Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a composite photograph of the Earth at night, replete with all the lights you’d expect. High-resolution versions also available. Via Slashdot.

I’ve seen pollen forecasts on weather channels, mapping allergens for allergy sufferers, and of course there are the golf and ski forecasts, but the British Weather Channel’s forecasts for aches and pains and seasonal affective disorder are new to me. From their explanation of the aches and pains map:

This forecast incorporates meteorological parameters that have been linked to the production of uncomfortable effects on the body. Areas with a high likelihood of precipitation, high relative humidity, brisk winds, and those likely to experience large changes in surface pressure are linked to the highest aches and pains index values.

These aren’t my father’s weather maps; these are maps that interpret the impact of weather on various activities and conditions. As though we need someone to lead us along the path from “It’s raining” to “Golfing’s going to suck today.” We never could have figured that out before. Via Here Be Dragons.

Making Maps Easy to Read is “a research project that set out to discover some of the factors that make maps easy to read and to use.” Relief, symbols and typography are some of the issues explored. The pages contain abstracts of the project’s research papers; the full papers are available as PDF files. Via Kottke.

Since The Map Room started at the end of March 2003, the about page has said, “from medieval Mappæ Mundi to satellite imagery, and from topo maps to Tolkien.” I’ve done posts on all of these subjects save one: I’ve never done a post on maps of Tolkien’s Middle-earth.

Part of the problem — my own legendary powers of procrastination aside — is that there really isn’t very much out there that’s online, and still less that’s any good. Maps of Middle-earth are hard to come by on the Web, probably because the Tolkien Estate refuses to licence them. Them that exist are either flouting copyright or are operating under fair use.

Those in the former category sometimes aren’t very good: the level of detail is usually less than that you’d find in an endpaper map in one of the books. The quality of execution is often surprisingly bad: you can tell in some cases that the software used to create the map was, in fact, MS Paint. These vector maps are better than most I’ve seen.

In the end, your best option in terms of Middle-earth maps is the venerable Atlas of Middle-earth by Karen Wynn Fonstad. And even then I feel left wanting. Fonstad’s a bona fide cartographer, but the two-colour maps are essentially line drawings. I probably want the impossible: a full, atlas-quality relief map, providing a level of detail that Tolkien himself never imagined.

There are, though, a couple of interesting maps online that even the Tolkien Estate would have to concede are excellent examples of fair use.

This page puts Middle-earth on a meridional grid, and superimposes that grid on a map of Europe. It’s an amazingly effective way of grasping the scale of the map in relative terms:

If we assume Hobbiton at the location of Oxford, this superimposes the LR map on the geographic territory between Scotland and Crete, and between Ireland and Kiew. Minas Tirith and Osgiliath are getting submerged in the Adriatic Sea at 43 deg. N, 17 deg. East, somewhat South of the Croatian city of Split. Barad-dûr is found in Western Serbia, not very far from Belgrade.

Finally, I blogged Matthew White’s maps early in the history of The Map Room; he was, in fact, the fourth post ever on this blog. In his section on surreal histories, he’s got a page describing Tolkien’s “lost sequel” to The Lord of the Rings, which projects Middle-earth into an overindustrialized modern age:

Discovered in Tolkien’s papers long after his death were the notes for a new story. It was to be set in a new age of Middle Earth, long after the dwarves had been rounded up and herded into to bleak, rural reservations, long after the elves were no longer to be seen anywhere outside the Museum of Mythical Creatures. The new Middle Earth was a quiet, no-nonsense world of airports, malls and sitcoms, but then Bonnie Baggins found a ring of power in her grandmother’s attic.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work on my Middle-earth map for Railroad Tycoon II — I’ve got a hankering to run some troop trains to the Black Gate behind Númenórean 2-8-2 Mikados …

Part of a site on medieval art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, this page of British maps features scans from a 1929 historical atlas. Warning: large file sizes. Via Plep.

For you Tube map freaks: R. Gardiner has taken a geographically accurate map of the London Underground and superimposed it on a satellite image of the city. Very effective. Via Here Be Dragons.

And now for some fun at the expense of people who don’t know their geography.

Fool’s World Map has been linked to all over the web — I saw it first on MetaFilter — and, as usual, I’m just about the last person to link to it. It’s a collaborative map based on people’s mistaken assumptions of world geography.

One day, a Texan asked me a question when I lived in [the] U.S.

The question was “How many hours does it take to go to Japan by car?”

He didn’t know where Japan is, and even before that, he didn’t know that Japan is an island. And then, I thought. “What kind of world map is pictured in his mind?”

This was a beginning to think that it might be fun to gather those mixed up recognitions of countries and visualize it as a world map imagined by the fools in the world.

And, on the map, Japan is shown attached to the southwestern United States …

But wait! There’s more!

Related, but not affiliated, is this collection of globes hand-painted from memory:

Each “It’s My World” globe represents a unique world view, mapped from memory by professional artists from the Niff Institute with scant knowledge of world geography. Marvel at their endeavours to chart familiar-sounding continents and countries and their attempts to pinpoint the global position of such places as Kualalumpa, Rangoon and the Bay of Biscay.

All sold out now, sadly. Via Boing Boing.

I’ve linked to the University of Southern Maine’s Osher Map Library before, but I somehow missed the page listing all their online exhibitions. Via MetaFilter. (See previous entries: The Cartographic Creation of New England, Henry Popple’s Map, Early Highway Maps.)

I like electoral maps, and I like seeing the election results plotted out on a map so that it’s easy to see which regions voted which way. The problem with such maps, as many people have noticed, is that large, sparsely populated regions tend to appear to “count” for more. In Canada, for example, Nunavut takes up about one-third the surface area of the country, but sends only one MP (out of 308) to the House of Commons — but boy it makes the map look red when it votes Liberal.

There have been some attempts to compensate for this by distorting the size of each district on the map so that it matches their electoral clout. Two such maps, dealing with the U.S. electoral college, are available online. Dan Hartung did one for the 2000 presidential election (now only available through the Wayback Machine); Sam Wang of Princeton University has drawn one up based on the probability that a state will vote for Bush or Kerry. Interesting stuff — and interesting to see how each of these maps has been generated. Via Rebecca’s Pocket.

Jonathan Jackel has a review on TidBITS of Route 66, which is, he says, the only route mapping software available for Mac OS X. (It’s also available in Windows, Pocket PC and mobile phone/Bluetooth versions.) It’s also GPS-compatible, though he couldn’t get that feature to work properly.