Thursday, January 4, 2007

When Sailing the High Seas, Avoid Indonesia


I'm reading through a stack of new-ish books, prepping for some booktalks in the coming weeks. In one of the novels I read yesterday, a survival/adventure called Red Sea, a 14-year-old girl is left to captain a sailboat to safety after modern-day pirates attack them, killing her stepfather and critically wounding her mother.

Today, I stumbled across a list called 50 Things to Do With Google Maps Mashups (a mashup is an online service or information source created by combining the power of two separate Internet sources, like a list of houses for sale with a mapping service). And wouldn't you know, somebody out there has combined 2006 data from the International Piracy Reporting Center with Google maps, to create a "Live Piracy Map" of high risk areas. Two attempted and two actual pirate attacks in the Red Sea in 2006, but oh, my. The Indonesian archipelago is the winner by a mile. Who knew?


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