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kottke.org posts about maps
Scientists un-discover an island
A group of Australian scientists sailing to research plate tectonics discovered more than they were expecting. Well, less. They sailed right through where an island should have been.
Dr. Maria Seton, our cheif scientist, noticed that on the path that we were taking there was this very unusal island. Essentially it was on all the Google Earth maps and it was on all the weather charts. But when you zoom in on it it was just a black blob. Google had no photos from it. It was just this sort of slit in the Earth.
(via ★interesting-links)
Britain Has Invaded All but 22 Countries
Of the current 200 nations in the world, the British have invaded all but 22 of them. The lucky 22 include Sweden, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Bolivia, and Belarus. The full analysis is available in Stuart Laycock’s book, All the Countries We’ve Ever Invaded.
Stuart Laycock, the author, has worked his way around the globe, through each country alphabetically, researching its history to establish whether, at any point, they have experienced an incursion by Britain.
Only a comparatively small proportion of the total in Mr Laycock’s list of invaded states actually formed an official part of the empire.
The remainder have been included because the British were found to have achieved some sort of military presence in the territory — however transitory — either through force, the threat of force, negotiation or payment.
Incursions by British pirates, privateers or armed explorers have also been included, provided they were operating with the approval of their government.
The US currently has military personnel stationed in all but 43 countries.
For instance, as of Sept. 30, 2011, there were 53,766 military personnel in Germany, 39,222 in Japan, 10,801 in Italy and 9,382 in the United Kingdom. That makes sense. But wait, scanning the list, you also see nine troops in Mali, eight in Barbados, seven in Laos, six in Lithuania, five in Lebanon, four in Moldova, three in Mongolia, two in Suriname and one in Gabon.
But the presence in most of those countries is due to diplomatic usage of military personnel. (thx, aaron)
County-by-county voting maps for the past 112 years
The Blaze has a collection of county-by-county election maps for every US Presidential election since 1900.
The video at the bottom is worth watching to witness the shift between a north/south divided country to a urban/rural divided country over the past 20 years.
US state matching game
Starting with a blank map of the US, the object is to place each state in its proper place.
My average error was 8 miles. A better test would be to start each state with the blank map…placing Colorado in the western part of the country without any guide is much tougher than doing it last. (via @notrobwalker)
1000 years of war in 5 minutes
This is a time lapse world map showing all the battles that have occurred in the past 1000 years. Worth sitting through the whole thing to see Europe go absolutely bonkers in the late 1930s.
(via @DavidGrann)
Radio’s circuits shaped like London tube map
There’s not a whole not more to this radio than what it looks like, but I will forever have a soft spot for things that mimic the London tube map.
Now, if it contained vacuum tubes or something…
How Google builds its maps
The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal gets an inside look at how Google builds its maps (and what that means for the future of everything). “If Google’s mission is to organize all the world’s information, the most important challenge — far larger than indexing the web — is to take the world’s physical information and make it accessible and useful.”
NFL TV maps 2012
Once again, here’s the link to the maps that show which NFL games will be shown in which parts of the country.
Infinite Atlas and Infinite Map
In July, we mentioned Infinite Boston, a project from William Beutler to map and photo the Boston-related locations in Infinite Jest. Today Beutler announced Infinite Atlas, which expands nationally on this project, and Infinite Map, a limited edition print featuring 250 “of the most interesting locations” from Infinite Jest.
A fractal tour of Earth
Paul Bourke has collected a bunch of images from Google Earth of natural features that display fractal patterns. This one, from Egypt, is flat-out amazing:
(via ★interesting)
Google Earth Time Machine
The Google Earth Time Machine blog uses Google’s historical satellite maps to make now-and-then comparisons of interesting places around the world. Like the transformation of this Texas river bend into an oxbow lake over 60+ years:
(via stellar)
Map made from movie names
Design firm Dorothy has created a map where all the features are movie-themed: Jurassic Park, Shutter Island, Howards End, the Soylent Green…that sort of thing.
See also their song map.
2012 map of baseball player hometowns
If you’ve ever wondered if any Major League Baseball players come from your favorite city, this is the map for you. See also the 2011-2012 NHL Player map. The maps are by Mike Morton, and I’m fascinated by the fact the NHL had players from both Africa and Brazil, while MLB did not. (via @jonahkeri)
An Atlas for the Blind
The Atlas of the United States Printed for the Use of the Blind, published in 1837 before Braille was widely used, used embossed printing of lines, words, and symbols to be finger-readable.
Without a drop of ink in the book, the text and maps in this extraordinary atlas were embossed heavy paper with letters, lines, and symbols. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first atlas produced for the blind to read without the assistance of a sighted person. Braille was invented by 1825, but was not widely used until later. It represented letters well, but could not represent shapes and cartographic features.
(via @ftrain)
Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.
This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe.
