Archive for the ‘maps’ Category
Regional Dialects
December 28th, 2010
If you consult this map of American dialects, you’ll find that Midland is objectively the best dialect. It’s also a fundamental truth that on rhymes with dawn.
You may also be interested in the famous pop vs. soda debate.
Atlas of Remote Islands
October 18th, 2010
Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands perfectly merges the experiences of reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities and poring over an atlas at age eight. I really can’t imagine recommending a book more highly.
She also wrote an ode to blackletter typography called Fraktur Mon Amour which leads me to wonder if she’s single.
Powers of Ten
July 27th, 2010
This 1968 film zooms out by powers of ten from a picnic in Chicago to encompass the visible universe, then zooms back in to a proton in a carbon atom. Behold the power of logarithmic scales.
Envisioning Development
December 2nd, 2009
The Envisioning Development project has an interactive map detailing the cost of living in various neighborhoods of New York City. It’s nice to know that if I ever get a web design/development gig in NYC I can afford to live in Williamsburg and be the biggest hipster ever.
I wish there were similar maps to detail the CoL for other cities.
Visualizing Empires’ Decline
November 26th, 2009
The Nine Nations
November 16th, 2009
Written in 1981, Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America breaks the continent down into its most culturally relevant components. I like maps.
- New England
- An expanded version including not only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although omitting the Connecticut suburbs of New York City), but also the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Capital: Boston.
- The Foundry
- The by-then-declining industrial areas of the northeastern United States and Great Lakes region stretching from New York City to Milwaukee, and including Chicago and Philadelphia as well as industrial Southern Ontario centering on Toronto. Capital: Detroit.
- Dixie
- The former Confederate States of America (today the southeastern United States) centered on Atlanta, and including most of eastern Texas. Garreau’s “Dixie” also includes Kentucky (which had both Federal and Confederate governments); southern portions of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana; and the “Little Dixie” region of southeastern Oklahoma. Finally, the region also includes most of Florida, as far south as the cities of Fort Myers and Naples. Capital: Atlanta.
- The Breadbasket
- Most of the Great Plains states and part of the Prairie provinces: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, almost all of Oklahoma, most of western Missouri, western Wisconsin, eastern Colorado, the eastern edge of New Mexico, parts of Illinois and Indiana, and North Texas. Also included are some of Northern Ontario and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Capital: Kansas City.
- The Islands
- The South Florida metropolitan area, the Everglades and Florida Keys, the Caribbean, and parts of Venezuela. Capital: Miami.
- Mexamerica
- The southern and Central Valley portions of California as well as southern Arizona, the portion of Texas bordering on the Rio Grande, most of New Mexico and all of Mexico, centered on either Los Angeles or Mexico City (depending on whom you ask), which are significantly Spanish-speaking. Garreau’s original book did not place all of Mexico within Mexamerica, but only Northern Mexico and the Baja California peninsula. Capital: Los Angeles.
- Ecotopia
- The Pacific Northwest coast west of the Cascade Range, stretching from Alaska down through coastal British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and into California just north of Santa Barbara. Capital: San Francisco.
- The Empty Quarter
- Most of Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Colorado from Denver west, as well as the eastern portions of Oregon, California, Washington, all of Alberta and Northern Canada (including what is now Nunavut), northern Arizona, parts of New Mexico (mainly the area controlled by the Navajo Nation), and British Columbia east of the Coast Ranges. Capital: Denver.
- Quebec
- The primarily French-speaking province of Canada, which held referenda on secession in 1980 and 1995, the latter of which the “separatists” lost narrowly. Capital: Quebec City.
Coastline Mappings
April 2nd, 2009
When I was a little kid, I’d look at topographic maps of coastlines* and imagine what the area would look like if the sea level rose or fell. This has not changed. As a side side effect of the popularization of global warming, there now exist interactive maps that let me raise and lower continents as I please. None of them are exactly what I’d like, but these two examples are the closest:
- http://flood.firetree.net/ — This map lets you raise the ocean by up to 14 meters, but it can’t be lowered. It’s a google map, so you can zoom in as much as you’d like. The blue shading is a little clumsy, though.
- http://merkel.zoneo.net/Topo/Applet/ — You can raise or lower the ocean as much as you please, and the coloring is great, but it’s only applied to a few selected areas. I’m looking for arbitrary scales of devastation here, people.
It looks like I’ll need to learn the Google Maps API and do this thing myself.
* My childhood involved a lot of thinking about land bridges and oxbows and alluvial fans. How I ended up in math/compsci instead of geology I’ll never know.
The Flat Earth Society
January 29th, 2009
I’m not sure if this site can justifiably be called crankery, since I’m almost certain that everyone in the forum is only there to practice their debating skills.* But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that some of its supposed adherents actually believe it, so I’m including it here.
At least some humans have known with a fair degree of certainly that the Earth was mostly spherical since the 4th century B.C., and it’s probably safe to say that most of us are pretty well convinced. This is not true of the Flat Earth Society, and they have an impressive array of unintuitive arguments to back up their position in the FAQ.
Here ends crank week! Hopefully you’ve enjoyed these delightful nutjobs. If you’d like to learn about more cranks, I recommend the always-entertaining crank.net. I especially endorse their “Crank of the Day” feature. If you’re more interested in the process of identifying and rating cranks, you may find John Baez’s Crackpot Index to be a useful tool. Simply sum up the relevant points to gauge your crank!
* I’m also not entirely convinced that “crankery” is a word.
The Dymaxion Map
January 1st, 2009
Move over, Mollweide projection, I have a new favorite world map.
All maps of the globe are fundamentally flawed – there’s no way to project the surface of a sphere onto a flat map without distorting it somehow.* The best a mapmaker can do is try to minimize distortion while still keeping the map readable. Over the years dozens of projections have been designed to meet those needs.
In the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller (architect, futurist, and one of my all-time favorite people) designed the Dymaxion projection, which maps the globe onto an icosahedron and unfolds it. This spreads the distortion somewhat evenly around the globe (avoiding the “Greenland is bigger than Africa” problem) and also avoids chopping up any landmasses. Wikipedia has a really neat animation of the mapping and unfolding process.
I’d imagine you could get as little distortion as you liked by using geodesic spheres with increasing numbers of triangles, but that would involve a lot more continental division.
The Dymaxion projection is kinda similar to J.S. Cahill’s “Butterfly projection,” but his doesn’t involve a Platonic solid, so it’s clearly less wonderful (and less mathable).
* As usual, Gauss can tell you why.
My Antipodal Point
September 11th, 2008
When Harry Schwartz was a young lad, he used to wonder where you would go if you drilled a hole directly through the Earth and fell in. The answer is the Indian Ocean.*
In geography (and geometry) the antipodal point of a point on a sphere is the point opposite it, such that a line drawn through both points passes through the center of the sphere.
Assuming you live outside of Pennsylvania (in which case you, too, are opposite Perth), you can find your own antipodal point using this nifty tool.
*N.B.: The answer is actually damped oscillation, but that’s not nearly so whimsical.