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The world according to Americas
Europe according to Germans
This ain't your grandfather's maps! In the series Mapping Stereotypes, Designer Yanko Tsvetkov of Alpha Designer created maps that lays bare the racists and stereotypical views of a number of nations (us Yanks included): Link
What would America look like if various secession movements of the past had been successful? The company Urban Mapping created maps that follow 30 such movements, and what the results may have been. Link to story. Link to interactive map. -Thanks, Ian!
NASA posted a map detailing the “Aboveground Woody Biomass” in the continental United States (in other words, trees).
Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of the Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) recently worked with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to create such an inventory for the United States. The map above was built from the National Biomass and Carbon Dataset (NBCD), released in 2011. It depicts the concentration of biomass—a measure of the amount of organic carbon—stored in the trunks, limbs, and leaves of trees. The darkest greens reveal the areas with the densest, tallest, and most robust forest growth.
Over six years, researchers assembled the national forest map from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models, and a massive amount of ground-based data. It is possibly the highest resolution and most detailed view of forest structure and carbon storage ever assembled for any country.
Forests in the U.S. were mapped down to a scale of 30 meters, or roughly 10 computer display pixels for every hectare of land (4 pixels per acre). They divided the country into 66 mapping zones and ended up mapping 265 million segments of the American land surface. Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.
Since I live in the greener part of Appalachia, this explains why I went to Colorado and expected to be really impressed with the Rockies, but was puzzled at the lack of trees. Link -via Buzzfeed
The folks at Perception Builder reconstructed the path of the Mythbusters cannonball misfire from last week on this map. You can clearly see the area that was intended to contain the firing, and the incredible distance it actually went. See a larger map at the website. Link -via Fark
Tomorrow, we scale the Western Stuffing Slope and conquer the Sweet Potato Peak!
Just in time for Turkey Day, Grant Snider of Incidental Comics gives us this handy Map of Thanksgiving Dinner. View the larger size here: Link - via Laughing Squid
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The most detailed moon map yet has been constructed from images by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). Technicians from Arizona State University compiled the map which shows elevation changes as small as 100 meters.
The near-global topographic map was constructed from 69,000 WAC stereo models and covers the latitude range 79°S to 79°N, 98.2% of the entire lunar surface. Due to persistent shadows near the poles it is not possible to create a complete stereo based map at the highest latitudes. However, another instrument onboard LRO called LOLA excels at mapping topography at the poles. Since LOLA ranges to the surface with its own lasers, and the LRO orbits converge at the poles, a very high resolution topographic model is possible, and can be used to fill in the WAC “hole at the pole.” The WAC topography was produced by LROC team members at the German Aerospace Center.
Read more about the map at NASA. Link -via Laughing Squid
Afniel has an intriguing but simple method of drawing fantasy maps starting with absolutely nothing. She presents it as a way to get children interested in cartography, because the results look quite like real maps. Well, it might get an adult interested in world-building as well! The map shown looks a bit like western Europe, don’t you think? Link -Thanks, Charis Michelsen!
Ahh NYC, the sprawling metropolis that inspired Metropolis, a gritty gothic landscape that inspired Gotham City, the home of X-Men, Ninja Turtles and Futurama’s Planet Express.
In honor of the New York Comic Con taking place this weekend, here’s a geeky tour guide’s dream map of the city, showing where things would, should and might someday be located, complete with color coded genre so you can tell whether the location is from a comic book, movie, tv show or video game.
Now go forth and see the mundane real life counterparts of these fantastic locations for yourself!
Many of these places have been mapped, but now we get the big picture, from Dan Meth. I had no idea Oz was so close to Middle Earth! Frodo would have made sure Dorothy got home safely. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
Where in the world are zombies? Oxford Internet Institute researchers Mark Graham (of Floating Sheep's fame), Taylor Shelton, Matthew Zook, and Monica Stephens mapped the world's zombie outbreaks:
Using a keyword search for "zombies," the following map visualizes the absolute concentrations of references within the Google Maps database. The map reveals two important spatial patterns. First, much of the world lacks any content mentioning "zombies" whatsoever. Second, and related, the highest concentration of zombies in the Geoweb are located in the Anglophone world, especially in large cities. The results either provide a rough proxy for the amount of English-language content indexed over our planet, or offer an early warning into the geographies of the impending zombie apocalypse.
See also NeatoShop's Zombie Shop
It all depends on how you define “continent,” and that’s where things get sticky. -Thanks, tom tom!
Residents were asked to rate their states among factors such as economy, education, and things to do. In total, 293 people responded with an average of 5 per state. Click the link to see the report cards.
Link -via Boing Boing | See also The United States of Shame.
Brought to you (between shots, of course) by Dustin Glick of Dustinland. Click for larger: Link - via I Love Charts
I enjoy the challenge of trying to figure out when a world map was made by looking at the countries on it. That challenge is easier with a handy chart from Replogle Globes that tells what year nations came into existence or changed names. Metafilter, on the other hand, took the question and made a joke thread, with each joke trying to one-up the one before.
My globe is so old…
HOW OLD IS IT?
My globe is so old it still says “here be dragons.” On France.
The chart does not yet have South Sudan listed, but may someday soon. Link
While I would typically consider scanning the backyards of strangers’ houses a bit creepy, Jenny Odell does it for art (and anything done for art is excusable, right?) Odell’s Satellite Collections amalgamate images of swimming pools, nuclear cooling towers, and basketball courts found through Google Maps. How many baseball diamonds are there in Manhattan? According to Jenny Odell, 116. Impressive.
