WEBVTT
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Rot playing troop in the minds of the beat Young.
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All right, we're getting comments Scott's Scott.
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Tompkins Bigfoot Mapping Project. Tell us who you are and
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what you do.
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Let's start with the bigfoot stuff. As you say, I'm
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Scott Tompkins. I created the Bigfoot Mapping Project, and the
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Bigfoot Mapping Project is a crowd sourced repository for Bigfoot reports, sightings, audibles, evidence,
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et cetera, all to be submitted by the general public
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who's had any experience or found anything to do with
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bigfoot into the map so we can get into the map,
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you know further on in the episode, but essentially it's
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a map centric crowd sourced repository for people to access, explore,
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and submit any information that they have about Bigfoot. Now me,
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I'm from New York, so it's nice to be chatting
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with another New Yorker like we were talking about in
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the green room. I'm from downstate near I'm from Beacon,
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which is about an hour north of New York City
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in the Hudson Valley, and I grew up out in
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the woods fishing, hunting, boating, camping, you name it, and
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went to college for gis which is geographic information systems,
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which is the background I have to be making the
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maps and the applications that I create. And from there
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I got into geophysical exploration, which is oil and gas
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exploration seismic some people notice seismic, and it's basically making
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a sonogram of the earth so you can see all
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the layers and geology beneath and the formations and faults
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and everything that's beneath the surface of the earth for
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basically drilling oil wells. And from there, during the exploration
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I was doing, I would talk to people about Bigfoot
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because I was out in middle of nowhere in a
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lot of places, and so they would tell me what
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was happening on their properties and their relatives, experiences, etc.
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And that gave me the idea to create the projects.
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So my professional in a way, my professional and educational
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experience and background has directly unintentionally influenced the creation of
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the Bigfoot mapping project, because had I not taken that route,
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I never would have had the background, or the capabilities,
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or the understanding or idea to capture all of this
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information in a semi novice anthropological anthropological approach in the
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application and in the database. So that's a little bit
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about me. I think you know, Mora will come out
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throughout the episode, but that's in a nutshell who I
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am and why I created the project.
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Yeah, and it's an amazing tool. I take a lot
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of notes just so you know I'm here for it.
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I need to.
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Ever, since I had a kid, I forget everything.
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No kidd, So what I was looking at is oh yeah,
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So and I'll ask the questions a little bit. But so,
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all right, so Bigfoot Mapping Project. Obviously, I'm pretty sure
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what you're going to answer when I say, what was
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your entry into this whole world of you know, high
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strangeness that that we kind of live in in this community.
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Was your gateway drug?
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Well, it was Bigfoot for sure, right, And so it's
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kind of a two fold answer. I touched on it
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earlier when I was doing the introducing myself, but prior
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to that, I had an experience on Mount Beacon that
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was kind of unexplainable. I was hiking with a friend
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around the backside of the reservoir.
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At the top of the mountain.
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There's a fire tower you can hike to, and you
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have to go around one of the trails goes around
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the backside of the reservoir and you can get to
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the fire tower and cup climb up and you can
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see the New York City skyline from top of the mountain.
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Is really cool. But as we were rounding the backside
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of the reservoir, there was basically a it would go.
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It went up a small hill and behind that hill
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was like a ridge that dropped down. And immediately behind
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that hill we couldn't see, but there was something screaming, guttural,
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like a gorilla tiger. I couldn't tell you what it was.
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And a really large tree started shaking violently all the
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way to the canopy. And this is something no way
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A grown man that you know, the rock couldn't have
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done it, you know. So we were fourteen, right, this
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is many years ago. We looked at each other and
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bolted down the mountain, right, And that was the first unexplainable,
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hair raising, scary thing. What it was I don't know,
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but we didn't have an easy explanation for it. So
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we've wondered what was that? Was a bigfoot? Was it
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somebody messing with us?
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We really don't know.
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So that got some curiosity, some adrenaline going and I
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realized that there could be some stuff out there in
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the woods that we you know, don't know or haven't seen,
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or is unexplained. Couple that with at the time, finding
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Bigfoot was really popular, right, gaining popularity, So it was
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a natural.
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Influence on.
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What I was interested in and the explanations I jumped to, right,
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because of course it was all over pop culture.
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You could and it was like, maybe that was Bigfoot.
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So fast forward and I've kind of forgotten about it.
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I've gone on through college and work and stuff. And then,
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like I was saying earlier, that experience out in the
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field really contributed to my idea to create the database.
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Where I was hearing other people's stories about Bigfoot, and
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I was hearing them in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, Louisiana,
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all over the place. So I started to realize that
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this wasn't just a localized phenomenon. It was happening everywhere,
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and that's where I got the idea to create the project.
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So my like I was saying in the intro, my background,
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my professional career, and then that's one experience in my
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early years really contributed to my gateway drug You know,
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they got me into Bigfoot, and I tell you know,
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I talked to Renee occasionally and I told her, I
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was like, you know, I used to watch you on
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Finding Bigfoot, and I kind of blame not blame you,
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but you had a direct influence on you know what
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I'm doing today through your show, and I don't think
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you know, how often do you get to say that
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to someone, right?
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So, yeah, that's cool.
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By the way, she's such.
