The Map Room

The Philadelphia Print Shop has a page on mythical geography in antique maps: Illusions, Confusions and Delusions.

Old maps are filled with inaccuracies — rivers running a wrong course, cities placed incorrectly, coastlines lacking bays, and mountains, lakes and islands missing completely. The mistakes in old maps are one of the primary aspects which makes them interesting to us, and much of the history of cartography is the history of the correction of these errors. One category of cartographic error consists of what are called “geographic myths.” These are geographic features that appear on the map but not on the earth; cities where none ever were, islands where there are but waves, lakes and rivers where there is dry land, and kingdoms of non-existent kings. Geographic myths populated most areas of the world and the history of exploration is filled with expeditions in search of chimeras that existed only on the map.

Via MetaFilter.

From the Democratic National Convention: an electoral college map where each vote is represented by a gingerbread man.

Forty-two traffic control boxes in downtown Victoria, British Columbia have been wrapped in maps of the downtown area. The goal is to combat graffiti — the maps are supposedly easier to clean than the boxes themselves — but the side benefit is, of course, way cool. Via Boing Boing.

I covered the release of the Garmin iQue 3600, a Palm OS handheld with a built-in GPS, rather obsessively last year. Now Garmin has announced a slightly cheaper sibling, the iQue 3200, which has a smaller (320×320) screen and lacks the headphone jack and voice recorder. To be available next month.

See previous entries: Maps on Your PDA, Garmin iQue 3600 Photos, Enough About That Garmin PDA Already, Jon, Garmin iQue 3600 Now Shipping, Hopefully the Last Garmin iQue 3600 Post Ever, Brighthand’s Garmin Review.

Though it appears to contain a few mistakes, and the graphics are kind of poor, it’s a neat concept: a so-called Linguistic Atlas of the World that labels each country in its own language and writing system. Via Languagehat (see the comments for error-catching). I saw something similar on an airline’s inflight guide a while back, on a worldwide network map: while every country was labelled with the Roman alphabet, the “local” names (e.g. Misr, Bharat) were used.

The Guilford Rail System web site has a page of maps of two of its predecessor railroads: a 1916 map of the Boston and Maine (853 KB JPEG) and a 1923 map of the Maine Central (456 KB JPEG). I do like old rail system maps; could you tell?

And finally, and somewhat more recently, the last link tonight that I’ve stolen from the Here Be Dragons community at LiveJournal is this doozy of a map of the railroads of the former Soviet Union. Different colours represent different kinds of rail line: passenger or freight, electrified or not, narrow gauge or standard, that sort of thing. The map is in Russian, so you’ll likely have a hard time with the place names, but there’s an English legend.

Also via Here Be Dragons, another fine digital collection of lunar maps, from the Lunar and Planetary Institute. These maps were made by the USAF in the 1960s — back when the U.S. government had a vested interest in accurate relief maps. They’re 1:1,000,000 scale and are downloadable in several sizes, including a high-resolution JPEG-2000 version.

Still working on my backlog of links. Here’s a collection of bathymetric maps — i.e., nautical maps showing soundings (depth) at various points — of Scottish freshwater lochs published in the early 20th Century. The survey was done from 1897 to 1909: “Over 10 years some 60,000 soundings were taken of all the major Scottish lochs, some 562 in total, resulting in the first detailed charts of all their depths.” The collection appears to be complete, and the map navigation is extremely zoomable. Via Here Be Dragons.

Las Vegas’s monorail, which opens July 15, connects several hotels/casinos along the Strip (naturally). Here’s a map of the line. Via Slashdot.