The Map Room

I remember well this Sesame Street bit, starring Grover the waiter and his restaurant customer, who misses his flight to South America because Grover won’t shut up about “this wonderful, glorious map.” When I stumbled across it again tonight, I noticed something interesting: take a good look at that map and tell me it isn’t a Gall-Peters projection!

Via MapHist, I learn that the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center has a newish RSS feed. It also has a Flickr account, though that’s been up and running for some time.

Apple says that iPhone developers should not use Core Location, the API that provides an iPhone user’s location, just to provide location-targeted ads. Ed Parsons and GPS Review have what I think is the correct take on this: if you’re going to tap into Core Location (which drains battery life, requires user approval and reveals personal information), for God’s sake make it for something more than just local advertising (which I presume is still allowed, just secondarily). Apple may be getting into mobile advertising, but I don’t think preemptively stomping on the potential competition in the mobile ad space is what’s behind this (pace MacNN, ReadWriteWeb and others).

NASA has released new maps of Pluto, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Even through the Hubble, everyone’s favourite Kuiper Belt Object is only a handful of pixels across, and the Hubble can only make out surface variations a few hundred kilometres in size. Even so, this is probably the most detail we’ll get until New Horizons arrives in five years’ time. And it’s still of use to scientists:

The images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope show an icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness. Pluto has become significantly redder, while its illuminated northern hemisphere is getting brighter. These changes are most likely consequences of surface ices sublimating on the sunlit pole and then refreezing on the other pole as the dwarf planet heads into the next phase of its 248-year-long seasonal cycle. The dramatic change in color apparently took place in a two-year period, from 2000 to 2002. …

Hubble reveals a complex-looking and variegated world with white, dark-orange and charcoal-black terrain. The overall color is believed to be a result of ultraviolet radiation from the distant sun breaking up methane that is present on Pluto’s surface, leaving behind a dark and red carbon-rich residue.

More from Bad Astronomy. Emily Lakdawalla has created a video of a rotating Pluto from the still images. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and M. Buie (Southwest Research Institute).

Previously: Map of Pluto.

Recent updates to Google Earth include higher-resolution underwater terrain data for some parts of the ocean floor and historical aerial photography taken over European cities during the Second World War.

The Ordnance Survey’s lawyers are going after the publishers of a comic novel, The Hills Are Stuffed with Swedish Girls, whose cover parodies the OS’s Landranger series, Grough reports: “In place of the OS’s initialled north arrow are the author’s initials and there are a few new conventional signs on the cover, including a bra, a tablet and a part-drunk pint of beer. The scale is described as one beer to one mile.” The author and publisher say it’s clearly a parody; the OS says it’s trying to protect its brand’s reputation.

Via GPS Review, a short promotional video from the U.S. Air Force’s Space Command about GPS:

Mark Pilgrim on the geolocation API in HTML 5, which is only supported by a couple of browsers at the moment (Firefox 3.5, the iPhone, and Android). When and where it is supported, though, a user’s location can be acquired with just a few lines of JavaScript (assuming the user grants permission). Via Sean Gillies.

Kottke notices that New York City’s mapping portal has aerial photos of the city from 1924. Deroy Peraza has some fun comparing them to aerial photos from the present day.

Previously: NYCityMap.

NASA has released a post-earthquake radar image of the Port-au-Prince region: “JPL’s Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) captured this false-color composite image of the city of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and the surrounding region on Jan. 27, 2010. Port-au-Prince is visible near the center of the image. The large dark line running east-west near the city is the main airport. … The large linear east-west valley in the mountains south of the city is the location of the major active fault zone responsible for the earthquake: the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault.”

For previous entries on the Haitian earthquake, see the Haitan Earthquake category archive.

Wapenmaps are contour maps made of stainless steel. The company, Wapentac, produces several maps of locations in various British national parks. Relatively inexpensive at £20, and small enough (17×8.9 cm) to be shipped by mail, they require some assembly by the purchaser to separate the contours from each other. Via La Cartoteca.

