This is the ninth "through the window" type of post I've written and is definitely the last for the year. It's the view of Atlanta's Midtown skyline, from the Palomar Kimpton hotel, late at night, after everyone's gone home and just the buildings and lights remain. There's something completely compelling to me about these night time scenes; maybe it's because you just don't tend to see views like this in and around London.

But this isn't the main reason for this post. This post is about hotel bath robes. You know the sort of thing, a generally white, toweling affair that nice hotels provide for you, together with a helpful notice that a large sum of money will be added to your hotel bill should you feel compelled to take the robe home with you. The Palomar, which is a nice boutique sort of hotel, has these bath robes. But in no way can they be classified as white or in any way ordinary. Oh no ...

.. there's also a tiger skin effect number hanging up in the wardrobe in case fake zebra skin isn't your style. You'll hopefully be relieved to hear that I just couldn't bring myself to put either of them on.

To be filed under the "slightly self promoting" department, earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.

You might have noticed but I'm a reasonably big Twitter user. Actually, I should be more precise. I'm a reasonably big Twitter API user ... I tend to use Tweetdeck on my mobile devices and on my laptop. I very rarely use Twitter on the web, and so I've only just noticed how Twitter are handling the display of geotagged Tweets. Take a look below and you'll see that on the accompanying map that they're rolling up from the point of the geocode to the nearest administrative geographic entity and highlighting this in a rather fetching shade of transparent red.

By my reckoning, this is the eighth "through the window" post I've written. Mostly the view through the window is the same, day in, day out, but sometimes it gets interesting. Like this night-time view of Chicago's Magnificent Mile.

Taken from the window of my room on the 17th. floor of Chicago's Intercontinental Hotel, this is high rise, downtown America at its best. America is always a culture clash to me and no more so than my room in the Historic Tower of the Intercontinental. This wing of the hotel is a 42 story rework of the Medinah Athletic Club, built in 1929 just before the Stock Market crash later that year. When the building was converted into a hotel, most of the original floor plans had been lost, resulting in over 175 different room layouts and sizes over the 42 floors of the building.

Of course, a building built in 1929 wouldn't really class as historic by European standards, but walking through the hotel is like stepping back in time and given the building's checkered history, I think for once the "historic" appellation is well and truly merited.

Photo Credits: Gary Gale on Flickr.

From the department of cartographical curiosities comes this wonder; a map of the world but with the countries changed so that their population size corresponds to the size of each country. It's a map of the world; but not as we know it and has cropped up in several places online, including Frank Jacob's excellent Strange Maps blog.

In this new world order, the United Kingdom now sits, landlocked, in the middle of Africa, where the Republic of Niger is usually found and Germany has migrated in a South Easterly direction and now sits where you'd expect to find Saudi Arabia. The map also notes the interesting coincidences that the United States, Yemen, Brazil and Ireland don't actually move and correspond precisely to their place in the population ranking.

Photo Credits: JPALMZ (original source unknown).

There are some places you really don't want to check into using one of the many location based social networks. There's a variety of suggestions of this nature on the web including funeral homes, an ex-partner's house, jail or the same bar (every night). It now seems you can add military bases (when you're in a war zone) to the list.

A recent report highlighted concerns that the US Air Force has over troops using location based apps, with the Air Force posting a warning on an internal web site on the matter.

"All Airmen must understand the implications of using location-based services," said a message on the internal Air Force network. The features, such as Facebook's 'Check-in,' Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt "allow individuals with a smartphone to easily tell their friends their location," it said. "Careless use of these services by Airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications," said the message, which was posted on November 5, according to spokesman Major Chad Steffey.

The age old adage about Military Intelligence being an oxymoron springs to mind.