Miscellany

Three Controversial Maps
Mental Floss’s three controversial maps will be familiar to regular readers of The Map Room: Percy’s 38-state map of the U.S. (Rob even draws a new version of Pearcy’s map), the Mercator projection (in the context of the Peters projection… »
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Posted on Tuesday, August 19, 2008 at 9:57 AM
Categories: Hoaxes & Controversies, Map Projections, Miscellany
Genetic Map of Europe
The genetic map of Europe, which shows the genetic relationships between various European populations and which was published in Current Biology, “bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map,” the New York Times’s Nicholas Wade writes. “The major genetic… »
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Posted on Saturday, August 16, 2008 at 10:25 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Arctic Maritime Jurisdiction Map
Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has produced a map of the frequently overlapping boundaries, jurisdictions and claims of various countries in the Arctic. In the wake of Russia’s planting a flag on the seabed under the North Pole,… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 6, 2008 at 7:29 AM
Categories: Miscellany
A Collection of National Geographic Maps
Kolby Kirk shares some examples of his collection of National Geographic maps. Around 1994, when I moved away from home to attend college, I was forced to get rid of most of my National Geographic magazines — a nearly… »
Posted on Saturday, August 2, 2008 at 8:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map Shoes
More map tchotchkes. Dan Catt has discovered that Zazzle — a CafePress-type store that lets you put your images on various things like shirts and postcards — now does shoes, and goes a little crazy with the maps-on-shoes thing…. »
Posted on Friday, August 1, 2008 at 3:00 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map Shirts
Nikolas Schiller points to several t-shirts with map-based designs, including this one; he’s not happy about their likely sweatshop origins, though…. »
Posted on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 at 10:00 PM
Categories: Miscellany
A Shift in Online Map Searching
“When I stated operating this site in 1997, the most common question I received was related to locating a place on the planet,” writes About.com’s Matt Rosenberg. No more: Today, site like Google Maps and software like Google Earth have… »
Posted on Monday, July 21, 2008 at 2:57 PM
Categories: Miscellany
A Roundup of Interesting Map Links
A few quick map and map-related gems to share with you: Claire showcases another collection of map tattoos. Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps: Mark Simonson notes that the maps used in the Indiana Jones movies are anachronistic…. »
Posted on Sunday, June 22, 2008 at 8:24 PM
Categories: Driving Directions, Fun, Miscellany, Paris, Triangulations (Links)
‘The Death of the Paper Map’
On the occasion of the CSAA’s announcement that it’s getting out of the business of publishing paper maps, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Caille Millner has this to say: I am saddened, but not surprised, about the death of the paper… »
Posted on Monday, June 9, 2008 at 12:37 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Inuit Tactile Maps
Middle Savagery has a post about tactile maps, particularly as practiced by the Inuit: The Inuit made songs, but they also made maps. These were often sketched in snow or sand, but some of them were sketched on paper with… »
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008 at 10:35 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Raincoat Map from 1939
Another find from Modern Mechanix, reprinted from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science: “A colorful map of the United States, complete with rivers, mountains, boundary lines, and other geographical features, adorns a novel rain cape recently introduced. Made… »
Posted on Sunday, April 27, 2008 at 2:49 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Another Internet Country Code Map
Here’s another map showing country code top-level Internet domains, available as a 24×36-inch poster. “Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30%… »
Posted on Friday, April 25, 2008 at 7:54 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Inflated Views
Don’t miss Cartophilia’s blog entry on inflated views — maps where one portion is distorted in size to reflect its self-importance — for example, a New Yorker’s, or California’s, or Texas’s, view of the United States or the world…. »
Posted on Saturday, April 5, 2008 at 12:02 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Salish Sea
A Seattle Times column on how national boundaries obscure reality — i.e., how Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca are a single body of water: “Go to any store and look for a map depicting… »
Posted on Thursday, April 3, 2008 at 7:33 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Shaded Relief World Map and Flex Projector
