Miscellany

Daylight Saving Time
In this map from Wikimedia Commons (reproduced here under its Creative Commons Licence), blue areas use daylight saving time, orange areas no longer use it, red areas never have….   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 8:00 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Relief: Dynamic 3D Interactive Map
Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group have created Relief, “an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form digital models like geographical terrain in an intuitive manner. The…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, March 2, 2010 at 10:23 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Ed Parsons Receives Honorary Doctorate
Congratulations to Ed Parsons, Google geospatial technologist and map blogger, on receiving an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Kingston University. Via Mapperz….   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, February 18, 2010 at 5:03 PM
Categories: Miscellany
A Map Envelope
Look what designer Beste Miray Dogan has come up with: envelopes lined with a Google Maps printout of the return address. Via Make….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, February 12, 2010 at 5:28 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Facebook Connections
Pete Warden has been visualizing Facebook connections, and has noticed that some local networks form clusters in surprising ways. [I]t’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster. For example Columbus, OH and Charleston, WV are nearby…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 at 8:43 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Contour Maps in Stainless Steel
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….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, February 1, 2010 at 6:22 PM
Categories: Miscellany, Topo Maps & Trails
Fifty Equal U.S. States
Neil Freeman’s map imagining 50 U.S. states with equal populations, thereby equalizing congressional overrepresentation from small states and rural areas, is making the rounds of the blogosphere (and Twitterverse™) lately (see, for example, here); we first saw it five years ago, in Martin’s comment on this entry about maps…   Read more →
4
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 1:13 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Anti-Mafia Map Printed for German Tourists
A tourist map financed by the German embassy in Rome indicates which shops in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, don’t pay extortion money to the Mafia, AFP reports. Inspired by the Addiopizzo movement protesting widespread extortion payments to the Mafia, the map is being produced for German tourists, who are…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, January 24, 2010 at 12:55 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Soft Maps: Map Quilts of Cities
Soft Maps are quilted maps of cities and neighbourhoods; the maps are stitched into the quilt through a combination of hand and machine stitching. Not inexpensive, to be sure; a number of cities are available, as are custom orders. Via geoparadigm. Previously: New York Subway Map Quilt Fabric; Map…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, January 18, 2010 at 2:26 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Zombies
io9 and MetaFilter collect a series of maps produced last September on an alternate history discussion board illustrating zombie (and golem) attacks throughout history. At right, The Scourge of 1866 by Nymain1….   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 10:45 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Netflix Rentals
I’m awfully impressed by the New York Times’s interactive map showing Netflix rental patterns, by neighbourhood, for a dozen U.S. cities. That’s an incredibly complex amount of data to display — especially when you consider that there’s a map for each of the top 100 movies — and could have…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1:50 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Smallest Map of the World
It’s still about a hundred times larger than this nanometres-wide map of North America, but the 40-micrometre map of the world produced by the Photonics Research Group of Ghent University-IMEC is almost certainly the smallest map of the world. Above, how it appears in an electron scanning microscope. Via…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, January 11, 2010 at 1:42 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping Wikipedia
Mark Graham has mapped the half-million or so geotagged Wikipedia articles to show how many have been written about each country. Not surprisingly, the U.S. leads with 90,000 articles; Anguilla, on the other hand, has four. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably there are more…   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, December 5, 2009 at 8:17 AM
Categories: Miscellany
eBay Maps Black Friday
As a way of promoting itself during the holiday shopping season, eBay has mapped “all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions on eBay on Black Friday, November 27, 2009 (12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM EST).” Via All Points Blog and Cartophilia….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, November 30, 2009 at 7:23 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The Nine Nations of China
Economics professor Patrick Chovanec has grouped the provinces and autonomous regions of China into what he calls the Nine Nations of China — regions with their own “resources, dynamics, and historical character.” Of course there’s an interactive map. Via The Map Scroll….   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 at 9:58 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Senators Draw Their States
Al Franken’s uncanny ability to draw all 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from memory inspired the National Geographic Society to ask other senators to draw their home states from memory, labelling at least three important places on that map. ElevenTwelve senators accepted the challenge. Via Cartophilia….   Read more →
