Someone at work emailed this around: A tube map where line length is equal to journey time.

It’s a bit of a botch, not least because the fact that the colours have been changed makes comparison with the original very difficult for anyone familiar with it. Nevertheless it’s an interesting idea.

A while back I thought of doing a similar thing, though I was coming at it from a different point of view. Here’s some background, you may want to skip it if you want to get straight to the idea. Getting a computer to work out the quickest way accross a network from point A to point B is pretty tricky, when the network starts to get have a large number of connections the number of options the computer needs to search gets big quickly, it’s not pretty. Though not quite as un-pretty as some other things.

Anyway back to the tube map.

I thought a good thing to do would be to get some string, one piece for each tube line, coloured appropriately. First you tie knots in each string. Each knot represents a station and the spacing is proportional to the journey time between them. Next you get the knots representing the same station on different bits of string and tie them together. So what you’ve got is a distorted London underground map made of string.

Why?

In case you haven’t allready figured it out this setup can be used to effortlessly compute the shortest route between two points on the network. All you need to do is grab the two knots representing the stations between which you wish to travel and pull them appart untill the strings between them are taught, that’s your shortest route. It’s a kind of highly specialised analogue computer.
Cool huh?
Well I thought it was cool.

At work we get all the papers so I get to see what the Express has on its front page (incidentally, do they still sell this paper in shops? I never see it) which is quite entertaining at the moment as they seem to be making a concerted effort to nab the looniest sections of the Daily Mail’s readership (is it me or is the Daily Mail only read by blonde girls in pink shirts on the district line, actually it probably reflects the kind of people who I tend to notice on tubes, I’ll shut up now). There was a stunning example a couple of weeks back and I was annoyed that I didn’t grap a copy when it was lying there for the taking (too embarasing if I was caught stuffing it in my bag). Luckily someone managed to find an image of it. So with out further ado, here it is…

WOW!
That was pretty amazing wasn’t it.
Asylum seekers, gypsies, Diana, girl in a short skirt, drugs, outrage about ‘them’ banning something!
Well done mr Express front page guy you’ve really outdone yourself, you should probably retire, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to top that.