Tom Patterson of Shaded Relief wrote in to announce his new project, a physical map of the world. As was the case with his relief map of the United States, it’s free and freely available in several formats, including… »
Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 at 8:21 AM
Categories: Map Projections, Miscellany, Software
Smelly Maps
Maps with scents? The Globe and Mail explains: Carleton University cybercartographer Fraser Taylor and his colleagues have already developed multimedia maps and atlases that use sound, music, photos and artwork to convey information about places such as Antarctica and the… »
Posted on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 8:10 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Blank Maps Collection
This collection of blank and outline maps looks useful: the maps are available in GIF, EPS and PDF format, and they’re freely available under a Creative Commons licence. And there seem to be an awful lot of them. Via… »
Posted on Monday, January 7, 2008 at 7:49 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Defining a Map
How many definitions of the word “map” have there been? According to this page, at least 321. Via a discussion on MapHist…. »
Posted on Monday, December 17, 2007 at 7:45 PM
Categories: Miscellany
NYC Adopts Compass Decals
This time it’s for real. A year and a half after John Emerson proposed compass points at subway entrances, and guerrilla-style compass roses began appearing on city sidewalks, the New York City Department of Transportation announces temporary compass decals… »
Posted on Sunday, October 21, 2007 at 8:10 PM
Categories: Miscellany, New York
Mapping the Minnesota Lakes Region
Cathy Hummel couldn’t find a decent map of the Minnesota Lakes region where her family had their cottage, the Fargo Forum reports, so she started a business making her own. Her maps, which have been positively received by fellow cottagers,… »
Posted on Monday, October 15, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Decline of the Paper Map
The San Francisco Chronicle charts the decline of paper maps in the face of their digital competition — a subject that we’ve seen from time to time, but not necessarily drawing the same conclusions. The Chronicle reports that paper map… »
Posted on Sunday, October 14, 2007 at 12:12 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Wal-Mart’s Spread
A Wall Street Journal article discussing the end of Wal-Mart’s retail dominance includes a flash map showing the spread of Wal-Mart stores across the United States. Via Boing Boing…. »
Posted on Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 5:52 AM
Categories: Miscellany
A Map in a Cane
This is not a proof of concept or an art piece, but a real product: this cane containing a pull-out map of Boston was produced in 1940 for attendees of the American Legion’s National Convention in that city. Via… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 19, 2007 at 8:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
That Miss Teen USA Map Question Meme
Lauren Caitlin Upton’s embarrassing moment at the Miss Teen USA pageant (see previous entry) has taken on a life of its own, as her garbled response to a question about cartographic literacy has become the latest Internet meme. And, since… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 at 7:50 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Chocolate Maps
You’ll like this one. A Denver-based company, Art Coco, makes chocolate maps. They’ve been doing it since 1989, when they started out making chocolate topographic maps. Impulse buyers take note: they’re not shipping at the moment due to the… »
Posted on Monday, August 20, 2007 at 8:04 PM
Categories: Miscellany
A Third of Britain Can’t Read a Map
One third of British motorists cannot read a basic road map, according to a survey of 1,000 adults undertaken by an insurance company. Over a third of motorists struggled to read a four-figure grid reference and a staggering 83 per… »
Posted on Monday, August 6, 2007 at 7:42 AM
Categories: Miscellany
British Columbia and Google
The government of British Columbia is in talks with Google about supplying information about the province for Google Maps and Google Earth. The potential goes beyond providing transit information, the Vancouver Sun reports: “Government input could include information on highway… »
Posted on Monday, July 30, 2007 at 9:28 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Social Network Dominance Map
Valleywag has put together a map that shows which social networking site — Friendster, MySpace et al. — is the most popular in a given country. That Facebook dominates in Canada and Orkut in Brazil is a no-brainer, but… »
Posted on Thursday, June 28, 2007 at 5:10 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Readiness and Relief Maps
I encountered a couple of cases of map-related double entendres recently (not at all salacious) that puzzled me for a while. Earlier this month, Mitch wrote in with a question: I have a United States map like the ones that… »
Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007 at 8:03 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Global Warming Mug
Meanwhile, how about a a mug with a map of the world on which the coastlines disappear, mimicking the projected effects of global warming, when you add a hot drink to it. Via All Points Blog…. »
Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 3:00 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Rubik’s Cube Earth
I was a kid when the Rubik’s Cube craze hit; I could never solve more than one side (my aptitudes clearly lay elsewhere). I doubt, however, that this Japanese version with a world map on it will be any… »
Posted on Monday, June 4, 2007 at 2:43 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Internet Ham Atlas
Darek Milka’s Internet Ham Atlas provides maps of all the world’s DXCC entities and ham-radio prefixes. More at ARRLWeb…. »
Posted on Sunday, May 6, 2007 at 2:33 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Fly Swatter Map of Milan
Okay, I have now officially seen everything: this fly swatter’s webbing is patterned after a street map of Milan, Italy. Via Boing Boing and Gadling…. »
Posted on Thursday, May 3, 2007 at 7:18 PM
Categories: Cities, Miscellany
San Francisco Emotion Map
We first heard about Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project last November, when I blogged about the Greenwich Emotion Map. Now Nold is in San Francisco for a five-week stint, measuring the emotional responses to various locations in the city, the… »
Posted on Monday, April 30, 2007 at 6:58 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Waldseemüller Map Stamp Issued
Deutsche Post, the German post office, has issued a stamp in honour of the 500th anniversary of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world — this is the map, you may remember, that first named the New World “America.”… »
Posted on Friday, April 20, 2007 at 10:21 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Wal-Mart Countries of Origin
This is a cartogram that shows from which countries Wal-Mart gets its products. China and the U.S. predominate; Europe and Africa, not so much. Via Kottke…. »
Posted on Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 12:11 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Virtual 3D Maps for the Blind
I’ve run across several methods to provide maps for the visually impaired, and each is completely different from the other. The latest, Scientific American reports, is a virtual, three-dimensional map that is navigated using force-feedback gloves; the twist is that… »
Posted on Sunday, April 8, 2007 at 6:32 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Atlas of Mexico
UNAM’s Instituto de Geografía has made the Atlas nacional de México — the national atlas of Mexico — available online. The atlas is comprised of literally hundreds of high-quality maps on every subject a national atlas ought to have,… »
Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 at 3:05 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Maps for the Visually Impaired
Presenting spatial information to those who cannot see is not, as you might think at first glance, a lost cause: a section of Natural Resources Canada’s web site is dedicated to providing (and researching methods of providing) maps for… »
Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 2:11 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map of Canada’s North Cannot Be Found
A map of three Arctic islands in Canada’s north, drafted by Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, who discovered them, was thought to be in Canada’s national archives, after the government paid $67,000 to Sverdrup in 1930 for his diaries and maps… »
Posted on Saturday, March 17, 2007 at 6:50 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Earth Viewed from Books
An interesting post on Google’s Inside Book Search blog, where Matthew Gray crunches the numbers in Google Book Search to create a really interesting map: “I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations… »
Posted on Tuesday, March 13, 2007 at 11:22 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Municipal Data in a Text File
Not a map per se, but interesting and possibly useful: a 3-megabyte text file that contains ” a list of all towns, administrative divisions and agglomerations with their current population, their English name (if not equal to the international name)… »
Posted on Monday, February 19, 2007 at 9:04 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Economic Activity
The G-Econ project maps the world’s economic activity on a one-degree grid. Animations for the entire globe are available, as are maps of individual countries and data sets. The country maps reveal an unsurprising correlation between economic activity and… »
Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007 at 3:47 PM
Categories: Miscellany
It Burns! It Burns Us!
