from the point of view of the Indian government. But it makes me think we need more surveillance - by the right people, of the right sort, and open to all. If more of these EPZs could be Google-earthed by a bunch of unions, along with related data, that would be wonderful.

Just wrote this in an e-mail to the MySociety geo-discussion list. Save me having to write it again for here, copy and paste.

Now I read it again, I'm thinking to myself: the open source community have no constitutional requirement to do anything. Legally, their code can't be copyrighted by others, but there's nothing to stop them veering off in this or that direction. So what keeps them going forward? Is the community itself - tightly interwoven as it is? Does this make it more or less likely, in the long term, to serve this nebulous thing, 'the public?'