The time had finally come to sort through and [mostly] discard the stuff I’d accumulated in the last days when higher education was conducted on paper. What follows is merely a selection.

Snowbowl trail map, 10/10

1

A seminal masterpiece of student ski cartography by the inimitable Dana Allen, lately of Backcountry Magazine.

The last map series I ever made with an Esri product, 6/10

2

For an avian biology/landscape fragmentation study.

All of Ed Tufte’s books for some reason, 2/10

3

Note: Bill remains on Tufte’s Twitter block list as of this writing.

1996 geopolitics textbook about . . . now, 4/10

4

Somehow fails to mention Putin, Trump, Pandemics, Beyoncé. Predictions are hard, I get it.

Stats programming textbooks, 3/10

5a 5b

You know what the world needs less of? Proprietary versions of data analysis programming languages that today offer flourishing and dominant open-source implementations.

Open source GIS textbook, 11/10

6a 6b

A decade-old #foss4g textbook by Gary Sherman, who is my absolute hero for printing the term “Green-beaked Freak”. The book holds up surprisingly well, with a still-applicable intro to PostGIS.

Little red book, 1/0

7

Jeez, how did that get in there?

Internet map, 7/10

8

A printed copy of the XKCD 2010 map of online communities. Much remains accurate; Facebook still controlling too much territory, tech blogs still largely on the proto-libertarian side of the Bay of Flame.

Watercolor, 14/10

9

The most amazing use of newsprint by Stamen, Nathaniel Vaughn Kelso & co. Still one of the best examples of map tiles making it out into the real world.

Scholarly articles, 7/10

10

Old school satellite imagery classification papers. Maximum likelihood! Single-layer neural nets! Algorithms from before the fall of the Berlin Wall!

The original AVHRR paper, 12/10

11

The coarsest-resolution map of the world! Talk what smack you want about 1-degree grid cells - You can’t beat the radiometric consistency, or the fact that all pixels and bands fit on half a burned CD-ROM. I would have filled the rest with OutKast MP3s.

Annals, 3/10

12

759 hard copy issues of The Professional Geographer and The Annals of the AAG. I think I only held onto them this long out of intense guilt about how many trees went into this.

On that note . . .

Scenarios, 0/10

13

Printed summaries and emissions scenarios from the IPCC 2001 report. Printed. On hundreds of pages. And distributed so broadly that an undergrad got his hands on them.

To serve man, 1/10

14

ONE SHILLING AND SIXPENCE. Predates Marie Tharp and common decency.

Bibles, 15/10

15

I still reference these all the damn time.

Thanks for following along folks! Tune in next week for an exciting look through my high school yearbook! [Is dragged off stage in a straightjacket]