Chad suggests that maybe Microsoft Paint isn’t the best tool to draw a map with…. »
Posted on Saturday, January 27, 2007 at 9:31 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Israel and the Holy Land, Past and Present
I’m overdue in presenting a couple of links regarding maps of Israel and/or the “Holy Land,” which terms may or may not be interchangeable, but you get the general idea as to area. Holy Land Maps is an online… »
Posted on Sunday, January 21, 2007 at 6:39 PM
Categories: Antique Maps, Miscellany
Driftwood Map
From the fascinating blog Modern Mechanix, which reprints items from old popular science magazines, this item on Inuit mapping from the September 1933 issue of Popular Science: The text: “An Eskimo, who had never before seen a map, has just… »
Posted on Wednesday, January 17, 2007 at 9:58 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Happiness
I don’t pretend to understand anything about psychology, but there is apparently a line of research into “subjective well-being” — which is, I guess, how people measure their own long-term happiness. And enough research has apparently been done to map… »
Posted on Saturday, January 13, 2007 at 7:29 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Georgia Towns Back on the Map
Georgia’s Department of Transportation has backed off. The Associated Press: “the 488 communities wiped from this year’s version of the state highway map will be restored, the Georgia Department of Transportation said Wednesday.” Previously: CSM on Georgia Map Controversy; Georgia… »
Posted on Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 8:13 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Maps and Directions for the Blind
A couple of recent items about maps and directions for the visually impaired. Rachel Magario, a blind graduate student at Kansas University, is working to create tactile campus maps — “maps for the blind that are created by the blind”… »
Posted on Wednesday, December 27, 2006 at 11:49 AM
Categories: Miscellany, Online Maps
CSM on Georgia Map Controversy
Last Wednesday’s edition of the Christian Science Monitor had a long, thoughtful article about the State of Georgia’s decision to remove 488 communities from its official map: “[T]he action has triggered a deeper debate about how Americans view one another… »
Posted on Sunday, December 24, 2006 at 4:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Visualizing U.S. and German Postal Codes
The U.S. ZIPScribble Map by Robert Kosara plots U.S. ZIP codes in ascending order, one connected to the next. Pretty! A similar map applies the same method to the travelling salesman problem: it maps the shortest distance between ZIP… »
Posted on Sunday, December 17, 2006 at 6:41 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Georgia Map Removal Update
Boing Boing’s update on the State of Georgia’s decision to remove 488 communities from its official map includes a link to a complete list of the affected communities in a WTVC news story. Oh yeah, and this image. Previously:… »
Posted on Friday, December 15, 2006 at 9:31 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Georgia Removes Nearly 500 Communities from the Map
In an attempt to make the official map “clearer and less cluttered,” the Georgia Department of Transportation has removed 488 communities from that map. The communities were mostly — but not always — “placeholders” with populations under 2,500. That number… »
Posted on Saturday, December 9, 2006 at 4:26 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Beck’s British Motorways; Monopoly’s London
A map of British motorways, done in the style of Beck’s London Underground Map. (Interesting FAQ: “Should I use this map to plan a road trip? No.”) From the same site, a map of the locations used on the British… »
Posted on Sunday, December 3, 2006 at 10:16 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapmaking as a Career
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s “On the Job” feature looks at mapmaking as a career and the local GIS job market (which, in Nova Scotia, isn’t huge, but still)…. »
Posted on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 at 7:55 AM
Categories: Miscellany
NFL TV Distribution Maps
This is interesting, even for a non-football fan like myself: NFL TV distribution maps that show which games get broadcast where, with a discussion of how that gets determined. Via Kottke…. »
Posted on Wednesday, November 15, 2006 at 8:56 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Greenwich Emotion Map
The Greenwich Emotion Map was created by people walking around the community wearing devices that measured galvanic skin response; the compiled results suggest a collective emotional response to each location. Maps are available in Flash, PDF (20 MB) and… »
Posted on Sunday, November 12, 2006 at 11:04 AM
Categories: Miscellany
New, Free Physical Map of the United States
Tom Patterson — whom we know from his Shaded Relief site — wrote to announce an excellent relief map of the United States that he made from SRTM and other data and released to the public domain. (Methodology here.)… »
Posted on Wednesday, November 1, 2006 at 9:13 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Kohr’s Principles of Federation
Strange Maps has been having fun with the maps of philosopher Leopold Kohr, who argued for smaller states in his seminal 1957 work, The Breakdown of Nations. An appendix to that book contained maps hypothesizing successful and unsuccessful federations… »