2
Posted on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 6:04 PM
Categories: Miscellany
30 Superb Infographic Maps
Webdesigner Depot’s 30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps: “Map illustrations are a dime a dozen; however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.” Via geoparadigm….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, November 13, 2009 at 9:41 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Maps Without Legends
The Morning News has a different kind of map quiz: “We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the color-coding, names, landmarks, and whatever else you can detect. Here’s…   Read more →
Posted on Wednesday, November 11, 2009 at 7:24 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Calendria
Like Cartophilia, designer Elizabeth Daggar sent me a copy of her unusual project, Calendria, the full title of which is the World Atlas of Calendria for the Year 2010 of the Common Era, as Observed and Faithfully Recorded by Electrofork. Liz calls Calendria “a calendar-as-world comprising twelve countries (months).”…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 7:22 PM
Categories: Art, Miscellany
Geocaching T-Shirts
Very Spatial points to an amusing geocaching t-shirt on Zazzle.com: “I use multi-million dollar satellites to find Tupperware in the woods. What’s your hobby?” A look at the t-shirt page’s recommendations reveals lots of other geocaching-themed t-shirts on the same site….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 6:42 PM
Categories: Geocaching, Miscellany
New York Subway Map Quilt Fabric
Our latest example of map miscellany comes in the form of quilting fabrics with a pattern resembling a New York subway map from a quilt shop in New York City. Probably not for use in navigation. Via Very Spatial….   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, November 8, 2009 at 6:08 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map Marker Death
Busted Tees’ Map Marker Death: Best. T-shirt. EVAR. Via James….   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 6:44 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Ordnance Survey Announces Colour-Blind Mapping
Hold your mouse over this map to see how it would appear to someone with colour-blindness. The Ordnance Survey has announced a product that will, they say, make it easier to produce maps for people with colour-blindness. For the eight percent of the population unable to distinguish red from…   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 10:28 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping McDonald’s
Stephen Von Worley has compiled a map showing the location of every McDonald’s in the lower 48 states, as an exercise in determining “just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience.” Where in the contiguous United States is the furthest distance from a McDonald’s?…   Read more →
Posted on Friday, September 25, 2009 at 8:24 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The End of the World Islands
The Times reports that the World Islands, an artificial archipelago of several hundred private islands in the shape of a world map being constructed off the coast of Dubai, has been, like so many other Dubai construction projects, cancelled: “Mile after mile of breakwater built from boulders brought hundreds of…   Read more →
Posted on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 at 7:58 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Fluid Forms: Stuff Made from Custom Topography
Austrian design company Fluid Forms creates things from customer-submitted topography. Bowls, clocks and tables are carved out of a laminated block of wood; lampshades are produced on a 3D printer; and silver brooches (pictured) are first 3D printed in wax and then cast in silver. None of which is…   Read more →
1
Posted on Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 7:58 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Michele Battiste
The Southeast Review interviews Michele Battiste, a poet whose work frequently makes use of map themes and imagery. Place is one of those big ideas I can’t fully grasp, so I won’t try to explain. I like maps because they are instructional and representative. They prepare us for what we’ll…   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 7:15 PM
Categories: Miscellany
More Map Shower Curtains
Following up on this post, a number of readers have written in to provide additional links to map shower curtains. Several of you have noted that the curtain Jamie referred to is available at Target; it’s also available on Amazon. Matt says this about the curtain: “The map is…   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, August 15, 2009 at 7:12 AM
Categories: Miscellany
World Freedom Atlas
The World Freedom Atlas is a project by cartographer Zachary Forest Johnson (who also has a blog). The Atlas combines a number of datasets from non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations that attempt to measure human rights, freedom, democracy and all that good stuff. Most of the data is in grades…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 7:01 AM
Categories: Blogs, Miscellany
Map Shower Curtain and Bikini
If you’re at all interested in map-related paraphernalia, then Jamie at Cartophilia is your guy. His latest find, from photos sent by a friend, is a map shower curtain and a map bikini: the bikini was from Victoria’s Secret and is apparently no longer available; I don’t know where the…   Read more →
1
Posted on Sunday, August 9, 2009 at 6:47 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Ohio Is a Piano
I don’t think I’ve encountered Andy Woodruff’s Cartogrammar blog before, but his latest entry, about his latest project, is a beaut: “Last month, as I was driving through Ohio,” he writes, “it dawned on me: There are 88 counties in this state. There are 88 keys on a piano….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, July 31, 2009 at 2:09 PM
Categories: Blogs, Miscellany
A Map of a Balkanized Western Europe in 2020
