London Futures

An interesting set of images showing how climate change could affect London...

Tube Map...

For some strange reason, I still have a fascination with the Tube and the Tube map, so love this video from Digital Urban showing the lines laid out according to their geographical locations, rather than the traditional Tube map layout...


London Tube Map Geography:Visualisation Draft from digitalurban on Vimeo.

Busy!!

Apologies for the lack of posts recently...

Yesterday I was in Leeds, listening to Edexcel trying to sell their new A level course which will be ready for teaching from September 2008... If any of you, especially those who've just finished A levels or might be thinking of A level Geography in the next couple of years, are short of something to do and fancy having a look at the new specs, I'd be interested to hear what you have to say! You can find them by visiting the exam board websites (Edexcel, AQA, OCR, WJEC) or come and see me...

I also had a trip down to London last week, for an excellent course about Google Earth, run by GE guru Noel Jenkins... I learnt lots, and also had chance to play with a fantastic "space navigator" . Now that (I hope!) we have Google Earth on the network, 7RPr will be having a chance to find out a bit more about it...

On Saturday, I was at the University of Leeds, for the 21st Century Geography Conference - some really interesting lectures (including regeneration/rebranding in Leeds, and avalanche risk in Iceland), and great to meet up with fellow geography teachers... What I saw of the Geography Department at Leeds looked excellent - worth checking out for those of you thinking of Geography at university!

Lights out for London

Lights were switched off across London for an hour last night to encourage people to conserve energy... According to this report from the BBC, if all Londoners had switched off their lights, 380 tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been saved - enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall twice! It was the first time that the lights at Piccadilly Circus had been turned off since World War II.

London 2012??

Lots of controversy at the moment around the new logo for the 2012 London Olympics which was unveiled yesterday and the number of people who have signed an online petition to have the logo changed has increased by more than 3000 when I looked at the end of school to more than 28000 now...


There is lots on the BBC website about the logo, what it is meant to represent, etc. - look here. People have also been sending alternative logos in to the BBC, which you can view here and here - interesting that many of the alternative logos include some idea of Britain and or London!

What do you think of the logo? Do you like it - why or why not? What about the alternative ones? Can you come up with a better one??

Edited to add: I've just signed the petition... Less than a minute later, my name was onto the second page!!

Live Earth

Registration to be in with a chance to buy tickets for Live Earth London is open until tomorrow at midday...

The Live Earth website describes the concerts - one in each continent, all on 7th July 2007, as...

"a monumental music event that will bring together more than 2 billion people to combat the climate crisis. Live Earth’s 24 hours of music across 7 continents will deliver a call to action and the solutions needed to answer the call. Live Earth marks the beginning of a multi-year mass persuasion campaign led by The Alliance for Climate Protection to move individuals, corporations and governments to take action."

But there has been no shortage of controversy about the events... Are pop stars (whose carbon footprints must be pretty big) the best people to be spreading the message about climate change? And how green can it be to be running concerts of this scale across the world?

Find out more about the concerts, how they'll work and how environmentally-friendly they'll be on the Live Earth London website... What do you think? Are these concerts a good idea? Will they work? And most importantly, will you be trying to get tickets?!

Another Millennium Dome?

Just watching a discussion on Question Time about the 2012 Olympics...

According to the London 2012 website, the Games are going to "transform the East End"... A lot of people disagree, and think that the whole project's a complete waste of money - particularly as it was announced today that the cost is going to be far higher than originally anticipated!

Check out today's news story from the BBC and explore the London 2012 website by clicking on the image above.

What do you think? Fantastic opportunity for London and Britain?? Or £9.3 billion down the drain??

Disinformation?

Mrs P found this interesting (if rather bizarre!) set of movies from the British Library today... Can you sort the fact from the fiction? Two of them are history ones, so that should keep H-Team happy!

While you're on the British Library site, check out the London: A Life in Maps exhibition they've got on at the moment.

In fact, while you're on the British Library site, have a good look round - there's loads of interesting stuff on there!