Posted on Wednesday, October 25, 2006 at 2:31 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Credit-Card-Sized Stainless-Steel Subway Maps
Sure, laminated paper versions are cheaper, but a credit-card-sized, stainless steel map of the New York subway or London Underground is, well … it’s something, isn’t it? It’s fifteen bucks, anyway. Via Gizmodo, where they seem to think it’s… »
Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 5:27 PM
Categories: London, Mass Transit, Miscellany, New York
Twisty Table
Here’s something different. While at PopTech, Jason Kottke discovered the Twisty Table, which was developed as a way to navigate high-resolution satellite imagery. “When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls… »
Posted on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 12:59 PM
Categories: Miscellany, Satellite & Aerial
Fall Foliage Map
CNN’s Foliage Map shows, for the U.S., when the best time of year is for viewing fall colours. I can tell you it’s all but over where I am. Via Gadling…. »
Posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 9:20 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Australia Under Water
From the Sydney Morning Herald: as part of an exhibition called “Australia from Space,” geographer Stephen Young has created six images of Australia that show how the continent would look if the world’s sea levels were to rise anywhere… »
Posted on Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 7:58 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Temple University’s Flood Map Is Too Good
In 2002, Temple University began working on a flood map of the Pennypack Creek watershed, an area on the north side of Philadelphia that historically has been particularly prone to flooding. The resulting maps, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports in a… »
Posted on Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 1:02 PM
Categories: Miscellany
MapQuest Abandons Printed Maps
Last year it was announced that MapQuest was moving into print maps. Wise commenters on that entry noted that it was not the first time that MapQuest had moved into paper, and in fact they had earlier laid off their… »
Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 7:58 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Another Word for Map Is Faith
The August issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had a damn fine short story by Christopher Rowe where mapping plays a central role. In “Another Word for Map Is Faith,” an alternate America is ruled by… »
Posted on Wednesday, September 6, 2006 at 9:55 PM
Categories: Miscellany
British Overreaction to European Regional Maps
The Daily Mail and British Conservatives have their knickers in a twist over maps from Interreg III, an EU initiative designed to foster “cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation.” The Interreg maps — available here as PDF files — overlap one… »
Posted on Tuesday, September 5, 2006 at 8:05 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The Middle East Redrawn
An article by Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of the Armed Forces Journal imagines a redrawn map of the Middle East, where borders are shifted and new states are created to address local — and, thanks to… »
Posted on Monday, September 4, 2006 at 4:50 PM
Categories: Miscellany
More on the Atlas of Canada Stamp
The story of Canada Post’s stamp honouring geographer James White, creator of the Atlas of Canada, issued at the end of June to commemorate the atlas’s centennial, has been picked up by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s stamp columnist. (Contemplate… »
Posted on Sunday, September 3, 2006 at 1:46 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Give Geography Its Place
Speaking of geographic literacy, David Rayner wrote to tell us about Give Geography Its Place, a grassroots campaign to give geography a higher profile in the UK, and to call it geography, damn it: We are a group of… »
Posted on Tuesday, August 1, 2006 at 5:43 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Long Tail of Mapping Redux
Adena Schutzberg’s column on the “long tail” and its applicability to mapping is interesting in that it mentions the long tail coming up in discussion, but not necessarily where; it might be seen as a response to Joe Francica’s column… »
Posted on Thursday, July 13, 2006 at 8:41 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The Long Tail of Mapping?
I don’t think Joe Francica’s article, The Long Tail of Mapping, quite grasps what the concept of the “long tail” is all about. As I understood it, the “long tail” — as first expounded in Chris Anderson’s Wired article in… »
Posted on Tuesday, July 4, 2006 at 9:12 PM
Categories: Miscellany
More on Naive Geography
More about the concept of “naive geography” — the idea that how ordinary people perceive geography has implications for the design and use of GIS applications. Alan Glennon has, for a GIS class, written two short essays looking at the… »
Posted on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 10:23 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Atlas of Canada Stamp
The Atlas of Canada (see previous entry) is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Canada Post is issuing a stamp to commemorate the occasion; the 51¢ stamp features geographer James White, a map of Canada, and proportional dividers. It will be… »
Posted on Monday, June 19, 2006 at 7:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Travel Time Maps