Coming Anarchy speculates about a balkanized western Europe in 2020 — with a map, of course. “It is purely speculative and in no way a firm prediction, but rather a sketch of the possibilities and list of the most likely cases. It is by no means exhaustive and you’ll…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 5:30 PM
Categories: Miscellany
More Outline Maps
About.com Geography and Catholicgauze point to another resource for blank and outline maps: Daniel Dalet’s d-maps.com, which has, at this particular moment, 3,860 maps in six different formats. Previously: Outline Maps; National Atlas Outline Maps….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, July 17, 2009 at 3:40 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Al Franken, Cartographer
Al Franken, now the junior senator from Minnesota, has a hell of a party trick: he can draw, freehand and from memory, a map of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S. He’s been doing it for decades: Talking Points Memo and Cartophilia point to his 1987 appearance on…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 7:37 PM
Categories: Miscellany, Video
Obama’s Map
The caption for this photo from the White House’s Flickr photostream: “President Barack Obama looks at a map donated to the White House by the National Geographic Society, in the Oval Office, June 10, 2009.” Official photo by Pete Souza. The map in question is probably this one (affiliate…   Read more →
1
Posted on Sunday, June 28, 2009 at 4:36 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Determining a Map’s Age
Catholicgauze explains how to figure out a map’s age by checking for known changes, like the reunification of Germany, the breakup of the Soviet Union, or the independence of East Timor. I’ve done this too, actually, but it’s just as much of a challenge for maps and globes produced in…   Read more →
2
Posted on Tuesday, June 23, 2009 at 5:59 AM
Categories: Miscellany
A Corollary to Tobler’s First Law
Sean Gorman proposes a corollary to Waldo Tobler’s well-known First Law of Geography (“everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”). Inspired by developments in mobile applications, he adds a temporal element: things that are near for a long period of time are…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 4:03 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map of TV Sitcoms
In case you haven’t already seen this: a map showing where sitcoms were set, from, I believe, folks at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Not that most of them weren’t filmed in a Hollywood studio regardless of their putative location. Via Macleans….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:32 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Map Purse
Via Platial, a do-it-yourself guide to creating a purse out of a map. Some craftiness (and a sewing machine) required….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, May 18, 2009 at 4:16 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping the Death Penalty
Good Magazine’s map of the death penalty around the world is interesting not only for its information, but for its design: look closely and you’ll see that it’s superimposed on the pattern of a chain-link fence replete with barbed wire. Via Andrew Sullivan….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, May 15, 2009 at 9:38 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Rachel Maddow’s Map Room
MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow has a map room (no relation), the purpose of which is to provide maps and infographics in support of The Rachel Maddow Show. Via Cartophilia….   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 6:53 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Organic Farms in the United States
A lot of maps of the lower 48 lately. The New York times maps organic farms in the United States, which aren’t distributed the same way as farms in general; they’re clustered in a few areas. “Areas in the Northeast and Northwest have many small organic farms that sell…   Read more →
Posted on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 at 7:46 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Texas Divided
With all the nonsense going on about Texas seceding from the U.S. — remind me again how well that worked out the last time? — one of the things that has also been noticed in the hullaballooery is that Texas apparently has the right to divide itself into five…   Read more →
1
Posted on Friday, April 24, 2009 at 7:07 PM
Categories: Electoral Maps, Miscellany
The Geography of Buzz
The Geography of Buzz, a project of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, “set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles.” In layman’s terms, they were trying to map the intangible…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, April 20, 2009 at 7:04 PM
Categories: Geotagging, Los Angeles, Miscellany, New York
Office of the Geographer
Catholicgauze points to a profile of the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Geographer and Global Issues in the March 2009 issue (PDF) of the State Department’s employee magazine, State. It’s not the first time State has profiled the office; here’s an earlier look from the July/August 1999 issue….   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, April 18, 2009 at 9:52 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The United Countries of Baseball
The United Countries of Baseball, a map showing the boundaries of team loyalty, is something I’ve seen before, but I thought I’d posted it. Apparently not, so here it is. Via The Map Scroll. Previously: CommonCensus Map Project. Update: See James Fee’s post from last September (and another from…   Read more →
2
Posted on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 10:23 AM
Categories: Miscellany
New York Subway Map Hoodie
It’s a pity that this hoodie with a map of the New York subway printed on it seems to be sold out, because, you know, want. Via Platial….   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 8:52 AM
Categories: Mass Transit, Miscellany, New York
Earth Point Coordinate Converter
