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

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!

Link

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.

Link

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

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.

Link – via NPR

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).

Link

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?).

Link

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.

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 ]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/24/russian-map-of-the-hobbit/feed/ 2 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/18/east-of-the-south-pole/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/18/east-of-the-south-pole/#comments Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:37:31 +0000 Miss Cellania http://www.neatorama.com/?p=44803

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

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

Today is Presidents Day in the US, and it is UNESCO International Mother Language Day everywhere. This is a day to celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, and to learn about the world’s languages. National Geographic has an interactive world map highlighting areas where languages are in danger of dying out, as part of their Enduring Voices Project. As it is now, one of the world’s 7,000 languages is gone for good an average of every two weeks.

Language defines a culture, through the people who speak it and what it allows speakers to say. Words that describe a particular cultural practice or idea may not translate precisely into another language. Many endangered languages have rich oral cultures with stories, songs, and histories passed on to younger generations, but no written forms. With the extinction of a language, an entire culture is lost.

Much of what humans know about nature is encoded only in oral languages. Indigenous groups that have interacted closely with the natural world for thousands of years often have profound insights into local lands, plants, animals, and ecosystems—many still undocumented by science. Studying indigenous languages therefore benefits environmental understanding and conservation efforts.

Link -Thanks, Marilyn!

Dan Meth came up with the definitive map of fantasy places you know and love -all in one big continent! It’s “the very first accurate map of the entire fantasy world.” Let the arguments begin. Link -via Buzzfeed

The design of this handcrafted item from Whole Cloth Quilts is taken from a vintage New York City subway map. Karyn, the quilter, made it as a wall hanging. It’s compact enough in size that, in an emergency, it could be taken off the wall and used to navigate the subway system.

Link -via Not Martha

“My dog has a map of the world on her nose. Sort of,” writes Mililani Smythe. But of course: there’s the American continent, right in the middle!

Link

Remember the United States of Shame, where each state was labeled with the statistic it was worst in? Ilya Gerner figured that there should be a statistic that each state is best in, and made a map accordingly. However, I’m not sure how proud I can be that Kentucky is the best armed state. Link to map. Link to explanation. -via Buzzfeed

Jeff Wysaski of Pleated Jeans wrote "Whether it’s a fat population, high rate of STDs or excessive tax rate, it turns out that every state ranks dead last in at least one unsavory category." So he compiled a most unusual "worst of" list, featuring your favorite home state (Oh, poor, poor North Dakotans!)

Hailing from California, the state with the worst *cough* air pollution, I give you The United States of Shame: Link - via metafilter

This is pretty nifty: Axis Maps produces street maps of San Francisco, Downtown Chicago and Boston (New York is next) that accurately depict streets and highways, as well as parks and neighborhoods using only typography. Take a look: Link – via Holy Kaw

You’ll never be lost at the subway with these Mighty Wallets from the NeatoShop! The clever and super-strong Tyvek-made wallets are printed with maps from various subway systems, like the ‘L’ in Chicago, the London Underground, and the NYC Subway.

As an added bonus, you’re camouflaging your money and cards inside what looks like ordinary ol’ maps: Link

Remember the United States of TV map that assigned a show to each of the 50 United States? My Food Looks Funny did that with food, assigning a representative dish to each state. I can’t argue with fried chicken for Kentucky, but I think of catfish or barbecue for Tennessee instead of tomatoes. Link -via Laughing Squid

The New York Times has a series of interactive maps of the US with which you can study population distribution by race and ethnicity, income, housing (such as mortgage, home value, and rent), and by education. I found that the average household income in my county in 2009 was $21,195, which is 10% less than in the year 2000. The data comes from the US Census Bureau. Link -via Metafilter

Slate has an interactive map showing when and where cases of diabetes are soaring. At the link, you can adjust the year with a slider and mouseover the counties to find yours. My county had a diabetes rate of 11.4% in 2008. Link -via Gene Expression

What a neat idea! Type the name of each state in the US into the Google search field one at a time, and see what autocomplete suggestions come up. Then make a map of them. That’s what happened at Very Small Array, which resulted in this. I would have guessed Kentucky easily. See a larger version of this map at the site. Link -via The Daily What

Hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions – it seems there’s no end to the hazards that threaten to befall us. What areas are most at risk of experiencing a natural disaster? By looking at a region’s history of disasters,  fault lines and underground magma the io9 team has compiled a map of the world’s hot zones. Much to my relief the area that I call home around the Great Lakes in Canada looks relatively risk-free.

Link – Via The Map Room

Andrew Shears created this US Map with a TV show to go with each state. It’s good to see that TV sometimes happens outside of New York and California! Shears also explains why he choose each show. You can enlarge the picture at Thinking Pseudogeographically. Link -via The Daily What

You might remember how Randall Munroe of xkcd created a map of the internet in 2007. A lot of things have changed since then, so he made a completely new map to reflect the state of online communities today. Just a portion of the map is shown here. Go to xkcd and enlarge the map, and you’ll find Neatorama in the inset of the Blogosphere area (in the Sea of Opinions), a tiny island off the coast near Deadspin and Lifehacker. Look around, and you’ll see plenty of cleverness, such as Facebook’s privacy controls isolated in a pool of lava, and a meteor crater where Craiglist’s adult services used to be. Link -via Metafilter

Update 10/6/10 by Alex: Woohoo! Randall knows we’re alive – Neatorama made it to this year’s map, right alongside Boing Boing, Lifehacker, and Deadspin:

Eric Fischer took data from San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation agency (Muni) bus routes and turned it into a graph titled "A day of Muni":

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. Muni is one of America?s oldest public transit agencies and today carries over 200 million customers per year in 80 routes throughout the city and county of San Francisco.
Black lines represent very slow movement under 7 mph. Red are less than 19 mph. Blue are less than 43 mph. Green lines depict faster speeds above 43 mph.

Link – via Holy Kaw

Bruce Springsteen sang a lot of songs about places -more than you realize until you see Springstreets. Daniel Cassaro created a map of those places enshrined in song lyrics.

Warning: Springstreets is not to scale and should not be used while on a drive, last chance power or otherwise. The only thing you can really use this map to find is yourself.

The image here is cropped; see several larger images with more detail at the artist’s site. Link -via Nag on the Lake

Animals on the Underground is a collection of over 20 animal characters made using only lines, stations and interchange symbols on the London Underground map, created by illustrator Paul Middlewick in 1988. In 2003, the concept was used in a poster campaign by advertising agency McCann-Erickson to promote the London Zoo.

Link – via zevs

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by SnezanaP.

This map, or geoid, shows the contours of the earth in a more precise manner than ever before. It was constructed with measurements taken by Europe’s Goce satellite.

Launched in 2009, the sleek satellite flies pole to pole at an altitude of just 254.9km – the lowest orbit of any research satellite in operation today.

The spacecraft carries three pairs of precision-built platinum blocks inside its gradiometer instrument that sense accelerations which are as small as 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 of the gravity experienced on Earth.

This has allowed it to map the almost imperceptible differences in the pull exerted by the mass of the planet from one place to the next – from the great mountain ranges to the deepest ocean trenches.

Two months of observations have now been fashioned into what scientists call the geoid.

This technology allows mapping of places that were too inaccessible for such precision before, such as the Himalayas. The BBC has a lot more on this project. Link -via TYWKIWDBI

The surface of this world globe is like a blackboard. It comes with the outlines of the continents painted on it, but you can fill in the national boundaries and country names with chalk, so the globe will never be out of date (like mine, which has East Germany, the USSR, and Yugoslavia on it). Only $450! Link -via Nag on the Lake