mySociety’s travel-time maps demonstrate a way to use coloured maps with contour lines to show travel times, taking as examples rail travel and driving times from points in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London (at right, rail travel time from Cambridge, with… »
Posted on Friday, May 26, 2006 at 7:46 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Paeans to Paper Maps
A couple of recent comparisons of traditional — even ancient — cartography with the latest mapping technology. First, Ben Macintyre in The Times (via Cartography): The paper map will soon die, and with it something central to human experience. There… »
Posted on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 3:12 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Maps of Madison County
Maps of Troy, Illinois and surrounding Madison County have been produced by the Troy Area Chamber of Commerce, the Edwardsville Intelligencer reports. They’re printing 10,000 paper copies of the maps, which are also available online at the above links (nothing… »
Posted on Sunday, May 21, 2006 at 9:26 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Two Concepts
First, naive geography, from a 1995 paper by Max Egenhofer and David Mark: Naive Geography captures and reflects the way people think and reason about geographic space and time, both consciously and subconsciously. Naive stands for instinctive or spontaneous. Naive… »
Posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 at 9:26 AM
Categories: Miscellany
National Atlas Outline Maps
Among the printable maps offered online by the National Atlas of the United States are a collection of reference and outline maps suitable for teaching and low-tech scribbling on. Outline maps are a longstanding interest of mine. Thanks to peacay… »
Posted on Sunday, May 14, 2006 at 4:27 PM
Categories: Miscellany
That National Geographic Survey
Last week, the National Geographic Society released the results of the 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy, which tested young American adults aged 18 to 24 on their geographic knowledge. It’s probably not surprising that the results were not… »
Posted on Monday, May 8, 2006 at 8:08 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Internet Country Code Map
Here’s a map of the world that labels each country with its two-letter Internet country code; you can buy a paper version or download a big digital image from the site. Via MetaFilter…. »
Posted on Friday, April 21, 2006 at 2:51 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Gas Price Temperature Map
GasBuddy.com lists gasoline prices across the U.S. and Canada; an apparently new feature, though, is this national gas temperature map that shows relative gas prices by colour value. Right-click each county for local gas prices. Via MetaFilter…. »
Posted on Thursday, April 20, 2006 at 10:52 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Map Quotations
Our friend Tony Campbell has added a page about map quotations to his Map History/History of Cartography site; the page doesn’t list individual quotations about maps, but points to sources where they may be found online. (He should probably add… »
Posted on Monday, April 10, 2006 at 7:52 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Guerrilla Wayfinding
Bleeker compass by blueneurosis John Emerson notes that you can get disoriented when you come out of a subway (I’ve noticed this too, especially in places like Paris that aren’t built on a grid) and proposes a guerrilla wayfinding campaign… »
Posted on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 at 2:45 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Smallest. Map. Ever.
Scientists at Cal Tech (their site) have manipulated strands of DNA to create, among other things, a map of the Americas that is only a few hundred nanometres across. That’s smaller than human hair or bacteria; in cartographic terms, that’s… »
Posted on Friday, March 17, 2006 at 9:32 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Off the (Digital) Map
We’ve seen before how suburban growth in some U.S. regions can be so fast that the digital mapping companies can’t keep up. The implications of living in an area so new that it’s not mapped yet are surprising: GeoCarta points… »
Posted on Sunday, January 29, 2006 at 6:14 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Link Roundup for January 12
As an experiment, a lot of new links at once: A new Google Earth blog with a rather unwieldy title: Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing (via Ogle Earth). The Prejudice Map is built by querying Google… »
Posted on Thursday, January 12, 2006 at 9:41 AM
Categories: Blogs, Conferences, Groups & Societies, Libraries, Map Thefts, Miscellany, Online Maps, Satellite & Aerial
We Are Mapmakers
Anthony Doerr in The Morning News: “We are mapmakers, all of us, tracing lines of memory across the spaces we enter. We embed memories everywhere; we inscribe a private and complicated diagram across the landscape; we plant root structures of… »
Posted on Saturday, January 7, 2006 at 10:20 AM
Categories: Miscellany
LA Times Column on the Ordnance Survey
The LA Times’s Susan Spano has a column on the Ordnance Survey. She comes at it from a fairly uncritical, even naïve perspective: this is a rather breathless introduction for novices, not a history of theodolites or a critique of… »
Posted on Friday, December 30, 2005 at 6:17 PM
Categories: Miscellany
My Least Favourite Use of Old Maps
Tony Campbell pointed out this little gem in an article about waste reduction during the holidays: “Reuse holiday wrapping, or use old maps or comic pages from the Sunday paper for wrapping gifts” (my emphasis). The sound you just heard… »
