CES kicks off properly in Vegas in a couple of days and my Twitter feed is already wall to wall with "leaked" press photos of TVs nobody can afford and gadgets that'll be forgotten by March. I'm not doing a CES roundup this year. Every tech site on the planet will have that covered fifteen times over by Thursday, and honestly the pre-show hype cycle exhausts me more than the actual show does. So instead, something that's been bugging me since New Year's.
You've probably seen the map. It's been all over Facebook and Twitter the last week or so — a graphic showing the Australian bushfires overlaid on a map of Europe, or sometimes the US, to show just how much land has burned. The scale is meant to stop you cold: fire covering an area roughly the size of a small country, stretching from what would be Amsterdam to Berlin if you dropped it on the continent. I saw it shared by at least four different friends, none of whom, as far as I can tell, questioned where it actually came from.
Here's the thing. That map isn't showing you a single contiguous fire. It's built from NASA/MODIS thermal hotspot data accumulated over months of fire activity, all the individual detection points stitched together into one shape. So what you're looking at is more like "everywhere a fire has been detected since the season started" than "here is the fire right now, burning as one mass." It's a real dataset, pulled from a real source, but the way it's being presented flattens months of separate fires into something that looks like a single apocalyptic blob eating a continent.
I want to be careful here, because I've already seen this correction get picked up by exactly the wrong people, the "see, it's not that bad, fake news" crowd, who are using a legitimate methodology quibble to wave away a genuinely catastrophic fire season. It is that bad. Millions of hectares gone, whole towns evacuated by boat off beaches because the roads out were on fire, koalas and other wildlife dying in numbers nobody's fully counted yet. None of that needs an exaggerated map to be true. The actual data, presented honestly, is horrifying enough on its own. Which is sort of my whole point: the map didn't need to cut corners, and the fact that it did means every screenshot of it that gets debunked later hands ammunition to people who want an excuse not to care.
This keeps happening with every major disaster now and it drives me up the wall. Someone takes a real dataset, runs it through a slightly-too-clever visualization, and it goes viral faster than any of the boring, accurate reporting ever could. Nobody checks the source line in small gray text at the bottom of an image before they hit retweet. I'm not innocent here either, I nearly shared the thing myself before a friend who actually works in GIS pointed out what MODIS hotspot data does and doesn't tell you. That's a genuinely useful skill, by the way, being able to glance at a viral chart and ask "wait, what's actually being measured here," and I don't think schools teach it nearly enough. Maybe that's a post for another day.
If you want an actual live view of what's burning, the NSW Rural Fire Service has a real map with current incidents, not historical accumulation, and it's not particularly hard to find if you go looking instead of trusting whatever's been reshared into your feed forty times. Takes about ten seconds.
Anyway. New decade, new year, and this is techpad's first post of it, ten-ish years into doing this thing since November 2011. I thought about writing one of those "here's what tech will look like in the 2020s" posts that every site does this week, and then I remembered how badly the "2020s will be the decade of the smart fridge" predictions from ten years ago aged, and decided to spare everyone. We'll just keep doing what this blog's always done: writing about whatever's actually interesting that week, badly formatted opinions included. Stay skeptical of your maps.