If you're wondering how "close" two places are, a geographic map doesn't help much anymore. If the airports are good--or if there's a bullet train nearby--hundreds of miles might as well be down the street. Point being, "distance" is now really a function less of geography, than of the transport networks we've invented.

Which is why researchers at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, and the World Bank, created this gorgeous map. They first created a model, which calculated how long it would take to travel from a given point, to the nearest city of 50,000 people or more; the model includes rail, road, and river networks.

Then they plotted these results on a color coded map: The brighter an area, the closer it is to a big city; the darker it is, the further out it is. (The blue lines above represent oceanic shipping lanes.)

As the New Scientist reports:

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilization as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city--around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.

The most remote place: Tibet, parts of which are as much as three weeks away from a city--with the journey comprising 20 days on foot.

Check out the New Scientist's entire gallery of 11 different maps.

Related Stories: F1 Racing's Influence, from Wheelchairs to Mars Landers Scientists Design "Virtual Twins" to Pre-test Medical Treatments Measuring GDP by How Bright a Country Is at Night

Topics: Design, info graphic, data visualization, dataviz, infographics, geography, Innovation, Technology, New Scientist Magazine, Joint Research Centre, Italy, The World Bank Group, European Commission

A Secret for Contending with Colleagues

Instead of puzzling over the behavior of others, work on changing your reaction to it, says Peter Bregman

By Peter Bregman

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Posted on How We Work: September 10, 2009 10:01 AM

A few months ago my wife Eleanor came home upset after an incident with one of the parents at our daughter's school. That afternoon, when Eleanor said hello to Michelle, Michelle completely ignored her. Thinking maybe Michelle hadn't heard her, Eleanor said hello again, this time louder. Again, no response. Michelle wasn't speaking on the phone or in a conversation with another parent. She was able to respond, she just refused to. Eleanor was getting the silent treatment. Not one to give up, she said hello a third time. Finally, Michelle mumbled something without looking up and walked away.

Eleanor wasn't friends with Michelle. They had only spoken a few times in the past, most notably when she called Eleanor to complain about something our daughter did. Still, she was thrown off balance by Michelle's cold shoulder. It was one of those small things that's hard to get out of your mind. She wasn't expecting it.

We are constantly shocked by the things other people say and do or by the things they don't say and don't do. How can my boss have ignored me? How can my colleague have taken the credit? How can my employee have made that mistake? Can you believe my manager said that to me in front of all those other people? How can my partner be so inconsiderate? Why doesn't my spouse appreciate what I do for her?

When I coach executives or mediate conflicts between leaders, each person is always amazed at how the other people behave. This has led me to a very simple conclusion.

The problem is not us. And it's not them. The problem is our expectations.

It's not that people behave well or badly. It's that we expect them to behave differently than they do. Even when they have proven our expectation wrong time and time again.

At this point, should you still be surprised when your boss for the 100th time doesn't invite you to a meeting? Or when you send a colleague a nice email and it goes unanswered? Again.

Here's my advice: don't go to a hardware store and get upset when they won't sell you milk.

In this case, the answer to frustration is acceptance. It's amazing how changing your expectations can change your experience.

Because the world is more global and organizations are more diverse, the likelihood we will interact with people very different from us is increasing exponentially. And people who are different from us do things we don't expect or want them to do. Sometimes they don't look at us when we speak to them. Sometimes they talk back. Sometimes they don't talk at all. They defy our expectations, and we feel frustrated.

Remember the golden rule? Treat other people the way you'd like to be treated? Forget it. It doesn't apply anymore, if it ever did. Try this new rule instead: Treat other people the way they'd like to be treated.

If you don't like to be micromanaged, for example, you probably try to avoid micromanaging others. But there are some times and some places where that would be a mistake. Like India, for example.

According to Mike Schell, co-author of the excellent book, Managing Across Cultures: The 7 Keys to Doing Business with a Global Mindset, Indian workers prefer—and expect— to be micromanaged. Mike told me recently: "That ultimate sin of Western managers is the best way to get things accomplished in some cultures. Once you begin to treat people the way they want to be treated, you'll find the results much more rewarding. When operating in a new country, we don't just need word translators. We need people translators."

In some cultures it's important for meetings to start on time. In others, it makes no difference. In some cultures it's rude to interrupt. In others, it's simply the norm.

It's that time of year again, when our freezers are filled with the summer's bounty in preparation for the long winter months ahead. Get the most out of your freezer, and learn a few of its other uses, with these great tricks.

