Sorry, Pokémon Go again!

Pokémon Go has literally taken over my Facebook news feed. There are many friends who are posting about it and many pages I liked are running stories. Please do not talk about the Buzzfeed, it posts like dozens of stories per day about the Pokémon Go. Some stories are really weird which is not openly discussed in conservative societies. 

I now can get that -those people walking with cell phones with their device pointing to the surface- are Pokémon catcher.

I had heard a term Pokémon, I guess as cartoon characters in a TV network. I never tried to learn about it. I was never a cartoon fan except for Tom and Jerry. You might be surprised; we didn’t have electricity or a television in my hometown in Nepal when I was growing as a kid. A few years back, I found a DVD of Tom and Jerry with all episodes and I watched that within few days. I also watched some episodes repeatedly.

Sorry, I am distracted here. Let’s come to Pokémon again.

On the day of release of this game, one of my American friends posted about Pokémon Go in her Facebook status. Next day, a professor complained on her Facebook that she missed Pokémon Go release as she was teaching summer classes. Some friends from Canada and Europe and even Nepal were complaining about the game being not available there. The news related to Pokémon Go was bombarded in my news feed. Facebook Page of Wikipedia today also posted about thousand percent increase in Pokemon Go article read after the Pokémon Go release  Even the official twitter page of our school posted about a Pokémon being found in school’s bookstore.

Enough is enough!

There was more to it. I was startled after I knew that we have to literally go out and catch the Pokémon. There is a high-resolution real map of the surrounding available to play with. Isn’t it incredible? Ok, it is not that much incredible given that there are already high resolutions maps available for free to end users like Google Map, Bing Map, and Apple map. But the idea of using imaginative creatures in real-world location is incredible. Hats off to the creator!

I am sure that there are many people who still don’t get the concept of Pokémon. It is a mobile game, where you catch the imaginative creatures called Pokémon –abbreviated form of the term Pocket Monsters. To do that, you have to travel some distance from where you are. More you travel more Pokémon you get. I guess you require a mobile data connection or WIFI and a cell phone with the GPS and Camera. I learned it from reading from different sources and watching some YouTube videos. I haven’t downloaded this game and do not have any plan to download as well.

There is one thing - only one thing that compelled me to write this blog- the real world location factor associated with the game. And, you know in this blog I talk about you, me and places . It is interesting to note that the world has become so open and accessible especially in the developed region where they can access location information not only for real purpose but also for the virtual purposes, like this game. You might already know that the creators of this game also involve the people who created the Google Map and Google Earth.  The company which created this game is owned by Alphabet- parent company of Google. So, they already had the base map data available for their use. Spatineo  reconfirms that map data used in this game is indeed Google Map, not the OpenStreetMap.

News outlets report that game creators identified millions of locations to put Pokestops and gym. They also have different creatures for different habitat types differentiated by the geographic marker. They have different Poke species for water, park, forest or settlements. The Mashable reported that this game creator used  geographic classification of the area based on the climate, vegetation, and soil or rock type to assign the Pokémon species to appropriate habitat. Isn't it interesting? They use species distribution modeling type of complex spatial statistics and many different environmental data layers to identify the appropriate Poke species for the different locations. That's my guess as the detailed modeling approach of the game is not made public.  

You might have come up with some game idea with the spatial statistics you used in your thesis.

You catch 'em all! Good luck!

Flat Earth? No ! No!

Interesting ! My first blog as an official Ph.D. candidate in Geography program in a US university is going to be to find whether the earth is flat or round. I am from Nepal and never challenged the notion that the earth is spherical and that was what we were taught. After I came to the US to continue my tertiary level education, I encountered many news and views especially on the internet that Earth might be flat. I got more tempted to understand this conflicting views after I read a news story about  the earth being flat on the website of The Imaging and Geospatial Society of America,  (ASPRS). In this news, they reported 600-year-old map and tried to persuade that  the earth might be flat. Even one of the ASPRS members was cited in the news with a view that the earth might be flat.

Very amusing! Isn't it? That was an April fool prank.

And then I also started doubting! Haha!

Not really!

I had a few basic understanding that earth is not flat, it is spherical.

I started to explore about this discussions and debates on the internet. I typed in the Google –'Is earth flat?' Google showed almost 97 million records. Coincidently, it was a day after NASA's satellite Juno reached the orbit of Jupiter as you can see from the Google logo in the screenshot.

I noticed that a revival of flat earth notion is very recent as some mainstream media started reporting about a very conservative group called the Flat Earth Society. The Flat Earth Society seems to be rejuvenated around the end of 2015 and early 2016 as their last tweet is dated February 4, 2016 by the time this piece was written. There happened to be division among themselves and there are many different flat earth societies. Another believer of the flat earth named Enclosed World was active until the June of 2016.

There happened to be even a book titled Earth Not a Globe written by Samuel Birley Rowbothan. This book is being used as a holy book of the flat earth believer. In this book author claims that ' the Zetetic Sun, moon, planets and stars are all only a few hundred miles above the surface of the earth. The sun orbits the north pole once a day at a constant altitude. The moon is both self-illuminated and semi-transparent. Eclipses can be explained by some unknown object occulting the sun or moon'.

Apparently, the spherical structure of the earth was discovered 2300 years ago by a Greek philosopher Eratosthenes. He was even able to calculate the circumference of the earth with a comparable accuracy as of modern measurement. A scientific blog has a video  of his experiment with a red pomelo fruit. There are numerous 'not so technical' explanations available in the web including ten reasons  by Popular Science Blog.They point out that Aristotle's observation of the lunar eclipse being the shadow of earth shows that the earth is spherical. There is other easily observable phenomenon like all the other planets in the solar system is spherical, and there is no point to believe that the earth is an exception. And, of course, there are millions of pictures of the earth available which were taken from outer space. None of them show that the earth is flat.

Finally, we wouldn't need a map projection in Geographic Information System if the earth was flat. The followers of the flat earth phenomenon tend to believe that the map of earth in the United Nations logo as the close representation of the flat earth. Please, someone, tell them that it is also a type of map projection called  azimuthal equidistant projection of the spherical earth. The official explanation of the logo also tells the same thing that  the design is "a map of the world representing an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole".

You have right to doubt. You wish to remain stupid forever! Up to you.