There’s also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★interesting)
Update: The originals got taken down but the company responsible for the historical mapping software put up similar versions that I’ve embedded/linked above. But the new versions are worse and not quite so fantastic. Why is that always the case? (thx, andrew)
Matthew Cusick’s map collages
I love love love these collages made up of mappy bits from Matthew Cusick.
(thx, mouser)
Visualization of shipping routes from 1750 to 1855
This video is a visualization of the how ships moved goods and people around the world from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
Here’s more on how it was done.
This shows mostly Spanish, Dutch, and English routes — they are surprisingly constant over the period (although some empires drop in and out of the record), but the individual voyages are fun. And there are some macro patterns — the move of British trade towards India, the effect of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on.
There are times in the video when a single nation dominates all of the shipping traffic…the British in the early 1800s and the Dutch from the mid 1830s on.
Lovely watercolor maps
Well, now, this is gorgeous. Stamen Design overlaid watercolor textures on OpenStreetMap map tiles to show you what it would look like if your favorite watercolorist designed Google Maps.
It’s fun to scroll and scroll. (via @tomcoates)
And since we all could stand to look at more pretty things, watch this video of what different landscapes would look like if Earth had Saturn’s rings. (via @ianmurren)
The Best US Map
This map of the US was made by David Imus — he worked seven days a week for two years on it — and it won the Best of Show award at the Cartography and Geographic Information Society competition for 2010. Here’s why.
According to independent cartographers I spoke with, the big mapmaking corporations of the world employ type-positioning software, placing their map labels (names of cities, rivers, etc.) according to an algorithm. For example, preferred placement for city labels is generally to the upper right of the dot that indicates location. But if this spot is already occupied — by the label for a river, say, or by a state boundary line — the city label might be shifted over a few millimeters. Sometimes a town might get deleted entirely in favor of a highway shield or a time zone marker. The result is a rough draft of label placement, still in need of human refinement. Post-computer editing decisions are frequently outsourced-sometimes to India, where teams of cheap workers will hunt for obvious errors and messy label overlaps. The overall goal is often a quick and dirty turnaround, with cost and speed trumping excellence and elegance.
By contrast, David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus — a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client — did it all by himself. He used a computer (not a pencil and paper), but absolutely nothing was left to computer-assisted happenstance. Imus spent eons tweaking label positions. Slaving over font types, kerning, letter thicknesses. Scrutinizing levels of blackness. It’s the kind of personal cartographic touch you might only find these days on the hand-illustrated ski-trail maps available at posh mountain resorts.
Update: The map is now in its fourth version of the second edition, updated in Sept 2022. I updated the image above to a snippet of the newest map.
If the Nazis conquered America
Matthew Porter’s photo composite Empire on the Platte is arresting.
Pairs nicely with Melissa Gould’s Neu-York, “an obsessively detailed alternate-history map, imagining how Manhattan might have looked had the Nazis conquered it in World War II”.
In 1942, Life magazine speculated about what an Axis invasion of North America might look like.
NFL TV maps for the 2011-2012 season
These maps are updated every week and they tell you which games are on TV in which parts of the country. Not an issue if you have DirectTV or whatever, but for the rest of us… (thx, joshua)
How old is your globe?
This handy chart of defunct country names can help you determine the age of your globe.
When you find the FORMER place name on your globe instead of the NEW name, you have confimed the age of your globe.
Update: XKCD’s sliiiiiightly fictitious Guide to Figuring Out the Age of an Undated World Map would be a good way to present the chart above.
Rorschmap
Rorschmap is a trippy Google Maps mashup by James Bridle that provides kaleidoscopic views of locations from around the world. Here’s Paris, complete with MegaSeine.
Melty roads
Clement Valla collects Google Earth images where the 2-D to 3-D terrain mapping doesn’t work as well as it should. (via lens culture)
OpenStreetBlock
OpenStreetBlock is an open web service developed by Michael Frumin that converts lat/log coordinates to plain English location names.
OpenStreetBlock is a web service for turning a given lat/lon coordinate (e.g. 40.737813,-73.997887) into a textual description of the actual city block to which the coordinate points (e.g. “West 14th Street bet. 6th Ave. & 7th Ave”) using OpenStreetMap data.
There are likely many applications for such a service. It should be quite useful any time you might need to succinctly describe a given location without using a map.
(via stellar)
How Manhattan got its grid
The NY Times has an interactive look at how the Manhattan grid came to be.
In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Compare his map, along with other historic information, to modern-day Manhattan.
This article has more about the map. (via ★raul)
Mississippi River system as subway map
A map of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries drawn in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
Prints are available. (via strange maps)
Musical subway map
Alexander Chen made a version of the NYC subway map that plays music as the trains intersect routes.
At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.
Check out the full version; there are more details here. See also Isle of Tune. (via about 20 people on Twitter just now)
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