Randall Munroe of xkcd  presents a dozen different ways to project the earth onto a map, and analyzes the fans of each. My favorite (after the globe, of course) is the Robinson projection, which pegs my lifestyle pretty well. Link -via the Presurfer

The Mississippi River seems eternal, but it changes over time. How much? You can see in a collection of colorful maps at Visual News. Cartographer Harold N. Fisk produced them in 1944, with different colors to show the past and current flow of the mighty Mississippi. Link -via the Presurfer

The Migrations Map is an interactive map that lets you see which countries people are moving to and from across the world. Here, for example, are the ten largest streams of immigrants into Australia. The UK contributes the largest share with over one million current residents of Australia.

This map was made by Martin De Wulf, a computer scientist in Brussels.

Link -via MetaFilter

René Voorburg, an archivist at the National Library of the Netherlands, digitized a Roman road map from about 300 AD. OmnesViae displays a route between two towns of your choice and provides driving directions. Pictured above is one that I created from Ostia to Brundisium.

Link -via The Presurfer

Ingrid Dabringer likes to “…elevate the mundane. The Mundane is so saturated with meaning if we just take an extra second to dwell on it.” Among other expressions of this desire, she finds the forms for human figure drawings in maps. Link -via Geekosystem

I reside squarely in the “iceberg-with-ranch-dressing-eating” area even though I dislike both those things intensely. The best, I think, is the huge collection of countries in Europe who think the others are all arrogant, though “old and bad at real estate” made me giggle. You can see a larger version of this on Laughing Squid. Link

Gas, KS
“Don’t pass gas, stop and enjoy It.”

Hooker, OK
“It’s a location, not a vocation.”

Bushnell, SD
“It’s not the end of the earth, but you can see it from here”

Walla Walla, WA
“The city so nice they named it twice.”

Click on a slogan at the site and the map will show you where the town is. Link -via Buzzfeed

Artist Nikki Rosato creates amazing sculptures of human figures by using old street maps people have tossed. She started out by cutting flat silhouettes out of maps, then progressed to this stunning 3D work that she creates by eliminating all of the landmasses from the maps. She then uses wire to guide the remaining roads and waterways into the shape she wants. The result is “ambiguous and hauntingly ghost-like,” as she says in her artist’s statement.

Link via Flavorwire

Even driving down the highway can be a virtual experience! With this Google Earth application, just enter your location and destination, hit “go” to find your route, then go to the simulator panel and hit “start.” You can adjust your speed as you drive along. Now, slow down and enjoy the scenery! Requires the Google Earth plug-in. The screenshot shown here is where I’m either getting on the Brooklyn Bridge or plunging into the East River. Link -via Metafilter

Matthew Cusick composes collage portraits and landscapes out of maps, such as the above Red & Blue. Each work at his gallery at the link includes a detail image, demonstrating the remarkable work that Cusick put into selecting map colors and shapes.

Link via Dude Craft

R. Luke Dubois sifted through the profiles of 19 million people in the United States on 21 dating websites. He then plotted the words that they used in their profiles the most frequently with their geographic locations. Pictured above, for example, is central Michigan. “Companionship”, I think, is Lansing. You can view other maps at the link.

Link via Colossal

Lutz Bornmann and Loet Leydesdorff created interactive world maps which denote the locations from which scientific papers were authored. Green dots represent higher quality research and red dots signify lower quality research. There are three maps, one each for physics, chemistry, and psychology:

The idea is simple enough – scientific papers cite other scientific papers and it is usually held that the more a paper is cited the more important it is. So taking the data from the Web-of-Science database the researchers simply counted how many papers originated from each city and plotted a circle with a radius proportional to the number of papers on Google Maps.

They then looked at the number of papers that you would expect to be in the top 10% most cited papers from each city, i.e. 10% of the papers compared to the number that were actually in the top 10%. The difference indicates how successful the city is in producing important papers and not just their volume. They plotted the circles in red for lower performing cities and green for higher performing cities.

Pictured above is a selection from the physics map.

Link via Slashdot

Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London . He took over 10,000 photographs, which he edited down to 4,000. He cut them up and pasted them together  into a composite photographic map of the city of London measuring 7.5ft × 4ft.

Nishino’s collages are on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London until April 2.

Link- Via The Map Room

Forbes presents an interactive county map of the United States that shows where people are moving. Just click on a county to view where new arrivals came from or people are going to. You can also select from nine major metropolitan areas.