Photo by: Stevedepolo

Freezers are hard working appliances that can do more than just keep your bagged veggies chilled. Try on one of these 10 ideas below and see if you can make it pull double duty, or at least keep it running a little more efficiently:

Can I freeze that? A Guide to Freezer Do's and Don'ts

More often than not things can be saved from expiration date, mold or for a later use, by freezing them. But how do you know what can be frozen and how long it keeps? The National Center for Home Food Preservation has done the dirty work for you and made a list! (Original Post) Photo by gregoryjameswalsh

Unstick Plastic Wrap in the Freezer

Plastic Wrap loses it's static cling when placed in the freezer. It will attach to any bowl or plate that needs covering, but eliminates it sticking back on itself. (Original Post) Photo by Mike Wade

Freeze Ground Meat in Small Portions with a Chopstick

The extra 10 minutes it takes to thaw ground meat in the microwave is time you could have spent doing something else. Eliminate it by pressing a chopstick into the meat on the outside of a zip top bag. It will allow you to break off as much as you need without thawing the entire amount. (Original Post)

Preserve Surplus Summer Herbs for Winter Use

Fresh herbs bought from your local grocer can cost more than buying an entire plant. Try chopping and covering them with water, stock or oil before freezing. They'll be ready for any dish, all winter long. (Original Post) Photo by suavehouse113

Make Your Freezer More Efficient

Freezing used plastic bottles or jugs (milk and orange juice work great) full of water will help keep your freezer at a level temperature and use less energy to maintain it. (Original Post) Photo by Sarah Rae Trover

Save Your Hard Drive in the Freezer

A hard drive that is left in the freezer for 24 hours and then quickly inserted back into your machine can make a recovery. Or at least long enough to back things up before it says adios forever. (Original Post)

Tame Freezer Burn to Keep Food Tasty

Freezer burn can get the best of everything in your freezer. To make sure it doesn't happen as frequently, try keeping your freezer at a more steady temperature and keeping out as much air as possible. (Original Post)

Make Freezer Jam as an Easy Alternative to Canning

Freezer Jam is an easy way to use up remaindered fruits and doesn't even require a waterbath or any other canning know-how. Just a little pectin. (Original Post) Photo by Jennie Faber

Convert a Chest Freezer into a Super-Efficient Refrigerator

Chest freezers use 1/10th of the energy that an upright refrigerator does. With the addition of a thermostat, a chest freezer can end up being the ideal place to keep things cool, without freezing them. (Original Post)

Frost-Proof Meat with "Drugstore Wrap"

Zip top bags and Seal-a-Meal systems can be time consuming and inefficient. Try kicking it old school and wrap your meats in freezer paper for a frost free freezer experience. (Original Post) Photo by Rio Designs

How do you put your freezer to good use—apart from the obvious? Have something to add to the list above? Sound off in the comments.

Send an email to Sarah Rae Trover, the author of this post, at tips@lifehacker.com.

Even though SMS text messages are only 160 characters and cost your cellphone carrier virtually nothing to transmit, many mobile plans charge subscribers 5 to 20 cents per message. If you're a text message fanatic — or you have a teenager in your house — you already know that these costs can really add up in a month.

However, using online services, you can get around SMS overage costs. Here are a few ways to text to your heart's content without breaking the bank.

Text via instant messenger: For years, the popular AOL instant messenger service has offered little-known SMS support. To text message a cellphone from AIM (and therefore avoid the sending fee), send an IM as usual to the phone number prefixed by a +1. For example, to text 718-555-1212, in AIM, send a message to +17185551212. That message will arrive on the cellphone as a text message. You can use this trick via any AIM client — be it Meebo, iChat on your Mac, Digsby, or your cellphone's IM client. Keep in mind that your recipient does get charged to receive the message, so IM sparingly. Note also that the first time you send a message to a phone via AIM, the recipient gets the choice to accept or decline your messages going forward.

If you're not an AIM user, Gmail Chat offers a similar feature (U.S. only). In Gmail Labs, enable the "Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat" feature. Then you can send an SMS to any cellphone from within Gmail by just entering the phone number as your recipient.

In both cases, if your recipient replies to your message as usual, you'll get it via instant messenger. The bad news is that if you don't have your instant messenger set up on your cellphone and you walk away from the computer, you might not get it.

Text for free via Google Voice. Google's new phone service Google Voice is still invitation-only, but when it opens up to the public it will take a monster-sized bite out of cellphone carriers' SMS fee pie. Google Voice gives you a new phone number (porting existing numbers is supposed to be coming soon) and lets you text message from that number for free via the web site and various mobile applications, now available for BlackBerry and Android phones. The advantage to Google Voice's SMS service is that unlike the IM options above, the text message you send comes from your personal Google Voice phone number instead of AIM or Gmail Chat's special middleman codes. You can also have your Google Voice text messages fwded to your phone via email or SMS, so you can get replies whether or not you're at your computer.

