Divining The Ley Lines of Globalisation

We aspire towards seamlessness; ease of use and elided effort increasingly typify our online and offline interaction with reality. We like any project which makes this missing effort more manifest and that’s why we took note of Ethan Zuckerbergs recent tinkering with a Danish shipping cost calculator.

Danish shipping superpower Maersk has recently opened up it’s significant computational resources to the layperson. Though admittedly not as user intuitive as an iPhone/android app one can install this calculator into ones browser. From there

you can calculate the cost of shipping a 20′ container of “umbrellas, sun umbrellas, walking-sticks, seat-sticks, whips, riding-crops and parts thereof” (yes, that’s one of the available categories) from Auckland to Dubai: $2451.02

Maersk’s website also offers nicely detailed shipping maps, detailing those same routes that were all but paralysed in the immediate wake of the global financial crisis. It provides a fascinating insight into the figures and flows that make having the exotic at your fingertips a possibility.

Maersk Shipping Calculator

[via Ethan Zuckerman]