Link via Glenn Reynolds

Charts Bin presents an interactive map showing the distribution of passenger cars throughout the world. Iceland leads the world with 668 per 1,000 people. At the link, you can hover over each country to view more details.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Dr. Eilert Sundt, Secretary General, Norwegian Cartozoologic Society

cartozoology n. The science or practice of discovering and studying  animals outlined paradigmatically by street layouts as they appear in maps, especially with reference to physical evidence of the animals’ presence in the corresponding terrain.

cartozoologist n. [From French carte ‘map, card’ + modern Latin zoologia (as ZOO-, -LOGY)]1

As the dictionary definition indicates, cartozoology is a study of maps: a search for animal outlines hidden in the street layouts primarily of cities. But equally, if not more importantly, it is a field study, a study of the terrain: the animal outline is meticulously explored on foot. In cartozoological terms, this exploration is referred to as a “con-tour”.

Cartozoology in Norway, as in the world at large, is a young science. Tor Åge Bringsværd’s seminal article “Den store fisken i Reykjavik” (“The big fish in Reykjavik”)2 is generally accepted as the first properly cartozoological work. The term “cartozoology” is more recent still. The first recorded instance in print is from Bringsværd’s book London3 from 2003. The archives of the Norwegian Cartozoologic Society show the term in use in private correspondence in February 2003. In other words, we are dealing not with a young, but virtually an infant science. Nevertheless, we find that not only has a cartozoologic method been developed, but also elements of self-reflection and a critical methodology can be found in the cartozoological texts. As yet no fully-fledged meta- cartozoology can be said to have emerged; this article is intended as a first seed.

The Origins of Cartozoology
Even though cartozoology is a neophyte in the academic arena, it has of course not sprung full-born out of nothing.  As Aphrodite rose from the ocean foam, cartozoology has been shaped by ideas and thought currents that have undulated through human consciousness since the beginning of history.

A fundamental trait of the human psyche is our search for meaning and understanding in addition to mere knowledge. This wish is naturally accompanied by a deep assumption that the meaning of existence is inscribed in the world, in the shape of more or less hidden messages that may be read and understood by she who acquires the requisite knowledge and skill. These are important ingredients in the ideas whence cartozoology sprang forth.

An early example of cartozoology: the constellation Cygnus the swan, and for comparison, a swan.

In cultural history, we find several cases of discovery and examination of emerging animal shapes that have so much in common with modern cartozoology that they rightly may be described as examples of proto-cartozoology. A clear example is the surveying of celestial constellations. However, a critical examination of a fairly typical example, the constellation Cygnus (the Swan), juxtaposed with an image of an actual swan should illustrate that this is not particularly fruitful from a cartozoological point of view.

The format of this article prohibits a detailed treatment of all proto-cartozoological precursors of the modern science; such a project should be reserved for a future monograph. In this short article we jump instead to contemporary literature.

Cartozoology and the Humanities
Inasmuch as cartozoology finds its research material exclusively in cultural landscapes it has at least one foot firmly planted in the humanities. It should come as no surprise, then, that we find recent cases of proto-cartozoology4 in literature. Maybe the most striking example is found in Paul Auster’s novel City of Glass from the New York Trilogy.5 The protagonist plots the apparently aimless wanderings of a certain Mr. Stallman around New York and finds that he seems to be writing “THE TOWER OF BABEL” in the city streets. Thus Auster ends up in a kind
of cartotypography.

Nevertheless, this literary example illustrates important aspects of cartozoological research: The raw materials— cartographic representations of the cityscape—rarely yield clear, unambiguous images. Cartozoological research is often meticulous: only in exceptional cases is a cartozoological contour successfully drawn in the first attempt. Innumerable iterations may lie behind even the simplest observation.

In parallel with this contour tracing, actual species determination takes place in a hermeneutic interaction. The discovery of recognisable antlers or a characteristic auricle at one end of an animal may well result in the nether extremities at the opposite end being redrawn according
to a different set of streets, and small paws may easily be transformed into larger hooves.

Con-tours in Hammerfest
Here are some con-tours in the city of Hammerfest, Finland.

The West Side Riesenterrier is the first cartozoological specimen to be properly documented. As the name indicates, it is a formidably large beast. Crossing the embassy area and one of the main shopping streets in Oslo, it boasts a particularly rich habitat. Amateur explorers should, however, note that some properties along the con-tour have restrictions on photography. Failure to observe these restrictions may result in police reprimands, as the secretariat general have learned at some cost.

