In the era of GPS and Web Mapping you might think that paper(physical, concrete things you hold in your hands) maps are on their way out. I don’t necessarily agree, paper maps are very useful when you’re away from our friend electricity and are certainly handy in emergencies. Beyond that I’ve started to notice, perhaps [...]
Axis Maps presents a series of maps where all of the features, be they roads, rivers, rails, etc… are converted to text. At a distance it appears to be a “normal” map but on closer inspection the features are really linear iterations of the features name. Click the image below or the link at the [...]
Thanks to Real Genius for the title. Climate scientists are engaged in a little damage control after Britain’s Time Comprehensive Atlas of the World mistakenly claimed Greeland’s glaciers are melting at a breakneck rate. If you compare the ice cover from 1999 and 2011, the Atlas reports a 15% loss in ice coverage. Climate scientists [...]
OK, I’ll admit it, one of my favorite things about visiting relatives and friends in the Washington DC area is getting to ride the Metro. I’m sure for those who have to commute on its trains every day, the feelings are more mixed, but I always find it the best way to get around. One [...]
Where you live might decide where you get your AM cup of joe (unless you get your fix from a local favorite). Numbers Run has a neat series of maps that shows the number of store locations (Starbucks Vs. Dunkin Donuts) by zip code. Living in New England I can already tell you that I [...]
On this memorial day weekend the History Channel is kicking off a week of Civil War themed shows. While watching I thought I’d see if there were any interesting maps available on the intertubes. What did I find? Some wonderful animated maps from the Civil War Trust ! The maps are flash based and progress [...]
As a young girl reading OMNI magazine, I couldn’t imagine saying no to a one way trip to explore space. I’m a little older now and would ask more questions, such as the ones posed in Cosmic Logic on MSNBC. It discusses a paper written by Dirk Schulze-Makuch, Washington State University and Paul Davies, Arizona [...]
This link is a decade old, but still fun. The Antique Roadshow’s website has a section titled ‘Tips of the Trade‘ where different appraisers give tips that help them in deciding appropriate values. One of the tips is Searching out maps which talks about the different things that help them appraise the value of a [...]
Recently we featured the Grassroots Mapping project, a community participatory mapping initiative from the MIT Media Lab, on the podcast, and now the Grassroots team has headed down to Louisiana to try to utilize their balloon-based camera system to acquire imagery and map the Gulf oil spill along the Louisiana coast. Their goals are not [...]
For all you students out there whose maps are greeted with a “That’s bizarre…”, I’ve got the perfect map challenge for you! Our reader Keith M. sent us a heads up about the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition open to high school, college, and university students (only here in the US). The maps [...]
