kottke.org posts about maps
On view at MoMA through May 12, 2008: Design and the Elastic Mind.
In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design’s most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change.
I was surprised at how many of the show’s ideas and objects I’d seen or even featured on kottke.org already. But getting there first isn’t the point. The show was super-crowded and I didn’t have a lot of time to look around, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye.
Michiko Nitta’s Animal Messaging System (AMS), part of a larger project she did called Extreme Green Guerillas. The basic idea of the AMS is to use the radio ID tags worn by migratory animals to send messages from place to place. Nice map.
Molecubes are self-replicating repairing robots. Video here.
And I’ve been looking for Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux project for several months now…most recently I wanted to include his work in my time merge media post.
Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.
For more, check out the online exhibition (designed by Yugo Nakamura and THA Ltd, the folks behind FFFFOUND!). Thanks (and congratulations!) to Stamen for hosting a tour of the exhibition.
1. See a map of the world made out of musical notes.
2. Now, listen to the map.
Update: I misread the text associated with the second link…the music does not correspond to the notes on the map. But anyone wants to give it a shot, send along an MP3 of your recording. (thx, bill)
The fellow/lady behind the excellent Strange Maps blog is doing a book, The Atlas of Strange Maps. In my mind, I have pre-pre-ordered this book…I hope it gets the well-designed cover it deserves.
In a map of the Republik van Nieuw Nederland, Paul Burgess imagines that the Dutch never gave up their New World possessions and a republic formed centered around New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam never gave way to New York. The Dutch kept the whole of their North American colony out of the hands of the perfidious English, in fact. New Netherland today constitutes a thriving Republic stretching from the Atlantic coast to Quebec, dividing New England from the rest of the United States.
See also Melissa Gould’s map of Neu York, which imagines Manhattan as a post-WWII Nazi possession.
Web Trend Map 2008 Beta, which is basically 300 influential web sites mapped onto a Tokyo train map. It’s very pretty, but once again, kottke.org gets no love.
Update: A general trend map for 2008, this one modeled on the Shanghai subway map. (via mass custom., thx maaike)
Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce some lovely travel-time maps of London. My favorite is the interactive travel + housing prices map:
Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can’t afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay.
The commute time slider makes a lovely Mandelbrot-esque pattern as you pinch the times together. (via o’reilly radar)
Click on world cities on a map to test your traveler IQ. Africa = nearly random clicking for me although I would have done better had I not misread Swaziland as Switzerland.
This post about the carbon footprint of wine contains an interesting map at the bottom. It’s a map of the US with a line splitting the country in two. West of the line, it is more carbon efficient to drink Napa wine while to the east of the line it is more carbon efficient to drink French Bordeaux. You can almost see the coastline of the eastern and Gulf states struggling westward against the trucking route from California. The Vinicultural Divide?
19.20.21 (19 cities in the world with 20 million people in the 21st century) is a nice site for an effort to undertake “a five-year study that will encompass all aspects of the phenomenon of supercities” but the real attraction are the maps of the world’s largest cities through time (Menu/10 Largest Cities). In 1000, the largest city in the world was Cordova, Spain and by 1500, 4 of the top 10 were in China and one was in Nepal. (via snarkmarket)
Subway map geeks rejoice:
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication. Transit Maps is the graphic designer’s new bible, the transport enthusiast’s dream collection, and a coffee-table essential for everyone who’s ever traveled in a city.
Found out about this from Boing Boing, where Cory has a quick review.
A gorgeous wall-sized map showing the precise territory of the United States by Bill Rankin, proprietor of Radical Cartography. Check out some of Rankin’s other recent work.
Update: Oops, that didn’t take long. RC is a little slow right now because everyone’s trying to d/l the 3.8 MB png file of the map. Maybe check back a little later?
Statetris: “Instead of positioning the typical Tetris blocks, you position states/countries at their proper location.” There are versions for the US, Africa, Europe, the UK, and more.
Get Lost is a collection of maps of downtown Manhattan drawn by a variety of artists.
A must-see for football fans: NFL TV distribution maps. Check out what football games will be on in which parts of the country.
A list of resources for my recent dive into the deep end of an infinite pool. Wikipedia page. Search inside @ Amazon. A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest. Reviews, Articles, & Miscellany. The Howling Fantods! A scene-by-scene guide. Hamlet. Act 5, Scene 1. Infinite Jest online index. Wiki from Walter Payton College Prep (incl. timelines, chars, acronym list, places, etc.). Chronological list of the years in Subsidized Time. Notes on What It All Means. Character profiles by Matt Bucher. Character guide. Vocabulary glossary. Various college theses on IJ. Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (sadly not out until Nov). Not entirely unrelated: map of the overworld for The Legend of Zelda, which I’ve started playing again on the Wii. Suggestions welcome, especially looking for a brief chronological timeline of the whole shebang, something like the chronologically sorted version of this but covering more than just when the scenes themselves take place.
Update: Just to be clear, this is my second time through the book. (Last time was, what, 4 years ago?) Trying to make more of a study of it this time.
Update: Suggestion from Ian: “Get 3 bookmarks. 1 for where you are reading, 1 for the footnotes, 1 to mark the page that lists the subsidized years in order.” I’m currently using two bookmarks…will get a third for the sub. years list.
I’ve been keeping up with the latest iPhone news but I haven’t been telling you about it…partially because my poor pal Merlin is about to pop an artery due to all the hype. Anyway, it’s Friday and he’s got all weekend to clean that up, so here we go. The big thing is a 20-minute guided tour of the device, wherein we learn that there’s a neat swiping delete gesture, you can view Word docs, it’s thumb-typeable, the earbuds wires house the world’s smallest remote control, Google Maps have driving directions *and* traffic conditions, and there’s an “airplane mode” that turns off all the wifi, cell, and Bluetooth signals for plane trips. It looks like the iPhone will be available online…here’s the page at the Apple Store. What else? It plays YouTube videos. iPhone setup will be handled through iTunes: “To set up your iPhone, you’ll need an account with Apple’s iTunes Store.”
Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There’s a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said “arrr”, there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The “arrr” and the pirate accent “originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s”.
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World scores the world’s countries on two axes of cultural values…from “traditional” to “secular-rational” and from “survival” to “self-expression”. (via strange maps)
I’m sure this functionality is coming, but when using the new Street View feature in combination with driving directions on Google Maps, I want a play button that drives me from the starting point to my destination, showing me the street-level view along the way.
outside.in just launched a new maps feature that shows the physical locations that people are blogging about. Here’s the last few months of places I’ve talked about on kottke.org. I like the pie charts that show how exclusive a place is to a particular blog. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor to outside.in.)
Stamen delivers another lovely project: Trulia Hindsight. It’s an animated map of the US which shows new home construction over a period of years “with an eye towards exposing patterns of expansion and development”. As you might expect, the growth of a city like Las Vegas is interesting to watch. More on the project from Stamen and on the Trulia Hindsight blog.
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