The Earth Point Coordinate Converter not only converts between latitude/longitude and Universal Transverse Mercator, it’s also a handy way to convert between, say, decimal latitude/longitude and degrees, minutes and seconds. Via Free Geography Tools….   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, March 12, 2009 at 1:48 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Map Reader
The Map Reader is an independent film from New Zealand whose protagonist is an introverted teenager obsessed with cartography: trailer; reviews here and here; IMDB entry….   Read more →
Posted on Friday, February 13, 2009 at 4:03 PM
Categories: Miscellany, Video
Inuit Routefinding and Oral Tradition
Inuit mapping and routefinding continues to be a subject of interest — and, it turns out, of considerable complexity. “Inuit trails are more than merely means to get from A to B. In reality, they represent a complex social network spanning the Canadian Arctic and are a distinctive aspect of…   Read more →
Posted on Sunday, February 8, 2009 at 4:37 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Growth of Target
Nathan Yau has created an animated map showing the growth of the Target store empire across the United States; he previously made a map showing the same thing for Wal-Mart. He’s also released the code so that others can build similar maps. Via Infonaut. Previously: Wal-Mart’s Spread….   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 6:38 PM
Categories: Miscellany
California Man Reads Map While Driving, Crashes
A man reading a map while driving got into an accident in California; GeoCarta notes wryly that it’s not just GPS that gets you into trouble. Me, I’m just worried California will ban maps from cars….   Read more →
Posted on Wednesday, February 4, 2009 at 6:55 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Cartocacoethes
“Cartocacoethes” is, apparently, the uncontrollable urge to see maps everywhere, in everything. It’s a flavour of apophenia, which is the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless or random data (e.g., canals on Mars). A well-known version of apophenia is pareidolia, which is when people see significant things in random…   Read more →
Posted on Friday, January 9, 2009 at 5:09 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Communes of France
Via The Where Blog (which needs to clean up its comments), an interesting find on the Communes of France Wikipedia entry: a user-generated map of every commune in France. (The French commune is equivalent, more or less, to a municipality.) For some reason it reminds me of All Streets,…   Read more →
Posted on Wednesday, January 7, 2009 at 6:28 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Divided States of America
Those pissed off by the redrawn map of the Middle East may appreciate the implicit payback in the following. A Russian academic is ardently predicting that the U.S. will break apart from internal pressures in 2010, with six pieces falling under different spheres of influence, the Wall Street Journal…   Read more →
Posted on Friday, January 2, 2009 at 5:47 PM
Categories: Miscellany
The Boston Globe’s Year in Maps
The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett takes a look back at the year in maps; I spoke to Drake a while back about potential items for this article, some of which made it into the final product. Highlights include local stories, CNN’s “magic wall,” Mark Newman’s election cartograms, and Cassini’s mapping…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, December 29, 2008 at 5:52 PM
Categories: Miscellany
Redrawn Middle East Map Generates Controversy in Pakistan
Apparently, Ralph Peters’s proposed redrawn map of the Middle East has generated a lot of controversy in Pakistan; Fasi Zaka tries to calm things down by pointing out that the map is only an intellectual exercise — some people apparently took it as official U.S. policy — that tries…   Read more →
2
Posted on Friday, December 26, 2008 at 9:44 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Adidas’s Impossible Map
Part of Adidas’s “impossible” ad campaign during the Euro 2008 competition, the Impossible Map is a contemporary take on “caricature maps” from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Links to previous examples of which below. Via MapHist. Previously: More Caricature Maps from World War I; A Japanese Caricature…   Read more →
Posted on Monday, December 1, 2008 at 8:37 AM
Categories: Miscellany
The History of the India-China Border
There’s more to a disputed boundary than just a dotted line on a map; the Indian magazine Frontline looks at the history of the disputed India-China border. (It’s worth noting that you’d be hard pressed to find two countries more sensitive about maps showing the correct boundaries than India and…   Read more →
2
Posted on Saturday, October 18, 2008 at 9:43 AM
Categories: Miscellany
Mapping McCain
It’s John McCain’s night, so let’s have a little map-related fun at his expense. The Senator had earlier raised eyebrows with some geography- and cartography-related gaffes — referring to Czechoslovakia in the present tense, talking about the Iraq-Pakistan border — which the New Yorker’s “Naked Campaign” feature plays around…   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:30 PM
Categories: Miscellany
NFL TV Distribution Maps Redux
The NFL TV Distribution Maps site, which we’ve seen before, has been publishing maps of TV coverage for each NFL season since 2005. This year, though, they’ve switched to a Google Maps interface, which is actually an improvement, cartographically speaking, from the MS Paint-style maps that were used in…   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 8:17 AM
Categories: Hacks & Mashups, 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 movement), and the Chinese map purportedly proving the Menzies theory….   Read more →
1
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 differences are between populations of the north and south (the…   Read more →
1
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, in preparation for a claim that their continental shelf includes…   Read more →
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 complete collection of every issue back to 1929. However, I…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 changed the way we find geographic information online. I can’t…   Read more →
