Utah’s claim to fame

utah and uranium
I’ve got an old puzzle map of the United States that has little pictures of the various natural resources of each state on them along with the state’s nickname. Most are pretty typical like Idaho and potato, Texas and oil, Virginia and tobacco. My favorite is Utah, which has a fireball looking picture that signifies uranium. Below the little picture is the proud claim “Used in Atom Bomb” which I guess dates the map pretty well.

It would be interesting to see how each state would present themselves now if they could choose something to label their state with. I can’t help but think of corporate sponsorships leading to a Starbucks or Windows logo on Washington. I hope we’d get a pint glass for Oregon.

GIS I Project: Where to live in Portland

I’ve completed my project write-up and presentation, so I figured I’d release it to the wild. Chances are pretty good no one in my class will see it before I present and spoil it. Actually, I’m more worried that this may reduce our chance of actually finding one of these places.

The gist of the project was trying to find areas in Portland that meet the ideal requirements we have for a home using GIS. We compiled a list of things we wanted and things we didn’t want and then looked to see if there were actually any affordable houses in those regions. Here it is:

Both are in PDF format. I’ll have a pretty final map to include tomorrow.

ArcGIS missing Erase?

I finished the analysis part of my GIS I project yesterday. Overall the project went quite well but there was a moment of panic when I realized that ArcGIS doesn’t have any Punch tool for vector editing. I seem to remember this method being available in ArcView 3.x as “Erase” but its missing from ArcGIS. Maybe it was in ArcInfo?

ArcGIS provides a Clip tool, which lets you take one shape (i.e. the outline of the city of Portland) and use it to trim another shape (i.e. interstates) so that you only have the interstates that are within Portland city limits. This is useful, but I want to do the opposite. I want to take a shape of “bad” areas and punch them out of the otherwise “good” areas.

In theory you could design your analysis to avoid needing this functionality, but its such a simple operation that it should be included. I do it all the time in Freehand using punch. Luckily, there’s a plug-in for ArcGIS called XTools Pro that has a 30-day free trial. This software lets you Erase one layer based on another, so I downloaded it and got on with my analysis. Whew!

Query the possibilities

Here’s an example of some of the work I’m doing on my GIS project. Start with all the tax lots in Portland, query all lots zoned “single family residence”, then query those with a total value (property and building) of $175,000 to $225,000, then query those results for homes built before 1950, then query those results for lot size greater than 4400 sq. ft., then query those results for building square footage for those greater than 1500 sq. ft. Here’s what you get:

All Portland Taxlots After the fall

Kind of startling, huh? I wasn’t going to put streets in it originally, but there’s no way to tell where the second image is otherwise.

Google Maps – time to reconsider cartography

Google Maps

Google has announced their Google Maps Beta. Given the cool factor of their other tools I knew this was going to be big. So I tried it out. The sample queries they provide alone make the service much cooler than any of the competition. But I wanted to see what where I live looks via Google Maps. The results: Better start studying something besides cartography.

To start with – the maps are gorgeous. Drop shadows from the location callout, which also has options for setting this as a starting or ending point on a future query. The thumbtack isn’t that intrusive. The vectors are gorgeous – the weighting of the street volumes with colors, the labeling, the chocolate brown borders and the half-circle endpoints. And when you zoom out, the labels disappear cleanly. How am I supposed to compete with that?

The data that google uses appears to come from the same source as yahoo/mapquest (which I don’t like), and it displays it much more attractively. I had always had a preference for MapBlast who was then bought by Microsoft and turned into MapPoint, which I used up until this morning.

Oh – Google maps – since they get their data from the same place, also got the dead ends on my street wrong. Those aren’t through streets. Which is obvious just from the number of delivery-type vehicles that have to back up once they realize it too.

Portland Pub Buffer

I used 59 pubs (3 are really only fancy beer stores) to create a map of portland with 1/4 mile buffers to see what areas have appropriate access to a local. It appears that there is some severe disparity in many parts of of the city – or – the bars there are just lame. I need to make sure my pub set is good enough before my final project, but here’s the PDF if you’re curious. Warning, its ~1.5MB large

This is the first time I’ve used ArcMap 9 to create any output, and I was doing it over a 16 color Remote Desktop connection and it was too slow to label and simplify, so its nothing special yet. So no making fun. I’ll fix that later when I’ve updated the pub list to fix any discrepancies.

Remote Desktop is Faster

Its quite sad that running Remote Desktop to connect to a computer that has ArcGIS 9 is still much faster and bearable than working on my own computer with ArcView 3.0a for Mac. In fact, just loading the streets layer in ArcView 3.0a crashed the program and Classic (OS 9), which is why I tried Remote Desktop instead.

I’m 96% done converting street addresses of pubs to physical locations in a GIS for my project. ArcMap 9 actually tries to rectify them for you, and got 86% of the addresses right on the first pass – which is nice when the data set is 60 entities.

iGIS a.k.a. ArcCatalog

I’ve started GIS I this term and today’s lab introduced me to ArcCatalog, which is an awesome way to browse, preview and manage your spatial data. 3+ years ago we just haphazardly moved stuff between directories using Windows Explorer and often got stung. It was not an elegant way to handle data.

This is the equivalent of an iTunes for GIS data, but it’s not a free app. That’s fine though since it does way more than an iApp does. You can search based on name, file type, geographic region, and more. You can also search locally or on remote locations that you can connect to over the internet. I’m quite impressed and look forward to using it on something more than a simple exercise.