The Map Room

Today marks the eighth anniversary of The Map Room, which I started on March 31, 2003. Yes, it’s been that long.

The site has gone through a number of different iterations and questionable site designs. In the past year alone, I’ve added Twitter as an option, moved to a new URL, upgraded my Movable Type install, and switched to another commenting system. All the while, I’ve been trying to juggle work on it with other web projects, employment contracts, and the viccisitudes of my medical condition.

But it’s basically the same site, with the same premise: it’s a blog on which I post links to map-related stuff that I find interesting, and I’m still not an expert. (No, I’m not. Really. Stop insisting otherwise.)

For this anniversary, I thought I’d delve into Google Analytics and see what my visitors are like — where you are, what you’re using, and what you’re looking for. On the eighth anniversary, here are some top eight lists. (Yes, top eight. Because I’m being cute.) After the cut, because most of you will find this completely boring.

Continue reading this entry.

Well, not quite — but you can view Mercury imagery in Google Earth by downloading a KML file. That sounds like a very good way to peruse all that new imagery from the MESSENGER spacecraft, now orbiting the planet, in its geographical context.

A new geoid model has been released by the GOCE satellite mission. Included in the release is an animated geoid model. A geoid is a gravity map of the earth that compensates for ocean currents and variations in sea level.

Previously: GOCE Satellite Maps Earth’s Gravity.

A survey has found that men are more likely than women to ignore the directions given by their GPS navigation system, Reuters reports: 83 percent of men versus “less than three quarters” of women. (How much less?) Gender issues aside — perhaps the difference is overstated? — that’s a lot in either case. People are clearly (and properly) skeptical of their satnavs (otherwise, we’d be seeing a lot more stories about people driving off cliffs), probably because of bitter experience: according to the survey, one-third of respondents had their satnav lead them one to five miles off course, and nearly two-thirds kept a map in the car as a backup. Via @Thierry_G.

Google has updated Google Earth’s base layer imagery with new high-resolution imagery from the Sendai, Japan area. The imagery was collected on Sunday and Monday, so this is an incredibly fast turnaround. The imagery will also be available in Google Maps later on. See also Google Earth Blog.

Previously: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Maps.

Mark Ovenden announced on Twitter today that his next book, Railway Maps of the World, will be available soon. (According to Amazon and the publisher’s website, next month.) I’ve known about this for a couple of months now and am very much looking forward to laying hands on a copy. If you’re familiar with Ovenden’s work — I reviewed his Paris Underground and Transit Maps of the World — you will be too.

• Buy Railway Maps of the World at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Two new point-and-shoot digital cameras from Panasonic with built-in GPS, announced in January, are available this month: the 14-megapixel travel compact ZS10 or TZ20, which I presume is a successor to the ZS7/TZ10, and the 12-megapixel ruggedized TS3 or FT3, pictured at right. (They have different product numbers in different markets.) A Navteq press release (via) talks about how these cameras use their POI data as well as lat/long coordinates. Photography Blog has a review of the TS3 (FT3), which has this to say about the GPS functions:

This provides real-time information naming the location at which your shot is being taken. This is displayed ticker-tape fashion along the bottom of the back screen. Panasonic claims the on-board info covers 203 countries, thus encouraging worldwide use, and more than a million landmarks. What’s more it appears to work, competently picking out our local National Trust property. We live on a bend in the river, which was enough to fool it, so using the camera back at home we were classified as living across the water. While in daily use GPS might seem a bit of a gimmick — and is a function that can be turned on or off at will, there’s some use to be had perhaps if you’re abroad and haven’t purchased a guidebook to otherwise discover what’s what — or want to plot the route of your travels via Google maps or the social media of your choice later. Longitude and latitude coordinates are stored in the particular JPEG image’s Exif data.

Both cameras cost $400.

Previously: Leica’s Geotagging Camera Is a Rebadged Panasonic.

• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-TS3 at Amazon.com (Canada, UK as the FT3)
• Buy Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS10 at Amazon.com (UK as the TZ20)

NASA Earth Observatory has released maps showing the decline of atmospheric ozone levels in the Arctic to what is approaching “the lowest levels in the modern instrumental era”: “These maps of ozone concentrations over the Arctic come from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite. The left image shows March 19, 2010, and the right shows the same date in 2011. March 2010 had relatively high ozone, while March 2011 has low levels.”