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. Presenting the annoying (and quite likely offensive) Sat Nag: “Press…   Read more →
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 map, about its slow-but-sure eclipse by Mapquest and GPS and…   Read more →
1
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 pencil for European explorers, and were intelligible to these Westerners….   Read more →
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 in either red or blue, the cape is fitted with…   Read more →
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% to fit the layout. At the other end of the…   Read more →
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. The New Yorker cover from 1976, “View of the World…   Read more →
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 the sprawling inland sea stretching from Olympia to Campbell River,…   Read more →
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 a Zoomify-powered online version. The map’s home page also discusses…   Read more →
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 Arctic. Now he and doctoral student Tracey Lauriault are working…   Read more →
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 Maps and More. Previously: Outline Maps….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 outside four subway stops. John’s reaction, New York Times article….   Read more →
1
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, have a whimsical style based on old maps, with mermaids…   Read more →
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 distribution is down, according to some AAA regional numbers, but…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 Gizmodo….   Read more →
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 the Internet is powered by Schadenfreude and no gag goes…   Read more →
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 weather. Via Very Spatial….   Read more →
Posted on Monday, August 20, 2007 at 8:04 PM
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 construction projects, so local residents and visitors to the area…   Read more →
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 other results may surprise….   Read more →
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 used to be in every elementary school classroom. It’s the…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 easier to solve. Yours for a mere ¥2,520. Via Gadling….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 Associated Press reports. See also Gadling….   Read more →
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.” The stamp, which costs 2.20€ and is sold in sets…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 this new system requires only an ordinary video camera to…   Read more →
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, from oceanography to national history. The drawback is that they’re…   Read more →
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 the blind. Most are extremely low-resolution, and make little or…   Read more →
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 of his expedition. But the map could not be found…   Read more →
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 in books combine to yield another interpretation of the globe….   Read more →
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) and parent country” as well as their geographic coordinates. In…   Read more →
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 population or industrial centres. Via Catholicgauze….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 collection of more than 1,000 maps, dating back as far…   Read more →
1
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 provided the Library of Congress with the first accurate chart…   Read more →
2
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 it: From White’s paper: “It is immediately evident that there…   Read more →
4
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 Map Removal Update; Georgia Removes Nearly 500 Communities from the…   Read more →
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” — the Lawrence Journal-World reports. The maps will take note…   Read more →
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 and their communities, and the importance tiny towns put on…   Read more →
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 codes. Inspired by Kosara’s maps, Stefan Zeiger does the same…   Read more →
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: Georgia Removes Nearly 500 Communities from the Map….   Read more →
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 seems a bit high to me: I’m used to placeholders…   Read more →
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 version of Monopoly. Via Things Magazine….   Read more →
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)….   Read more →
1
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….   Read more →
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 Google Earth formats; a few have been printed, too. Via…   Read more →
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.) It’s available in several sizes and variants and has a…   Read more →
1
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 in the U.S. and Europe: his thesis was that the…   Read more →
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 a deadly shiruken….   Read more →
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 it.” Take that, mouse scroll wheel….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 from 100 to 500 metres. (At right, 300 metres.) Worth…   Read more →
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 special section on flooding, were, paradoxically, too good: After seeing…   Read more →
1
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 workers on the print side of the business during the…   Read more →
Posted on Thursday, September 21, 2006 at 7:58 AM
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 another and indicate regional, trans-border affinities, but that doesn’t stop…   Read more →