(Google Voice also does all sorts of other interesting phone-related things, like voicemail transcription and rules based on time of day, sender, and contact group — but that's a whole other post.)

How do you reduce text messaging costs (without paying for the unlimited plan)? Let us know in the comments.

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By Jason Fitzpatrick, 9:00 AM on Sun Aug 16 2009, 56,622 views (Edit, to draft, Slurp)

Gone are the days when the only place to find apartment listings was the back of a newspaper. Now you can conduct apartment searches of all sorts online, and its almost always packed with additional photos, video, and information.

Photo by cincyproject.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite ways to find apartments. We've tallied up the votes and now we're back to showcase the five most popular tools you use to find yourself some new digs.

HotPads

HotPads approaches apartment search in a novel way. In addition to offering the basic city/price searches found in any apartment search engine, HotPads has heat maps. When you search for apartments with HotPads, you can overlay heat maps of various data onto the map like population density, household income, median age, median rent, and foreclosure data. The heat maps give you a view of your future neighborhood that a simple apartment listing can't. In addition to the heat maps, each listing has a breakdown of how the price of the listing you're looking at compares to others in the zip code, city, county, and state. You can search HotPads for apartments as well as use it to search for a room to sublet or a roommate to sublet a room from you.

PadMapper / Craigslist

Craigslist is a popular destination among Lifehacker readers searching for apartment listings, but it isn't the most feature packed apartment listing tool. Fortunately PadMapper takes the spartan listings on Craigslist and aggregates them into a Google Maps mashup. You can search PadMapper just like you would Google Maps, and every pushpin in the map is an apartment listing. PadMapper results can be filtered by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, and pets. If you're already using Craigslist to do your apartment searching, PadMapper will put an extra zing to your search.

Apartments.com

Apartments.com is a veteran of the apartment search field. Their color-coded neighborhood maps will jog a few memories even if you haven't been apartment searching for some time. They don't have the flashiest site in the market, but thanks to being one of the original players in the online apartment-search field, they've got an absolutely enormous pool of listings. Nearly every listing has a photo tour and a significant number of them have 360° virtual tours. The color-coded maps are quite useful if you're unfamiliar with the layout of the city you're browsing in and help you quickly drill down from region to individual neighborhood. Apartments.com also has an iPhone app which combines the listings at Apartments.com with the GPS chip in the iPhone to create a location-aware apartment search tool. Love the neighborhood you're driving through? Hit a button in the iPhone app and see if anything is available.

MyApartmentMap

MyApartmentMap has quite a slew of features beyond simply indexing apartment listings. You can jump to Google Streetview to check out your new neighborhood, browse an interactive map of local businesses and social spots, and get rental data for your new city and neighborhood to compare the prices of the apartments you're looking at to the city averages—a rather handy feature if you're moving to a city with a market you're unfamiliar with. You can also search by colleges to see listings for off-campus housing surrounding that college in addition to searching by city and neighborhood. If you don't find anything you like, you can set up email and RSS alerts to be notified when listings that fit your requirements appear. MyApartmentMap pulls listings from Craigslist (like PadMapper) as well as a variety of other online resources.

Pounding the Pavement

As awesome as scouring the internet for a new pad can be, the whole world hasn't been digitized. That cool little apartment over a garage in a scenic Victorian neighborhood you just love probably won't ever make an appearance on a huge apartment aggregation site. Sometimes you just have to hit the streets, ask questions, and see what turns up. As we pointed out in our guide to apartment hunting, the greatest apartments often never advertise beyond putting out a "For Rent" sign because they don't have to; people flock to the best neighborhoods looking for them. Photo by Rodrigo Cayo.

Now that you've had a chance to look over the contenders for the title of best apartment search tool, it's time to cast your vote to see which tool will be crowned king of the pad-finding-castle.

Best Apartment Search Tool? (Poll Closed)

HotPads 15% (229 votes)

PadMapper/Craigslist 20% (303 votes)

Apartments.com 11% (169 votes)

MyApartmentMap 27% (412 votes)

Pounding the Pavement 18% (278 votes)

Other 9% (134 votes)

Total Votes: 1525

Best Apartment Search Tool?(polls)

Have a tool we didn't list? Shocked that scouting-via-airplane wasn't considered? Sound off in the comments with your apartment finding tips, tricks, and tools.