Posted on Friday, November 25, 2005 at 9:18 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Sony BMG’s Malicious Rootkit
Some background, in case you haven’t been following tech news lately: it was recently discovered that certain recent compact discs from Sony BMG contained a rootkit that secretly installed hidden files when you tried to play it on your PC…. »
Posted on Sunday, November 20, 2005 at 4:37 PM
Categories: Miscellany
OpenStreetMap London Poster as Fundraiser
To raise funds, OpenStreetMap is selling a limited-edition poster. The approximately 84×119-cm poster, which displays all the GPS data the project has collected for the London area, sells for £10 plus postage and shipping tube. Via Boing Boing. See previous… »
Posted on Thursday, October 20, 2005 at 9:05 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Now Just ‘Taiwan’
Google has removed “Province of China” from its reference to Taiwan in Google Maps (see previous entry). From the San Jose Mercury News article: “[C]ompany officials said the controversial label simply repeated information from outside data sources used to build… »
Posted on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 9:32 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Taiwan, Province of China
Taiwan has asked Google to stop labelling it as a “province of China” in Google Maps. BBC coverage (via Cartography). Google Maps Mania has an excellent post that includes links to other news sources. Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth… »
Posted on Wednesday, October 5, 2005 at 9:40 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Google Earth and Disputed Borders and Names
I’ve briefly mentioned maps’ normative function before: they not only describe reality, but, by assigning names and boundaries, they define it. National mapping agencies make use of maps’ normative function all the time: to pick a relatively non-controversial example, Canadian… »
Posted on Wednesday, August 24, 2005 at 2:21 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Using Google Maps to Avoid Traffic Tickets
The story about how someone was able to get out of paying a traffic ticket by pointing to Google Maps via WiFi during his court appearance was posted all over the Web today. Cute…. »
Posted on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 at 10:53 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Personal World Map
The Personal World Map’s purpose “is to give awareness of the user’s actual position in the world in relation to other places by taking into account the ‘effort’ needed to get to a certain destination.” Travel time and cost play… »
Posted on Wednesday, July 6, 2005 at 6:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Gaelic-only Maps
Maps can be normative as well as descriptive; the names contained thereon can reflect politics as much as common usage. Thanks to a new law, maps and road signs of western Ireland will be in Gaelic only, even if the… »
Posted on Sunday, June 5, 2005 at 11:08 PM
Categories: Miscellany
MapQuest Goes Paper
MapQuest. Remember them? You wouldn’t know it from all the buzz about Google over the last few months (er, guilty), but MapQuest still claims to have a 70 per cent share of the online mapping market. Now, whereas traditional businesses… »
Posted on Wednesday, June 1, 2005 at 11:27 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Geograph
Geograph: “The Geograph British Isles project aims to collect a geographically representative photograph for every square kilometre of the British Isles and you can be part of it.” Via Clean Slate…. »
Posted on Thursday, May 12, 2005 at 2:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Worldclock
Worldclocks, by design company This Is It, rotate a polar projection of the world around a 24-hour dial, simultaneously showing the time in dozens of cities at once. The 2001 version is a 48-inch wall clock; the 2002 version is… »
Posted on Sunday, May 8, 2005 at 10:17 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Geeks Meetup at MEDC
Chandu Thota wants to organize a mapping geeks meetup at MEDC next week. I suspect that few of my readers are attending a Windows Mobile developers convention, but there it is anyway…. »
Posted on Thursday, May 5, 2005 at 6:27 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Buying Maps from the Survey of India
When you’re used to the idea that the map you’re looking for is frequently only a click away, it’s disconcerting to read about Shobhit Mahajan’s attempts to buy maps from the Survey of India, where it seems that “the idea… »
Posted on Thursday, April 21, 2005 at 10:11 PM
Categories: Miscellany
FoxTrot on Google Maps
I’ve been away working on a web development project for most of the last week — without broadband — so I’ve been without my usual source-checking and web surfing routine. Because if I hadn’t been away, I would have immediately… »
Posted on Thursday, April 21, 2005 at 8:57 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Ground-level Google Maps
GoogleMaps Satellite View Real-World-Mix, uploaded by kokogiak. The funniest take yet on the Google Maps screenshot craze that’s sweeping Flickr (see previous entry), from kokogiak. Update: Not on Flickr, but just as funny…. »
Posted on Thursday, April 7, 2005 at 4:27 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The World Islands
The World Islands is a $1.8-billion project to construct several hundred artificial private islands off the coast of Dubai — in the shape of a world map. The glitzy official site is here. Via Boing Boing and MetaFilter…. »