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 the attention given to the Israel-Palestine situation, less well-known —…   Read more →
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 for a moment the fact that the Sun-Sentinel has a…   Read more →
1
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 UK-based geography teachers that feel geography and geographers are both…   Read more →
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 last month, which, as I pointed out last week, kind…   Read more →
1
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 2004, and subsequently expanded through his blog and, just out,…   Read more →
4
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 reasons for and against using naive geography in geospatial software…   Read more →
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 issued on June 30, but was unveiled today at the…   Read more →
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 contours at one-hour intervals). It’s an effective way to visualize…   Read more →
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 is a joy is not knowing exactly where you are….   Read more →
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 special; just scans)….   Read more →
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 geographic reasoning is probably the most common and basic form…   Read more →
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 for the link. See previous entry: Outline Maps….   Read more →
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 good: despite saturation coverage of the Middle East, most could…   Read more →
6
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….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
3
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 WikiQuote to that list; if and when they get search…   Read more →
1
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 — stencilling compass roses on sidewalks, for example. Coincidentally or…   Read more →
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 mapping on a scale of 1:200,000,000,000,000. More details at News@Nature;…   Read more →
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 to an article in The Herald (of Rock Hill, South…   Read more →
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 with phrases like “Germans are known for” and pasting up…   Read more →
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 smells and textures in the apartments of girlfriends and the…   Read more →
1
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 Crown Copyright….   Read more →
2
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 was a thousand map dealers, sobbing….   Read more →
1
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. Among other things, the rootkit installer creates serious security vulnerabilities…   Read more →
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 entry: OpenStreetMap….   Read more →
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 its mapping service.” Via Cartography….   Read more →
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 correct the mistaken reporting that it was Google Earth, not…   Read more →
5
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 maps assert our country’s claim on the Arctic Ocean east…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 in the results generated by this visually appealing interactive map….   Read more →
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 English name of the town is more commonly used. (As…   Read more →
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 are supposed to have migrated to the web, MapQuest is…   Read more →
3
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….   Read more →
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 20 inches in diameter and can be self-supporting or wall…   Read more →
3
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….   Read more →
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 is to deter everyone but the most determined customer.”…   Read more →
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 spotted FoxTrot’s series on Google Maps’s satellite images, beginning with…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
2
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 for this little project, I wanted some bare maps that…   Read more →
4
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. The hypothesis is that homosexual people shift in the direction…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 they are used, the important parts of a map and…   Read more →
1
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….   Read more →
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. When Pearcy realigned the U.S., he gave high priority to…   Read more →
5
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….   Read more →
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 viable nation state.” One of these is an 1864 school…   Read more →
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….   Read more →
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 cartographer, from the Gough Map of 1360 to the Ordnance…   Read more →
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 the last person to link to it. It’s a collaborative…   Read more →
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 benefit is, of course, way cool. Via Boing Boing….   Read more →
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 the comments for error-catching). I saw something similar on an…   Read more →
1
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 English-speaking world, with a hefty helping of Japan and Korea….   Read more →
2
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)….   Read more →
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 … ” (via Kottke’s Remaindered Links)….   Read more →
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….   Read more →
Posted on Saturday, January 17, 2004 at 9:38 PM
Categories: Miscellany

Note: Entries from 2003 were not categorized and will not appear in the category archives. Please consult the monthly archives.