The Nose-Ringed Dala Horse spans the distance from the Norwegian parliament to Oslo City Hall. Interestingly, at precisely the point where the underside of its lifted tail joins its hindquarters, we find the parliamentary information service. Being an iconic Swedish figure, the presence of a Dala horse in the centre of the Norwegian capital is something of a mystery.

The Ugly Duckling is a living testament to Danish storyteller Hans Christian Andersen’s life and work in the streets of Copenhagen. An entire book has been published to document the richness of this con-tour alone.

The Obese Stamshound bears witness to surprising secrets hidden in the small Norwegian fishing village of Stamsund, involving space exploration and the first dog in orbit.

A Call for Research Contributions
The Norwegian Cartozoologic Society was founded in Oslo on 19 June 2003, with a mission to map the hidden two-dimensional animal life in our close surroundings. The society is led by (and consists of) a secretariat comprising three secretaries general: as of this writing, they are Tor Åge Bringsværd, Roger Pihl and Eilert Sundt. In order to further cartozoological research worldwide, we call upon the readers of the Annals of Improbable Research to examine their local surroundings for cartozoological specimens.

A cartozoological exploration takes place in two phases: First the animal is discovered by scrutiny of a suitable street map. Then the contour of the animal is traced on foot in the corresponding terrain, and all animal life en route is documented by notes and preferably photographs. As an aide to novice cartozoologists, we publish the society’s tips for Cartozoological Expeditions:8

1.  Do not set out on longer expeditions without necessary training. Many cartozoological expeditions are long and arduous and require the participants to be in good physical shape.

2.  Let someone know where you are going. As cartozoological expeditions almost always follow paths less well trodden, it is essential that any rescue operations know where to look.

3.  Respect the weather and the weather reports. Many have been surprised by inclement weather, even in big cities. If the expedition takes place on a Sunday or public holiday, the range of available shelter in nearby shops will, in many parts of the world, be limited. Convenience stores and churches often provide adequate shelter.

The Mercantile Mongrel Dog prowls the heart of the City of London. Given the sheer variety and denseness of detail that is characteristic of London, this con-tour is best explored in the company of friends.

The Danish Mountain Stork is situated near one of Denmark’s most impressive mountain plateaus, Ejer Bjerge, and its con-tour makes for a pleasant walk around the charming town of Skanderborg.

4.  Listen to experienced city folk. We encourage talking to whomever you meet along your way before you venture into unknown territory. This can yield a lot of useful information when observing the cartozoological contour.

5.  Be prepared for inclement weather, even on short expeditions. Always bring an umbrella, credit cards, a camera, and whatever the city in question demands. Wet is wet, wherever you are, and an expedition may well end in failure if you fail to take basic precautions. Some establishments do not accept credit cards, and you may have to resort to cash (“money”).

6.  Remember your map and compass. Even though most city streets are sign-posted, it is all too easy to get lost.

7.  Never walk alone. Four cartozoological eyes see better than two. Six see better than four, and so on. And besides, any coffee stops en route are much nicer with company.

8.  Turn back in time. There is no shame in turning. The city will in all likelihood not be demolished tomorrow, and will still be there to be explored another day. The city planners are not that efficient.

9.  Save your strength. Seek a café if necessary. It may be wise to divide an expedition into several stages (see tip #8). Check into a hotel or other suitable accommodation if rest becomes vital. Be aware that sleeping in parks is illegal in many jurisdictions.

The Skien Stag marks the birthplace of the highly acclaimed father of cartozoology, Tor Åge Bringsværd. The stag was also chosen as the emblem for the Norwegian city of Skien’s recent 1,000-year anniversary,7 making the cartozoological find all the more fitting.

The Scottish Culture Cow is the Everest of cartozoology. With a contour length of roughly 21 kilometres (or half a marathon) through the streets of Edinburgh, it is rarely completed in one day.

Notes
1   The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011.
2   First published in Gateavisa (1975) and in Nazar 1: Timeglass (1975), a science-fiction anthology edited by Bing & Bringsværd.
3   Bringsværd, T.A. London. Oslo: Spartacus, 2003.
4   proto- because the cartozoological sketches are not recognised and described as such.
5   Auster, P. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber, 1987.
6   Bringsværd, T.A., P. Pihl, and E. Sundt. Det dyriske København. Oslo: Galrof forlag, 2007.
7   An event, interestingly, celebrated 42 years after its 600-year anniversary.
8   Translated and adapted from ”Kartozoologiske ekspedisjoner” by Roger Pihl in Håndbok i kartozoologi, Oslo: Tibe Forlag, 2004.

