Not Intent on Arriving

Story of One Drug Smuggler

German news magazine Der Spiegel published a fascinating look into the South American drug world. The magazine interviewed the former captain of a homemade submarine that delivered drugs to Mexico. How the man got into the drug world might surprise you. His wife was sick and he didn’t have any money to pay for her operation, so he agreed to captain one shipment of drugs in order to make some quick money. After that mission, the drug lords threatened him and wouldn’t let him go. As is often the case, the world of drugs is complex. And, after reading this article, you’ll find it’s hardly luxurious for everyone.

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories News

City Maps, By Most Photographed Area

5 Dec

Eric Fischer has made a lot of really cool maps recently. DCist gave him a shout out for his map of the racial division in the District of Columbia (a topic of particular interest to me).

Now, he’s mapped a series of world cities, by the most photographed areas in each. Areas in red are photographs taken by tourists and areas in blue are photographs taken by locals. Yellow areas are photographs by unknown people (Fischer says these images are “probably” tourists). The methodology is not flawless, but the results are pretty stunning. You can see how spread out touristy spots are in some areas, and how central they are in others.

: Map of Washington DC

Map of London

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories Personal

New WWF File Format Does Not Allow You to Print

4 Dec

The World Wide Fund for Nature has developed an ingenious new idea to address the problem of overprinting. A new file format that will not allow you to print.

In their promotional video (see below), WWF makes a pretty powerful case. They argue that with the growing popularity of .pdf documents and the frequency of laptop access, the need to print documents has truly decreased. With regards to the costs to the environment, they suggest that simply PDFing, and not printing, one document could save a tree.

They’ll save you the internal debate about whether you need to print. You can’t do it with the WWF file format! (Take note Middlebury professors).