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Place names redux

As Nestoria Australia grows up, we see more unusual search queries coming in.

Last week's highlight was Gum Scrub.

2_bad_place

But this week along comes Jackass Flat to trump its dental sounding predecessor.

1bad_name

Filed under  //  fun   map fun  
Comment (1)
Posted by Kat Parr Mackintosh 
 

BIY

As in “Build It Yourself”, is still a popular option for Australian future-home-owners.  A survey, commissioned by Mortgage Choice and released in May 2011, said that 5% of Australian buyers are going to buy land and build their own home.  (52% of people were planning to buy an established home, 13% wanted to buy a new one and 29% were as yet undecided about what they're planning to buy– but I think we can assume that they're not wanting to buy and build, 'cause that takes a bit more planning and intent.)

It's a hard slog, I follow several blogs by people involved – read embroiled – in the building process.  So I'm not making light of their situation when I mention the following collision of my interest in data visualisation and property.  But I recently had a conversation with a friend who has a slightly unusual building project – she's building a virtual reality house for her Sims characters. 

I've never really been into the Sims, but curiously I'd just read something relevant the website of my most recent interviewee, CASA's Andrew Hudson-Smith, so I was able to offer her some advice and help her out. 

We watched these two recommended BIY videos uploaded onto Youtube by user LuigiRules:


And then unleashed our inner architects.  I think if you're in the middle of the BIY process, or considering it as an option for the future then you should definitely try your design skills out on someone's Sims and see how they like it.  I don't know if there are Sims delays getting building contractors to do the plumbing etc. but we didn't have any. 

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Kat Parr Mackintosh 
 

Get your oversized pineapples here!

If you've spent any time driving around Australia then you'll know about Australia's “Big Things”, a collection of man made monuments homage-ing a variety of local flora, fauna or speciality.  The beauty of these constructions is their varied quality, some of them are quite good renderings and some of them are really, really poor.  Though even the worst ones aren't without their strange charms.  If you're a fan of these modern tributes then you'll be interested to hear that one of the best known big things, the Big Pineapple, is currently up for sale. 

(download)

It's on the Sunshine Coast, 15mins from Maroochydore, and the agents selling it, Ray White, say its features include: a macadamia nut factory, a confectionary factory, nine residential properties, parking for over 700 cars, a shop and a restaurant.  It doesn't list the pineapple itself as an asset, but there are lots of photos of it on the site, so the assumption is that while business operation isn't included in the sale, the pineapple itself is. 

It's a good way to start your collection of oversized local produce.  I'd personally go for the Big Merino next to diversify into fauna.

3pine

Image care of Snoskred

P.S. From Nomsa: apparently Australia isn't the only country where people like to experiment with supersizing things.  In Newark, Ohio, someone has designed an office block that looks like a picnic basket:

4pine

Nice.

Image care of RoadsideAmerica

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Kat Parr Mackintosh 
 

When size isn't everything...

The postcards depicting Australia's impressive relative size compared to the rest of the world that appeared on this blog a couple of weeks ago afforded an interesting perspective on the wide brown land gert by sea.  This one offers another take.  It's a population cartogram, depicting the world's population broken up into 200 territories which are arranged size relative, but ignoring normal territorial borders.

Yep – in this one Australia is tiny! Talk about bringing us down to size tall poppy style.  It does make the world look sort of delicious though, there's a cake-y quality to the shapes and colours...

For the technically inclined this map was created using raster datasets in ArcMap's ArcToolbox you can read more about the map's construction here.

In this one the shapes are retained but the data is from 2006:

Filed under  //  fun  
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Posted by Kat Parr Mackintosh