Last Saturday’s Globe and Mail ran a feature looking at 50 electoral districts to watch in the Canadian federal election now under way. The print infographic (above) differs from the online version, which is a Google Maps mashup with pushpins. In neither case does the Globe use geographically accurate maps of the ridings, which makes sense: large rural ridings are worth as much as compact urban districts. But pushpins?

John Krygier reports that the second edition of Making Maps, the manual of map design he co-authored with Denis Wood, is now shipping. My review of the first edition.

Previously: Second Edition of Making Maps Coming Next Year.

• Buy Making Maps (2nd ed.) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

MapAction has a number of maps relating to the current situation in Japan, including maps showing the evacuated population and search and rescue maps. The New York Times maps the evacuation zones around the Fukushima reactors. Google Maps Mania has links to other maps.

Previously: An Irresponsible Radiation Map; Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Maps.

If I keep posting links to the New York Times’s online maps I’m going to run up against their paywall limit in no time. Even so, here’s their day-by-day situation map of the Libyan uprising, showing the daily state of affairs since February 16. Via @nytgraphics.

Previously: Libya Crisis Map.

Interactive online maps are frequently done in Flash. That’s a problem if you’re using a device that doesn’t support Flash, like an iPhone or iPad. Andrew Long discusses using a jQuery plugin — JavaScript instead of Flash — to create a before/after map that uses a slider to swipe between two different images. Oliver O’Brien uses the technique with aerial photos of London (see also). It’ll be interesting to see whether other maps will get their interactivity through HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript instead of Flash. Via @desjardins and GIS Lounge.

An article on Poynter explores the use of interactive maps on online news sites — basically, why they are so useful from a journalistic perspective, particularly in the context of recent major news stories (i.e., Libya and Japan). Via @googlemaps.

A nice collection of maps of the British passenger rail network in PDF format, both diagrammatic (think Beck’s Tube map on a national scale) and geographic, on the National Rail Enquiries website. Via @maptd.

Google Maps Mania links to aerial imagery of Christchurch, New Zealand, taken only two days after the February 22 earthquake from an altitude of only 150 metres (500 feet). Resolution is 10 cm/pixel.

A New York Times article about a report discussing the lessons learned from crowdsourced humanitarian mapping, of the sort seen during the Haitian earthquake. Via @geospatialnews.

NYU professor Steve Hutkins wrote in to tell me about his collection of links to maps of New York.

The Independent has a review of a book that might be of interest: Venetian Navigators by Andrea di Robilant, “an account of 14th-century map-mania and the Italian navigators who charted apparently new-found lands in the North Atlantic.” Emphasis on apparently. “Were their voyages a hoax? Di Robilant thinks not. Doggedly, he sets out to rescue the Zens from their ill repute as fablemongers and carto-illiterate fantasists. What the brothers ‘discovered’ in the North Sea, the author believes, were today’s Orkney Islands, the Faroes, Shetland, Iceland and (possibly) Greenland.”

• Buy Venetian Navigators at Amazon.co.uk (Kindle, UK-only)

The Financial Times profiles Frank Jacobs, the author of the Strange Maps blog. And to think that for his first few years of blogging, he did so anonymously.

• Buy Strange Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Briefly noted: GPS Tracklog’s review of the Magellan RoadMate 9055, with a monster seven-inch screen, which Rich calls “perhaps the best Magellan I’ve ever tested.”

• Buy Magellan RoadMate 9055 at Amazon.com (Canada)

The business practices of the Ordnance Survey vis-à-vis its private-sector competition are being criticized. Thierry Gregorius’s so-called “hard-hitting analysis” is actually fairly even-handed: criticizing the rather two-faced nature of the OS as both government agency and commercial enterprise, but also pointing out that the OS does not have any clear rules to guide its operations.

What has struck me in many meetings with OS is that you never quite know who you are talking to. Is this OS, the government agency, or OS, the business? They can’t do special deals with you because, as a government agency, they have to treat everyone equally — which is fair enough. But at the same time OS remains at liberty to pursue any commercial opportunity that takes their fancy. There are geospatial companies that have been badly burnt by this, especially aerial imagery folks or online mapping providers who dared to compete with OS’s almighty mapping machine. In many cases, even today, OS is still competing with its own business partners.

For an example, see the Andover Advertiser’s coverage of the complaints of Getmapping CEO Tristram Cary, who’s had to cut jobs in the face of competition from the OS.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that there are two OpenStreetMap manuals out there — the one by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton, the other by Jonathan Bennett — each of which, confusingly, is titled OpenStreetMap. Muki Haklay reviews them both in incredible detail (the review is more than 2,700 words long). In the end, which does he prefer?