“The city planners are not that efficient.”

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the March-April 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

According to data compiled by environmental think tank World Resources Institute, Scandinavians drink a lot of coffee. Between 6.8 and 12.0 kilograms per year. So world travelers, does this map match up with your experiences?

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Cartographer Daniel Huffman measured the propensity of six swear words in tweets by geographic location within the 48 contiguous states. So this map is actually adjusted for population. Redder areas swear a lot more than blacker areas.

Link via Geekologie

The Economist created a map of the United States that matches each state with a national economy of comparable size as measured by Gross Domestic Product in 2009. It’s interactive. So at the link, you can hover your cursor over each state and get more detailed information.

Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Previously: Map of US States Showing Equal Population

This animation is a 3D rendering of Mortimer’s Cave, one of many available at the Nottingham Caves Survey. You’ll also find photographic virtual tours of caves, movies, images, and a Google map to find more of the 450 specific caves in Nottingham. You could get lost in here! Link -Thanks, John James!

Rich Aschmann, a linguist, created a huge map of North America describing the boundaries and differences between various dialects of the English language. Keep scrolling down at the link, and you can find Aschmann’s extensive listing of audio examples of many of these dialects.

Link via The Agitator

Paul Butler, and intern at Facebook, created this map of the world using ten millions online friendships:

I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points. After a few minutes of rendering, a big white blob appeared in the center of the map. Some of the outer edges of the blob vaguely resembled the continents, but it was clear that I had too much data to get interesting results just by drawing lines. I thought that making the lines semi-transparent would do the trick, but I quickly realized that my graphing environment couldn’t handle enough shades of color for it to work the way I wanted.

Instead I found a way to simulate the effect I wanted. I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

Link via Gizmodo

Vincenzo Cosenza created a series of maps tracking the most popular social networks around the world over the past year and a half. This month’s map is above. Consenza writes:

Zuckerberg’s creature continues to gain users around the world (almost 600 millions). Since June 2010 Facebook has stolen new important nations from local, previously strong, competitors (in 115 out of 132 countries analyzed it is market leader) especially in Europe. In particular:

- From Iwiw: Hungary

- From Nasza-Klasa: Poland

- From Hi5: Mongolia

- From Orkut (Google): Paraguay and India. Orkut remains the first social network in Brasil.

In Japan Mixi is still the most used web-based social network (Ameba that I previously mentioned it’s not a pure social networking site, but also a portal/blog-hosting provider). But if we look to mobile social networks usage the leader is Gree followeb by Mobage Town.

Link via Geekosystem

Click here for larger image

This map rearranges the world by correlating the population of a country to actual size. Some countries (the United States, Yemen, Brazil and Ireland) remain in their original location. India has replaced Canada on the map. I’d better start packing my bags because Canada is located way over in Pakistan.

Link – Via Frogsmoke

Bruno Kurth and Tobias Reichling. Vanessa Graf, Tanja Kusserow-Kurth, and Torsten Scheer built an enormous relief map of Europe topped with models of famous monuments. They used 53,500 pieces to create a structure that measures 12.5 feet on a side. 44 monuments lie on the surface of the map.

Link via Make | Photo: Tobias Reichling

Kris Kowal created an interactive map of Middle-earth. You can zoom and pan, search for or center a location, and link to a particular area. Place names are labeled in both English and Elvish.

Link via Geekologie | Image by Kris Kowal used under Creative Commons license

This is a portion of a 1858 map of property lines along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The map reminded the author of shotgun houses -long, narrow houses with all the rooms stacked in a line, one behind another. Is there any relation between the two? Maybe the odd property shapes point to the fact that every landowner wants a bit of riverfront. See the entire (enlargable) map at Strange Maps. Link

Rebecca Crane matched the geography of US states with planets in Star Wars to create a composite map of the United States. Texas is Kessel, Oregon is Endor, and Maine is Naboo. Crane writes:

Planets were assigned based on partial terrain, landmarks that correlate with the planet and state, types of people in the state and planet, famous landmarks, or slightly randomly selected (but loosely based on facts) from my brother and myself.

Link via Geekologie

Dimensions is a neat feature from the BBC that overlays historical or ecological events over modern maps centered on the postal code of your choice. The above map that I created shows the Great Wall of China shielding Lubbock, Texas. Other options include the route of the original Marathon, the Battle of Stalingrad, and the ongoing floods in Pakistan.

