9 ms·
ShipMap
- thunderbong 6y agoI see a lot of these points going over land, even where there aren't any big rivers. Maybe this is a plot of the containers rather than the ships?
- smitty1e 6y agoCanals. Figure they have probably fixed any wobbly data.
- genezeta 6y agoSome of the (likely) fixes look pretty weird, moving at a ridiculous speed, through land and sea in a straight line, only to reach a certain point and continue as if nothing had happened. e.g. 8 June 2012 05:00 from western Sahara to English Channel, through Sahara, right the middle of Spain, parts of France. Another on 9 May 2012 from Southeast Asia, straight through the south of India and right through the middle of Africa to somewhere on the Guinean Gulf in about half a day.
- adamcharnock 6y agoThat sounds to me like those ships are missing transponder data for some reason, and the visualisation is extrapolating between to distant data points. Not sure why this would be the case. Transponder turned off? Data missing for other reasons?
- dwheeler 6y agoQuite possible. I've never seen a perfectly clean dataset of any significant size. Big datasets have all sorts of weirdness unless there was an extraordinary effort to keep them pristine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vonwoodson 6y agoWhat you’re witnessing is a self reported dataset from an international community (read as “unconcerned with The Protestant Work Ethic”) of ship captains and owners. There are so many edge cases and oddities that the more you look the more you’ll find. The moral of the story here is that you cannot accept AIS data, or any single data source, to be God’s Truth; you must always skeptical of the data before your eyes, lest you fall victim to “The Analyst’s Fallacy” (believing that the data presented is all the data there is) and create false stories in your mind.
- jgalt212 6y agoI didn't know George Tenet was on HN.
- s_fischer 6y agoCouldn't a more rational theory be that the data is essentially captured over VHF radio waves and there can be data loss due to things like gaps in capture ranges, faulty capture devices, faulty transponders, or even signal congestion?
- junon 6y agoI would wager that the data is imperfect and the points are tweened to discrete samples rather than having a high detail point-to-point path. You'll probably see traveling over land more like cutting a corner. Just a hunch.
- hobbescotch 6y agoDoes anyone know where they get the data for these shipping map sites?
- paulgb 6y agoIn this case, the underlying data is from exactEarth. It’s not free data. I believe exactEarth obtains the data by reading the pings from the ship’s transponders. https://www.exactearth.com/product-exactearth-shipview https://www.exactearth.com/product-exactearth-shipview
- tinus_hn 6y agoIt’s free in the sense that there are projects where as long as you are operating an antenna feeding data, you get access to a feed of all data for free with the only restriction being you can’t compete by just restreaming the complete feed.
- paulgb 6y agoOh that's interesting, thanks. So I guess it's similar to ADS-B exchange[1] and the like but for ships. Have you operated an antenna, by chance? I've considered building an ADS-B receiver to satisfy my curiosity about the planes I see out my window all day. [1] https://www.adsbexchange.com/ https://www.adsbexchange.com/
- pottertheotter 6y agoIf you want to try the ADS-B receiver, you can do it for < $40. It's out of stock currently, but last year I bought the first one on this page https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ https://www.rtl-sdr.com/buy-rtl-sdr-dvb-t-dongles/ I got busy with other things so haven't done much with it, but there are some Python libraries that made ADS-B easy.
- dutchmartin 6y agoModern vessels are required to have a AIS transponder. This is a radio that sends the ships speed, position, angle and optionally their destination around by marine (VHF) radio. These maps are probably made by having thousands of receivers recording the AIS data.
- hellbannedguy 6y agoThere are pirates (thieves, but I like Pirate better?) whom were renting luxury boats in the Mediterranean, and stealing them. They would fly to Europe, and dress like rich fancy boys. They would then rent the ships for vacation. They would take the transponder off the luxury vessel, and put it on a toy boat. The owner would check on his vessel, and it all looked fine. Meanwhile, the thieves would have the boat in Russia in a few days. (I believe they got 100 boats. This article reminded me of the caper.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- antihero 6y agoNot going to lie but this sounds far more entertaining than sitting at my dining room all day making computer programs.
- kinduff 6y agoI lol'd. Sometimes when I read these kind of stories, including phishing and hacking ones, there's this tiny inner evil in me that wants to do bad things, but then I remember consequences and that being good usually pays off.
