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The Economist redraws the map of Europe with some countries in new places.
In Britain’s place should come Poland, which has suffered quite enough in its location between Russia and Germany and deserves a chance to enjoy the bracing winds of the North Atlantic and the security of sea water between it and any potential invaders.
The Beauty of Maps is a BBC series that “[looks] at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell”. The site also links to another maps blog: Amazing Maps. (via junk_deluxe)
Nice timelapse map view of taxi traffic across Manhattan.
I’ve often wondered what an NYC version of Stamen’s Cabspotting project would look like.
What a great way to start off this morning: a new series of map-based illustrations by Christoph Niemann. Reserve Battery Park is a favorite. So is this omelet recipe:
Fully draggable, zoomable, Zelda-like map of NYC…this is awesome. But where are the Octoroks? (via waxy)
I like these Alphaposters by Happycentro, especially the gorgeous Lowercase F Island:
Data from Facebook reveals how the United States is split up into different regions like Stayathomia, Greater Texas, Dixie, and Mormonia.
Stretching from New York to Minnesota, [Stayathomia’s] defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.
(thx, dinu)
The interactive map on the NYC govt site has hi-resolution aerial photos from 1924 (click the camera and move the slider to 1924). Check out all the piers, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the old baseball stadiums, the LES (and everywhere else they built housing projects), Penn Station, and the skyscraperless Midtown. This is hours of fun.
Update: The NYC Oasis map features a satellite view from 1996 and an imagined sat view from 1609. (thx, steve)
Map^2 is a zoomable paper street map of London…to zoom in, you fold down the quadrant of the map you’re interested in.
(thx, peter)
An amazingly extensive Flash presentation of the eastern front in Europe during World War II. It takes a while for the Flash to load because of all the resources but well worth the wait if you’re at all interested in WWII. (thx, reis)
Stephen Von Worley wrote a nifty little web app for looking up US streets that share your (or your kid’s or your spouse’s) name. For instance, here are all the streets named Ollie and the streets named Meghan.
Fascinating map of Netflix rental patterns for NYC, Atlanta, Miami, and nine other US cities. I wonder if you could predict voting patterns according to where people rent Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Frost/Nixon. I wonder what the map for Napoleon Dynamite looks like?
Update: Here’s how the Times’ graphic was made.
Most of the interesting trends occurred on a local scale — stark differences between the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan, for example, or the east and west sides of D.C. — and weren’t particularly telling at a national scale. (We actually generated U.S. maps in PDF form that showed all 35,000 or so ZIPs, but when we flipped through them, with a few exceptions, we found the nationwide patterns weren’t nearly as interesting as the close-in views.)
The Known Universe zooms out from Tibet to the limits of the observable universe. Dim the lights, full-screen it in HD, and you’re in for a treat.
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
Since 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the three-dimensional mapping of the Universe. This cosmic cartography brings a new perspective to our place in the Universe and will redefine your sense of home. The Digital Universe Atlas is distributed to you via packages that contain our data products, like the Milky Way Atlas and the Extragalactic Atlas, and requires free software allowing you to explore the atlas by flying through it on your computer.
Who Lives Here? is an interactive map of New York City that shows income levels in the various neighborhoods of the city. (thx, tom)
People find likenesses of states, countries, and continents in the oddest places.
Britain is an militaristic lion with a Roman Imperial italic-type helmet. It sits upon a mound of riches gathered from its Empire.
Drawn by Keith Thompson…prints are available if you like. (thx, zoe)
Thompson’s maps may have been influenced by this 1870 map of Europe. (thx, mark)
From The Morning News, a collection of maps without labels or legend…can you guess what each map represents?
A wonderful character interaction map of the Lord of the Rings trilogy drawn by Randall Munroe. Here’s just a little part of it:
The Strange Maps book is out today. The book is based on the awesome Strange Maps blog, one the very few sites I have to exercise restraint in not linking to every single item posted there. The content of the book is adapted from the site, so of course it’s top shelf.
My only reservation in recommending the book is the design. When I cracked it open, I was expecting full-bleed reproductions of the maps, large enough to really get a detailed look at them. The maps *are* the book, after all. But that’s not the case…only a few of the maps get an entire non-full-bleed page and some of the maps are stuck in the corner of a page of text, like small afterthoughts. The rest of the design is not much better, cheesy at best and distracting at worst. I wasn’t expecting Taschen-grade production values, but something more appropriate to the subject matter would have been nice.
Beautiful map by National Geographic of human exploration of the solar system.
See also Race to the Moon at HistoryShots and Bryan Christie’s Mission(s) to Mars. (thx, byrne)
This was my present to my nephew for his 3rd birthday. He loves, loves, loves the subway so my sister asked me if I could make a custom map with all the places that mean something to him on the poster.
Best viewed a bit large.
Update: There’s been a bit of confusion…this is not something that I made. I don’t even have a nephew.
Update: The subway map was made by Erin Jang.
To get to a McDonald’s in the lower 48 United States, it’s never more than 145 miles by car. And the McFarthest Spot in the US is in South Dakota.
For maximum McSparseness, we look westward, towards the deepest, darkest holes in our map: the barren deserts of central Nevada, the arid hills of southeastern Oregon, the rugged wilderness of Idaho’s Salmon River Mountains, and the conspicuous well of blackness on the high plains of northwestern South Dakota.
See also maximum Starbucks density and Starbucks center of gravity of Manhattan.
Update: The distribution of McDonald’s in Australia is a bit more uneven. (thx, kit)
Update: As of December 2018, the point the farthest away from any McDonald’s in the lower 48 US states is in Nevada, 120 miles away from the nearest McDonald’s.
Foliage map for New York and New England. You can register as a “Foliage Ambassador” on the site to report on the progress in your area.
If you want to know what football games are going to be on TV in your part of the country on Sunday, check out these maps every week.
Among this list of 20 fascinating ancient maps, you’ll find the island of California, a would-be beautification of Paris circa-1789, and the Modern and Completely Correct Map of the Entire World, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. (thx, john)
An assessment: what sort of photographer is the Google Street View car?
Initially, I was attracted to the noisy amateur aesthetic of the raw images. Street Views evoked an urgency I felt was present in earlier street photography. With its supposedly neutral gaze, the Street View photography had a spontaneous quality unspoiled by the sensitivities or agendas of a human photographer. It was tempting to see the images as a neutral and privileged representation of reality — as though the Street Views, wrenched from any social context other than geospatial contiguity, were able to perform true docu-photography, capturing fragments of reality stripped of all cultural intentions.
Strange Maps has a map of What’s On Earth Tonight, basically a TV Guide for the Milky Way. The map is not that big yet because TV signals have only been sent out from Earth since the late 1920s.
The first tv images of World War II are about to hit Aldebaran star system, 65 light years [ly] away. If there’s anybody out there alive and with eyes to see it, the barrage of actual and dramatised footage of WW2 will keep them shocked and/or entertained for decades to come. Which is just as well, for they’ll have to wait quite a few years to catch the first episodes of such seminal series as The Twilight Zone and Bonanza (both 1959), just about now hitting the (putative) extraterrestrial biological entities of the Mu Arae area (appr. 50 ly). The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and Night Court (all 1984) should be all the rage on Fomalhaut (25 ly). Meanwhile, the sentient, tv-watching creatures near Alpha Centauri (4.4 ly), our closest extrasolar star, are just recovering from the infamous “wardrobe malfunction” during Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake’s halftime show during the 2004 Superbowl.
See also the opening scene from Contact.
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