Link via Gizmodo

Harvard University graduate student Bill Rankin owns the site Radical Cartography. It’s filled with unique and imaginative maps, such as the above world map plotting relative population by lines of longitude. Other maps include displays of an actual cartographic “axis of evil”, US counties named after Presidents, and youth skater culture.

Link via Geekosystem | Rankin’s Professional Website

Grad student Nicholas Corso dons a backpack brimming with lasers and cameras. As he hikes the hall, the lasers scan everything from floor to ceiling and the cameras capture a panorama.

“The idea,” explains Professor Zakhor, “is that you wear a backpack, you walk inside the building. You’re done. You push a button and out comes this model.”

The model is textured (covered) with the photographs.

The team is also behind the technology that creates 3D views of major cities on Google Earth. So, why not fly into the buildings and not just around them? The outdoor version relies on GPS but you can’t rely on GPS indoors. So, the team in the imaging lab combined a new breed of miniature laser with an inertial management unit (IMU) like the ones that guide missiles.

Video at the link.

Link via DVICE | Image: KGO-TV, Screenshot by DVICE

Malice in the Palace(1949) is set in a fictionalised, funnified Middle East, where Moe, Shemp and Larry run the Cafe Casbah Bah. Two of their customers, Gin-A Rummy and Hassan ben Sober, are plotting to steal a giant diamond from the tomb of Rootentooten. However, when they discover the diamond is already in the possession of the Emir of Schmow, they start yammering and are kicked out of the Cafe. The Stooges then decide to retrieve the diamond themselves, using a map left behind by the unsuccessful plotters.
The map, shown briefly in the film, is of a continentful of countries with strange names and odd shapes, clearly designed to look and sound ‘foreign’. What does this ‘Map of Starvania’, designed merely for the purpose of unsophisticated comedy, unconsciously reveal of mid-20th-century America’s attitudes towards the exotic, the un-American?

Link – Via J-Walk

Doug McCune, who descibes himself as a “data visualization engineer”, created 3D crime maps for San Francisco. They look like topographical elevation maps because raised portions represent reported criminal incidents. Pictured above is a display of prostitution in the city.

Link via io9

No, it’s not just a weird work of art, but a demonstration by two scientists about how a slime mold can be used to plan road and communications networks efficiently:

Physarum polycephalum, a type of slime mold, grows tendrils in search of food and withdraws extraneous arms to focus on the most efficient paths between sources. Although the American map is just an illustrative model made for Popular Science, researchers in the U.K. have used slime mold to create similar replicas of local roads and railways, backed up by computer models. Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones, specialists in unconventional computing at the University of the West of England in Bristol, found that, left to its own devices, the slime mold mimicked a good part of the country’s actual road systems. Because slime mold finds the paths that are most resilient to faults or damage, it could be used to make mobile-communication and transportation networks hardier.

Videos at the link.

Link | Photo: Andy Adamatzky and Jeff Jones

English Russia is a marvelous blog filled with pictures of strange and inventive things from Russia. One offering in its archives is a post about “local globes” — the practice of taking local maps and fitting them around globes so that one locality is imagined as a whole world:

In Russia and other post Soviet countries there were a real craze on independence after they finally got it with USSR collapse. Sometimes this took some weird forms like, for example, making the globes of their own country. Yes, those were just like regular globes we used to see on geography classes but instead the whole world only their own country was mapped on it.

These things were officially on sale and still you can buy something like “the globe of Ukraine” in shops of Kiev.

So then people went further and decided to make the globes of their local cities or even villages.

At the link, you can find instructions on how to make your own.

Link via Make | Image: Collage by Sean Michael Ragan of Make

Artist Stephen Walter made an enormous, detailed, hand-drawn map of London. It’s called “The Island” and is a satire of Londoners’ alleged view that their city is independent of the rest of the UK. In an interview about his work, Walter said:

Discoveries such as the First Earl of Salisbury having honeymooned, in 1589, in what is now a dodgy part of Edmonton caused much amusement. The map charts the birthplaces of famous people such as Alfred Hitchcock, Samuel Palmer, Noel Edmonds and Phyllis Pearsall (the originator of the London A-Z). It notes where Winston Churchill went to school, the gymnasium where Arnold Schwarzenegger trained, where the speed of sound was first recorded, the place where Oliver Twist was taught to thieve, the hotel where Hendrix died, sites of old palaces and prisons and the main encampments of the peasant revolts …

Link via Make | Artist’s Website | Interview

Martin Waldseemüller, a modernist-humanist German clergyman and cartographer, reprinted “The Four Voyages of Amerigo” in 1507 with his own “Cosmographic Introduction.” He opined:

I see no reason why anyone should justly object to calling this part … America, after Amerigo [Vespucci], its discoverer, a man of great ability.