- 1-more 6y agoSome very sketchy back of a napkin in my head math says that my fake email job[1] amounts to pulling off multiple boat heists every year without the intervention of the authorities (whether legitimate or—more problematic—illegitimate). I'm getting away with a lot here. [1] https://twitter.com/Eve6/status/1341031553078448131?s=20 https://twitter.com/Eve6/status/1341031553078448131?s=20
- nabeards 6y agoThe Imp of the Perverse, of course.
- temp8964 6y ago
- zeristor 6y agoIt would be interesting to see this with more recent data. Ships taking the Northern Arctic route etc.
- jstanley 6y agoIf you click to about the middle of May and wait a few seconds, you get a ship flying across the middle of Africa. I wonder what happened there :)
- nerdponx 6y agoThere's one flying over Saudi Arabia in August, too.
- dotancohen 6y agoThat's a carpet.
- argvargc 6y agoSaw that too, and across Europe in December. Found the answer in the sites FAQ: > Why do ships sometimes appear to move across land? > In some cases this is because there are ships navigating via canals or rivers that aren’t visible on the map. Generally, though, this effect is an artefact of animating a ship between two recorded positions with missing data between, especially when the positions are separated by a narrow strip of land. We may develop the map to remove this effect in the future.
- wodenokoto 6y agoI’d love it if I could fast forward to the Suez congestion
- dotancohen 6y agoOr back to the 1967 - 74 Suez blockage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- euske 6y agoAlso happened to know about this site just today, thanks to the video by Johnny Harris (who covered a lot of geopolitical stuff recently). Awesome stuff. cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PbgYReEUO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PbgYReEUO8
- wingworks 6y agoYeah that's where I found out about it too, was pretty surprised it was never posted on HN over the years.
- robinhouston 6y agoIt has been posted here before. I posted it when we first made it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539
- pbrw 6y agoIs there any economy/strategic game about delivering goods with cargo ships, containers, etc.? I would love to play it.
- scrollaway 6y agoOffworld Trading Company is close to what you're looking for i think. But it's not ship-centric.
- ryandrake 6y agoGood game overall, but terrible end-game. You're playing along, building and making money and no obvious mistakes, and then all of a sudden you get the big pink screen that says "Sorry, someone else made more money than you and decided to buy you. Game over. Better luck next time!"
- ekianjo 6y agoPorts of call https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game)
- twobitshifter 6y agoThe South China Sea looks like a traffic jam.
- tyingq 6y agoThere's some interesting anomoly at the north east top bit of South America (both Colombia and Venezuela) where some really fast boats are regularly skipping across land.
- qndreoi 6y agoSame thing seems to be happening to Great Lakes freighters crossing UP of Michigan over land.
- everybodyknows 6y agoGuess: Interpolation between actual GPS samples.
- graderjs 6y agoGreat live / interactive data visualization. Great voiceover narration. Weird, weird choice of pondering, melancholy rainy-day ballerina-dance music. Is it a British thing?
- dasudasu 6y agoI think the point is that we're supposed to feel sad about this economic activity because it's emitting tons of CO2.
- graderjs 6y agoI think so too. still seemed like only one of the points it was making there's a lot of other interesting information in there. Kind of weird that music but hey I guess everyone has got their editorial stance :)
- robinhouston 6y agoHa ha! I think this says more about Duncan’s music taste than anything else. I don’t think he was trying to make any sort of point: he just chose music he liked.
- robinhouston 6y agoIt’s lovely to see this here! I made it a few years ago; it was the last project we made under the Kiln banner before we devoted all our efforts to building a software platform (Flourish) instead. If anyone has any questions, AMA!
- edge17 6y agoWhere does the data come from?
- robinhouston 6y agoWe were commissioned to make the map by the UCL Energy Institute, who had a research license from exactEarth for this historical AIS data. If you press the little info button at the top right, you get some basic information, including this: Where did you get the data and who paid? Our data sources for shipping positions are exactEarth for AIS data (location/speed) and Clarksons Research UK World Fleet Register (static vessel information). We are very grateful to our funders, the European Climate Foundation.
- madengr 6y agoWhy no traffic shown inland on the Mississippi?
- hjb 6y agoIf you go to the 12 of June 2012 you can see a ship making its way across the Sahara. I assume this is a data funny.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agofurther discussion from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11533539