No matter where you go, it’s hell. All this needs is a “You are Here” marker! Or maybe not. This image of hell is brought to you by Jeff Wysaski of Pleated Jeans. Link
Photo Credit: Florian Pucher
After attending grad school, Austrian born architect and furniture designer Florian Pucher started out as an architect in China and decided that he wanted to design items on his own. Fascinated by what he saw from his airplane window, he soon began making carpets based on satellite imagery of farmland. The result is Landcarpet, a conceptual series that can be purchased directly from the designer. Pucher states that he was always fascinated by the landscapes he flew over and thought it would make interesting floor coverings. They include maps from Europe, Africa, the United States and the Netherlands, complete with corresponding flower-colored fields. (Cows not included).
Have you ever wondered what Disneyland had to offer before it began getting massive, modernizing facelifts? Then take a look at this old map of the magical kingdom from 1962, scanned and uploaded in full size by Wishbook, with lots of classic Disney character heads surrounding a detailed, Imagineer drawn map! Look for the view all sizes button on Flickr and choose original size if you want to read the tiny text, and see all the pretty little drawings up close.
Link via Boing Boing.
Dan Abramson drew a map of the United States of America as seen by New Yorker over at Funny or Die. As far as I can tell based on my interactions with New Yorkers, it’s entirely accurate.
I love New York and New Yorkers. I found them to be amongst the nicest and most helpful people in the country. Their reputation of being rude and brusque is wholly undeserved (they are, however, direct).
But there’s one thing that I find very funny about New Yorkers (or those that blog anyhow): they think that everyone they like must live in New York because it’s inconceivable to live anywhere else.
You know you’ve always wondered. Alas, we have no Waffle Houses in Iowa – it would appear that our allotment went mostly to Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, where there are fewer than 200,000 residents per Waffle House. Artist Cat and Girl is selling an 11×14″ print of this enlightening map for $12 if you find it’s a must-have for your house (kitchen art, maybe?).
It doesn’t look that way.
This image shows the biomass of popularly-eaten fish in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1900 and in 2000. Popularly eaten fish include: bluefin tuna, cod, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, pollock, salmon, sea trout, striped bass, sturgeon, turbot. Many of which are now vulnerable or endangered.
The Guardian tells how this information was gathered. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
NPR posted overhead views of Joplin, Missouri before the tornado hit Sunday, and two days after the devastation. You can move a slider over the pictures to compare the two. Be warned, it’s sad. Link -via Bits and Pieces
This map of the world illustrates how and where we are connected to our friends on Facebook. What is interesting is that the map is constructed entirely by Facebook connections and is still able to show accurate borders of the continents. See full map at link.
Marian Bantjes created this awesome poster about knowledge (or lack of it) as a map. Check out the Isle of Knowledge, surrounded by the Sea of Ignorance and set apart from the Unknown by the Curiosity Straights (sic).
I’m very familiar with the Beginners’ Gulf and the Shore of Limitations. It seems like I visit those places every day! Link – via swiss miss
Frank Jacobs of Strange Maps blog posted this map that accompanied the Russian translation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It has a distinctly Slavic motif, including log homes for the Hobbit dwellings (instead of those cute Hobbit houses).
Link – via The Map Room | More Hobbit Maps
If you stand at the South Pole and walk in any direction, you’d be walking north, wouldn’t you? So how do people in Antarctica read a map or give directions? Minnesotastan looked it up, and the answer is: they throw out the directions from the globe and make up a system. The continent is labeled with “East Antarctica” and “West Antarctica” in this map, but of course you must go south to get to either. There are actually two conventions for mapping the continent, as you’ll read in this post at TYWKIWDBI. Link
Graham Roberts and GOOD Magazine collaborated to create Wanderlust, an interactive graphic depicting some of the most famous travels in history and fiction: Link
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The German site Zeit Online posted a map in which you can compare the evacuation around Japan’s Fukushima power plant to the populations around nuclear plants in the US and Canada. You can adjust the area of evacuation with a slider. Zoom in on a red dot, and see the stats. For example, 37,513 people live within 18 miles of the Callaway (Missouri) pressurized-water reactor nuclear plant, shown in this screenshot. The same type of evacuation would affect over a million people near the Indian Point plant in New York. However, Japan is beginning to evacuate some areas beyond the 30km (18 mile) radius. Link -via Metafilter
I’m glad that someone has done this, though I wish they had used names rather than flags; I would never be able to identify three of the entities on the outer part of the orange circle as Andorra, San Marino and Monaco. Fortunately some of the names and additional explanation is available at the Strange Maps blog at Big Think.*
This diagram is a particularly instructive map, too: it neatly visualises the gaps and overlaps between all kinds of supranational institutions in Europe – differences which for the most part are too subtle for any but the most attentive observer. All will be aware of the ‘Europe’ that is a less than homogenous conglomerate of nation states, with an unwieldy Brussels bureaucracy at its centre. This European Union, which consists of 27 member states, is merely the most visible of several European unions, all committed to different versions of the same goal: European integration.
The diagram also includes one statelet whose euros are much sought after by collectors.
Previously on Neatorama: The Great British Venn Diagram.
Link.
*Addendum: A hat tip to Feodor for noting that Strange Maps got the diagram from Wikipedia’s “Supranational European Bodies,” where the flags are clickable to the corresponding country entries. (It is also described there as a Euler diagram, not a Venn diagram).
When a TV show has been running as long as The Simpsons has, you get to know its fictional world pretty well. Jeff Wysaski took the information from the show and mapped out all the stores in the Springfield Mall for your convenience. This is only a small detail of the entire upper-level and lower-level map at Pleated Jeans. Link