Waldseemüller included a map of the the new lands, on which the name “America” makes its earliest appearance.

The map was popular. The name caught on, and it stuck.

And it spread. America was first used as a name for only the southern continent of the New World, but Gerardus Mercator’s 1538 world map included both North America and South America.

And that is precisely why many of us live in America instead of Christopha or Columbia. Link

The British Library has announced that the Klencke Atlas will have its first-ever public showing this summer as part of a map exhibition.

It is almost absurdly huge – 1.75 metres (5ft) tall and 1.9 metres (6ft) wide – and was given to [Charles II] by Dutch merchants and placed in his cabinet of curiosities.

At the time of its creation, it was intended as “an encyclopaedic summary of the world.”

Link.  Previously on Neatorama:  The [other] Largest Book in the World

The Photonics Research Group of Ghent University in Belgium created a 1 trillionth scale map that measures only 40 micrometers across. That’s about half the width of a human hair. It serves a purely decorative purpose on a new type of microchip that the team is developing:

The silicon photonics technology that is being developed with these chips integrates optical circuits onto a small chip: Light can be manipulated on submicrometer scale in tiny strips of silicon called waveguides or photonic wires. Using the unique properties of silicon, combined with state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, these silicon photonic circuits can pack a million times more components on the same footprint as today’s commercial glass-based photonics.

Link via Gizmodo

Swedish linguist Mikael Parkvall created this map using the relative size of regions to express how many languages they have produced. Papua New Guinea is quite a linguistic superpower. Aaron Hotfelder explains why:

Deep valleys and unforgiving terrain have kept the different tribes of Papua New Guinea relatively isolated, so that the groups’ languages are not blended together but remain distinct. While the country is thought to have over 800 living languages, some, like Abaga, are spoken by as few as five(!) people.

Link via Marginal Revolution

This map by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy is an attempt to demonstrate what areas of the world are comparatively accessible by land and water travel. The cartographers concluded that much of the world commonly thought of as inaccessible is not:

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and river networks (see the maps). It also considers how factors such as altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10 per cent of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city. What’s more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20 per cent of the land is more than two days from a city – around the same proportion as Canada’s Quebec province.

Map Link and Article Link via Volokh Conspiracy

Infographics are not new, they are just easier to make and pass around on the internet. BibliOdyssey has a collection of posters, pages, and pamphlets from the Victorian era that make information into an art form. Pictured is the Tableau De L’Histoire Universelle (History of the Universe Chart).

This is a fold-out print depicting all of human history from the time of creation (4693 BC = Adam & Eve; the great flood = 3300 BC) up to the date of publication (1858 by Eug. Pick, Paris). Vignettes of historically significant people, places and buildings etc are arranged along the borders.

The designer has employed something of a metaphorical display choice: civilisations are presented as a series of rivers — the widths likely imply the comparative population level of each group versus the world’s population — which ‘flow’ down through history.

See also graphics on geography, biology, astronomy, and more. The pictures are all linked to larger Flickr versions. Link

This map by James Richards overlays a map of the United States with the flags of countries with populations equal to the respective states. You can view a much larger image at the link.

Link via Strange Maps | Flags of the World

Image: Kalimedia

Cartography blog Strange Maps has a map of the British Isles showing current place names translated into modern English. It’s one from a collection known as The Atlas of True Names. You can view a larger image at the link.

Link | Other Maps of Translated Place Names | News Story

Image: National Geographic

The above image is a selection and compression of an enormous interactive map of the almost two hundred manned and unmanned exploratory missions in our solar system over the past fifty years. It was created by graphic designers Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic. Click on the link and use the box in the upper-right corner of the screen to choose what area you’d like to see, and zoom as needed.

Link via OhGimzo!

The richly decorated Carta Marina, from 1539 might seem a little crude by today’s standards but modern satellite imaging revealed that the sea monsters shown in parts of the ocean on the map actually correspond to well known storm fronts, dangerous currents and maritime hazards. This was perhaps just a method of depicting this at the time, as a warning to sailors venturing into these areas

This picture is just a small detail of the Carta Marina. See the full map and many others in a roundup of old maps at Dark Roasted Blend. Link

Believe it or not, explorers believed California was an island for a very long time and this map depicts that assumption. It would take over 50 years after the creation of this map before it was confirmed that California is indeed attached to the mainland of America.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by johnny.