I am a dope when it comes to constellations; identifying Orion’s Belt and the Dippers (Big and Little) is about as deep as my skills go when it comes to eyeballing the heavens. This Crumpled Sky Map by Palomar seems like it would be an awesome tool to help me and my fellow heavens-blind folk educate ourselves in the ways of the cosmos.
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Google Earth is an amazing resource, but if there’s one criticism that can be leveled at it, it’s that it’s permanently out of date due to the lag between when the data is acquired and when it appears online. But right now, a pair of Californian startups are putting swarms of tiny satellites into space, creating real-time satellite imagery that will solve that problem.
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I’ve always been interested in the distribution of the human population across the globe. It’s far from an even spread—this map shows where people are most squished in (dark colors) and where they’re spread out (light colors):
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Paper routes. All the swings in Harlem. Lost souls. The maps encased in Where You Are, the latest offering from the lovely ladies at London-based publisher Visual Editions, won’t actually get you anywhere—but they sure are fun to look at.
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Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?". From a practical standpoint, it’s a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a 2008 talk on OpenStreetMap I gave at the first MappingDC meeting. Here are many of same concepts, but expanded.
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The fact that we’ve kept the number of U.S. states relatively static is nothing short a miracle—there have been hundreds of attempts at state secession over the years. But what if they had all succeeded? This brilliant map depicts that alternative universe, where the U.S. is broken up into 124 different states that stretch from sea-to-shining-sea.
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Can you draw a map of the world just from memory? And if you did, how accurate do you think your map would be? Probably not very. You’d forget some land masses, make things too close too each other, bulge continents the wrong way and hastily add stuff without knowing where they would go. But still. You’d at least get the general shape down, right? Well, here’s what it looks like when people draw a map of the world from memory.
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Okay, history buffs. We’ve got a challenge for you: Learn as much as you possibly can from the 700 odd maps just uploaded to the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. Your brain will thank you later.
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Maps: Where would we be without them? This was banner year for beautiful, information-dense cartography, which provided a moment of self-reflection like a giant, geographic mirror. Here are our favorite maps from 2013 that helped us find our place in the world.
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When Apple tried to get away from using Google Maps on the iPhone for GPS navigation, its first attempt at its own maps was famously bad. The maps were so … Continue reading
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