Posted on Tuesday, April 5, 2005 at 1:19 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Outline Maps
Sometimes it’s all about knowing what your search term is. I wanted to do some species range maps for one of my other projects. Since I’m not wise in the ways of cartography, and because Illustrator would be serious overkill… »
Posted on Tuesday, March 8, 2005 at 10:08 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Navigation, Spatial Reasoning, Gender and Homosexuality
Behavioural psychologists are using navigating techniques as a means of testing whether gay men and women show “cross-sex shifts” in some of their cognitive abilities — i.e., whether gay men think more like straight women and lesbians like straight men…. »
Posted on Monday, February 28, 2005 at 5:58 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Links 4 Maps
Jim Weber writes to inform us about a non-commercial project he’s started: Links 4 Maps is a links directory for maps and cartography. It’s already got a number of good links already…. »
Posted on Sunday, February 13, 2005 at 10:47 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Map Ladies
Here come the Map Ladies: Susan Pietrantoni and Kathleen Cote are the “Map Ladies” who travel to schools throughout the surrounding communities including Tewksbury and introduce the art of cartography. They have developed a two day program about maps, why… »
Posted on Thursday, February 3, 2005 at 10:33 AM
Categories: Miscellany
La Worldmap
Found at Flickr: la worldmap, a collection of photos by Bertrand Eberhard of people interacting with what appears to be a large world map on the floor of the Beaubourg museum in Paris…. »
Posted on Wednesday, February 2, 2005 at 9:32 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Pearcy’s 38 States
In the 1970s, geography professor C. Etzel Pearcy proposed reconfiguring the United States into 38 states that were, in his view, more physically and culturally coherent. This page has the story — and, more importantly for our purposes, the map…. »
Posted on Monday, January 31, 2005 at 4:23 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Theme Park Maps
Maps of theme parks, dating back as far as 1931. Quite an extensive collection. Via Boing Boing…. »
Posted on Monday, December 27, 2004 at 11:18 AM
Categories: Miscellany
A Geography Textbook of the Confederacy
Now this is odd. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has scanned the text of a whole whack of documents from the Civil War era that “demonstrate the Confederate States of America’s unsuccessful attempt to create a… »
Posted on Tuesday, October 26, 2004 at 8:52 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Rappahannock County Map
Rappahannock County, Virginia has a new road map; the Rappahannock News has the story on how it came to be…. »
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 2004 at 10:17 PM
Categories: Miscellany
TV Series About Maps
Now playing on BBC Two: a television program about maps! The Map Man is an eight-episode series that began running on September 16. Each episode — see the program guide in Word format — looks at a specific map and… »
Posted on Sunday, September 26, 2004 at 12:24 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Fool’s World Map; Hand-Painted Globes
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… »
Posted on Thursday, August 12, 2004 at 10:48 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Maps on Traffic Control Boxes
Forty-two traffic control boxes in downtown Victoria, British Columbia have been wrapped in maps of the downtown area. The goal is to combat graffiti — the maps are supposedly easier to clean than the boxes themselves — but the side… »
Posted on Monday, July 26, 2004 at 7:34 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Linguistic Atlas
Though it appears to contain a few mistakes, and the graphics are kind of poor, it’s a neat concept: a so-called Linguistic Atlas of the World that labels each country in its own language and writing system. Via Languagehat (see… »
Posted on Monday, July 26, 2004 at 7:07 PM
Categories: Miscellany
A Map of Your Internet
One more from inflight correction, whose author would like to see a map of what he calls “personal globalization”: Not what’s been imported around you, though that’s interesting, but what is your world via the internet? Mine covers the broad… »
Posted on Thursday, May 13, 2004 at 10:27 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Maps on Money
A 1632 map of Canada by Samuel de Champlain and a satellite image of the country are featured on the back of the new Canadian $100 bill, which went into circulation today (CBC)…. »
Posted on Wednesday, March 17, 2004 at 4:35 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Anthropomorphic States and Provinces
An entry from Ian’s blog called Cartophilia: “I like it when states reach for something that they might not deserve. Take Alabama and Mississippi, for instance, both violently sticking out a body part to touch the Gulf of Mexico …. »
Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2004 at 12:59 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Geist Mapper
Owen sends along a link to this profile, in the Victoria Times-Colonist, of Melissa Edwards, the person behind Geist magazine’s quirky Caught Mapping feature. See previous entries: Caught Mapping, Caught Mapping Archives…. »
Posted on Saturday, January 17, 2004 at 9:38 PM
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