Web Tips: Photo Maps, History, Current

This time our web tips are about a 25-year-old Internet project that shows the world in photographic samples, a history podcast in which scientists can present their research results, and the website of the Federal Network Agency on electricity generation and consumption in Germany.

length, width, photo

Maps show the charm of the earth’s surface only incompletely. As early as 1996, Alex Jarrett from Massachusetts launched the (English-language) Degree Confluence Project. People from all over the world post photos there that they took at the intersections of longitude and latitude – Jarrett describes 9,743 of the total of 64,442 places as “primary” and therefore fully photoworthy. They are mainly on land or close to land.

Uploaders should always tell a little story about their photos; The extensive FAQ explains how project participation works. The stories give the pictures a personal touch and invite you to browse all the more. You can combine this with the guessing game, in which you have to determine the location based on the photo and approach it with the help of hints about distance and cardinal direction.

c’t last presented the project in 2001 in this section. The website has since increased its appeal with its unchanged nineties charm: while there were a few hundred places visited back then, the site statistics now count 6,600 primary intersections in 195 countries, which have documented 13,000 visitors on more than 130,000 photos.

talk about history

Modern history has much more to offer than dates and the great deeds of even greater princes, statesmen and generals. This is not only shown in good television documentaries. Extensive research work can also be presented in a suitable format in an understandable and exciting way, such as in the blog and in particular the podcast Anno PunktPunktPunkt by Philipp Janssen.

Janssen talks to his guest about his project in every episode. The topics are varied and range from social and cultural history to modern military history. There are also episodes on the history of IT, for example on “Hackers in East and West Germany”, a doctoral project by the young scientist Julia Gül Erdogan. Her colleague Nico Nolden, on the other hand, dealt with “history and memory in computer games”.

In more than 80 issues, Janssen systematically and comprehensibly asks his interlocutors how they found their topic, what methodology and questions they use as a basis and what (interim) results they came to – this is how Erdogan questions the traditional image of the sinister hacker and instead emphasizes that the scene pioneered data security and data protection in the 1980s.

Where does the electricity come from?

In times of the energy crisis, tangible data is indispensable. The Federal Network Agency’s SMARD (“electricity market data”) website is a useful starting point for electricity generation and consumption. The start page already presents the current total electricity consumption, the wholesale electricity price and the amount of electricity that conventional and renewable power plants generate at a glance, and breaks this down by energy source for the previous ten days.

If you want to know more precisely, you can get the values ​​for any period of time under “Visualize market data” or have the installed generation capacity displayed – and see blue on white there that, for example, the net increase in onshore wind power has only increased slowly since 2018. Under “Germany at a glance” you can call up, among other things, how much electricity is currently being fed into the grid by individual power plants with a generating capacity of 100 megawatts or more.

At irregular intervals, the Federal Network Agency also posts articles on current developments, particularly quarterly and annual figures. Under “Electricity market explained” you will find articles accompanying the figures that explain, for example, pricing on the wholesale market or cross-border electricity trading.

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(mon)