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A lovely person, awesome, lovely person. So good to hear
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that stuff because sometimes, man, she's amazing, amazing those TV personalities.
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No, no, she's.
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I like her way more every time we talk. So
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I'm really lucky to have her in my corner. Is
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supportive and given advice and stuff, so I'm very grateful
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for that.
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I see. So I see that you get some of
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the data from BFROS. Why you get it directly from them?
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Or do do you like download what they have publicly available?
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So I started with a data set called Man Johnny's
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and that website stopped. It just stopped being updated in
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twenty sixteen. It was a really good website. It's a
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very good precursor, essentially to the Bigfoot mapping project. It's
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very similar in a lot of ways to what I'm doing.
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And what that website did was aggregate a lot of
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bigfoot databases into one map, essentially.
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Just a clearinghouse oft.
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Yeah, exactly.
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So I got that data set, and in that data set,
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there's the BFRO, there's the Kentucky Bigfoot Research Organization, there's
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a bunch of other different organizations data all aggregated together.
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And I used that as a starting point to populate
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the map for the Bigfoot Mapping product, and then along
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with that, I started crowdsourcing reports. So yes, I do
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have to credit the BFRO and Man Johnny's and all
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of the other organizations that did a lot of work
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prior to me coming along with my integrating that into
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the map.
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Really that they open that up to you too, because
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sometimes you hear people protect.
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Their interestingly enough you can actually they have on the
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website if you find the website. I don't know if
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it's still live, but when I found it, they have
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a download section. You could just download the whole database publicly. Right,
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it's very very useful.
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Why the two maps?
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Why the two maps? Well, the first one the old map.
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If you want to I like.
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The classic, the classic map.
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I like classic, So the classic map is just all
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the points on the map. And then this is actually
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probably a deeper answer than you expect to this question.
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The classic map really just shows you points.
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On a map.
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There's no actual right, the actual location, but the symbology
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will the actual points start to coalesce, and which can
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really make the map look busier in certain areas and
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give you the wrong idea about what's happening in an area,
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because it's not. Those symbols are like a font size, right,
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They're not actually true to you know, ground scale per se.
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So what I've done, especially when you zoom out, when
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you zoom in, like they'll they'll disperse right the closer
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you are to you know, one to one scale. But
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when you zoom out, things start to get crowded, right,
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and it can give you the wrong idea. And there's
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tons of maps all over the internet that look like that, right,
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There's that There's one big Foot map. Everybody's probably seen it.
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It's like a bunch of big foot on a screenshot
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of like Google Earth, and it looks like it's like
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bigfoots everywhere, but the symbols are huge, right, So they
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cover you know, half the state that they're in, and
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that's the problem with the classic map. It's a great
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map because you can really see, you know, all the
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points in an area. However, it can give you the
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wrong idea about what's happening, you know, in general in
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a certain area. So with that in mind, I created
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the new.
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Map, which is awesome. I love it. I love them,
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but I use them both, that's the thing.
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Yeah, I mean, that's why I kept them up there, right,
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because you know, some people prefer to work with the
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points all visible, and then the new map really does
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some analysis and displays that density analysis a hot spot
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essentially in the map for you, so that you know,
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you can really see an analysis of all those points
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and how they relate to each other in certain areas.
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That gives you better information. So the reason that I
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have two maps is, you know, there's different functionality in
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each map, but essentially I wanted the map to display
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what was really happening with Bigfoot, i e. Hot spots,
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rather than people trying to digest all those points in
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a map themselves, because they're just not going to show
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you what people are what they think they're pulling from
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the map, it's not informing people correctly, which is why
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I created the hotspot map.
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Yeah, which is really cool because it does kind of
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give you. It just gives you. It's awesome.
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There's all different ways to work, right. You might not
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care about the hot spots for what you're doing. You
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might just want to go and see all the points
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on the map, right, So I try to keep it
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open for people to work with things however they want
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to work with them.
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Right now, what kind of data? All right, So this
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kind of leads right into one of the questions that
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I've got about the whole data collection of this. Now,
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obviously a lot of this stuff is taken from other databases, right,
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and from people putting in their own recollection of a
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h encounter. Right For some reason, I couldn't. I mean,
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I've even gotten an encounter on here, right, I I've
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got a few, but I only put in one just
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because I wanted to see what it was like. Yeah,
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and it's cool, it's smooth, it's it's everything's to hear that.
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I'm just wondering about data, like do you have a
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way of like runching data, meaning like how many sightings
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of like cinnamon bigfoot? Do we have absolutely know what
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I mean or like foot size or like in like
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how does that correlate to the map? Are you able
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to do that type of stuff?
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Yes, So there's two parts to there's two parts to
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your answer or your question. There's two parts to the
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answer to your question.
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Yes.
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First part is what makes crunching data easy is standardization. Right,
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So that was the form that you went through and
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filled out and said no that you had a good
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experience on. Those are the fields in the form. Did
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you see a male bigfoot? You see female bigfoot? How
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tall was it? What color did you see? Et cetera,
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et cetera. And then there's the additional comments, right, what
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didn't I capture in that those standardized fields? That was
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still relevant to the report? And there's like five thousand
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characters you can add to five fields of a thousand