CNet has a look at maps of Apple’s forthcoming iPad. I freely admit my Apple fanboyishness and confess that I’m looking forward to this gadget. Compared to the iPhone and iPod touch, the iPad’s Google Maps application adds both a terrain layer and Street View — to say nothing of a much larger screen. iPads with 3G data also come with assisted GPS; Wi-Fi-only models do not. The mind boggles at what could be done with maps on a device with GPS, ubiquitous Internet access anywhere there’s a cellphone signal, and a screen that big. (Image credit: Apple)

Geocoded Art geotags public-domain paintings of identifiable locations. The site requires that “a) the image is a recognizable depiction of [a] specific location (not just ‘Tuscan countryside’); and b) the image be in the public domain,” but does not include ridiculously familiar landmarks. This is a nice thing to have geotagged. Via Google Maps Mania.

The Washington Post’s article about OpenStreetMaps’s “citizen cartographers” portrays it as the efforts of what I guess could be called lovingly obsessive locals who care more about getting it right than “a couple of guys driving a truck down a street.”

A travelling exhibition of early printed maps, Envisioning the World: The First Printed Maps, 1472-1700, comes to the Princeton University Library on February 7, and runs until August 1.

Through the language of cartography, the maps in the exhibition illustrate the way in which scientists, mathematicians, explorers and cartographers came to grips with the shape, size and nature of the Earth as a whole and its place in the universe. Highlighted in the exhibition are the important contributions to this evolving cosmography of: Ptolemy (c. 90-168 ); Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543); Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); Johannes Kepler (1571-1630); and Edmond Halley (1656-1742).

The exhibition was at the Sonoma Museum last fall, and will be at the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library beginning in September (details).

The David Rumsey Map Collection announces the online availability of The California Water Atlas, “a monument of 20th century cartographic publishing.”

When the atlas came out in 1979, it got rave reviews from both historians and scientists. Charles Wollenberg, writing in the California Historical Quarterly, called it “a very big and beautiful book … well-written, spectacularly illustrated, and filled with useful information for expert and layman alike … an indispensable sourcebook for decades to come.” The Quarterly Review of Biology said it was “a major reference work of interest to applied ecologists concerned with water supply and usage and to ecologists in general in California.” Over 30 years old, the atlas is still fresh and germane to today’s issues and no doubt will be so for a long time to come.

Via MapHist, news of the death of Jenkins Garrett, a Fort Worth, Texas, lawyer and philanthropist, at the age of 95. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram obituary makes no mention of it, but Garrett was a map enthusiast and founding president of the Texas Map Society.

An exhibition of map art titled Off the Map opens February 12 at the Kirkland Art Centre in Kirkland, Washington (a suburb of Seattle). “Recognizing our increasing dependency on maps, the artists in Off the Map present alternative perspectives and reveal significant relationships that are otherwise too obscure to see, visualizing the connectivity in our world and simultaneously make the unknown more rational.” The exhibition runs until March 10.

This will be a busy spring for maps at the BBC, which has announced that BBC Four will run two television series on maps: a three-part, one-hour series called Mapping the World and a four-part, one-hour series called The Art of Maps. This, on top of a BBC Radio 4 series coming in March.

It turns out that the reason for all this Beebish map activity is an upcoming exhibition from the British Library, which, among other things, will feature the enormous Klencke Atlas of 1660. Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art will run from April 30 to September 19, 2010 at the British Library’s PACCAR Gallery, and it’ll be free. More about the exhibition from the Guardian.

Previously: BBC Radio 4 Series on Maps Coming in March.

Here are two animated historical timelines that map geopolitical change over time. This one from the British National Archives, which maps the 20th century, proceeds by period; it gets a few colours wrong here and there, and I’m not sure that occupations are represented consistently. (Also: Mercator? Seriously?) An animation by Pedro Cruz, Visualizing empires’ decline, charts the rise and fall of four European colonial empires during the 19th and 20th centuries; it’s not strictly cartographic, but it is fun to watch — colonies become independent by bursting from their mother countries’ bubbles.

I’m not sure all the dates are right, though. Via Cartophilia and Cartografie.