Although there are areas where the two books are complementary, in most cases Ramm et al. provides a better understanding of the matters discussed, using a broader and more extensive view. It addresses a wide range of readers, from those unfamiliar with OSM to the advanced programmers who want to utilise it elsewhere, and is written with a progressive build-up of knowledge, which helps in the learning process. It also benefits from the dedicated website where updates are provided. Bennett’s book, on the other hand, would be comparably more difficult to read for someone who has not heard of OSM, as well as for those in need of using it but who are not programming experts. There is a hidden assumption that the reader is fairly technically literate. It suffers somewhat from not being introductory enough, while at the same time not being in-depth and detailed.

His boldface. Via @steev8.

Previously: OpenStreetMap Book Now Available in English; Another OpenStreetMap Book; Bennett’s OpenStreetMap Book Reviewed; Two Book Reviews; OpenStreetMap Manual Reviewed; Another OpenStreetMap Book Review; Still Another OpenStreetMap Book Review.

• Buy OpenStreetMap (Bennett) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)
• Buy OpenStreetMap (Ramm, Topf and Chilton) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Speaking of the New York Times, they published an interactive map last week that had me fuming. It was a map that showed the forecast spread of radiation from Fukushima, Japan — or, more precisely, “how weather patterns this week might disperse radiation from a continuous source in Fukushima, Japan” (my emphasis). Of course, the radiation source hasn’t been continuous, so it depicts a hypothetical situation (that with any luck will remain so).

But the map was not just hypothetical, it was downright irresponsible, because its scale was completely arbitrary and relative (see the key at right). In other words, there is no way of telling whether the radiation being depicted was extremely minor (say, a banana’s worth) or something more severe — whether we’re dealing with microsieverts or millisieverts.

The forecast was meant to show dispersal patterns as an aid to radiation monitoring, and in that context this map is useful. But that’s a little too subtle for public consumption, and this map has been widely circulated. When people have been panicking beyond all reason and sense, it’s not enough to say, on the right side of the map, that “[h]ealth and nuclear experts emphasize that any plume will be diluted as it travels and, at worst, would have extremely minor health consequences in the United States” — people will see that plume on the map and freak. OMG it’s coming to get us!

To illustrate an article marking the 200th anniversary of Manhattan’s street grid, the New York Times has put together an interactive map superimposing 19th-century maps of Manhattan on the modern city. (Flash required; at some point NYT links may be paywall-encumbered, if I’m not mistaken.)

James Cheshire has created migration maps using data from the Global Migrant Origin Database. “Each line shows the origins and destinations of at least 4000 people in a given year (2000 in this case). The more red the line the more people it represents. I have used great circle distance to plot them onto the Earth.”

Mashable has infographics from TeleNav showing what people search for on their GPS receivers, based on anonymous data from 20 million subscribers.

Cruise missiles use GPS for navigation. As we have seen, GPS signals can be rather easily disrupted by an inexpensive jamming device. This would be a problem if cruise missiles didn’t have a backup, as Technology Review explains: terrain contour mapping or TERCOM, which uses preloaded contour maps and onboard radar. And if that doesn’t work? Dead reckoning. Via @gpstracklog.

While I continue to procrastinate my own review of the book, here’s another review, by Dan Karran, of OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing the Free Map of the World by Frederik Ramm, Jochen Topf and Steve Chilton. Dan calls it “a great introduction to, and overview of, the OpenStreetMap project, with plenty of detail and pointers to further information, all of which is sure to get the reader hooked in the realm of open geodata.”

Previously: OpenStreetMap Manual Reviewed; Another OpenStreetMap Book Review.

• Buy OpenStreetMap at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

In the April 2010 print edition of The Atlantic, authors Dante Chinni and James Gimpel “analyzed reams of demographic, economic, cultural, and political data to break the nation’s 3,141 counties into 12 statistically distinct ‘types of place.’ When we look at family income over the past 30 years through that prism, the full picture of the income divide becomes clearer—and much starker.” The resulting maps — available online in an interactive version (Flash required) — show how each of “the 12 states” have fared between 1980 and 2010. More from the designers. Via @replogleglobes1.

This map compares historical seismic activity on a gridded equal-population cartogram: the colours show past earthquake activity; the map is distorted by population. “The resulting map,” says the press release, “gives each person living on earth the same amount of space while also preserving the geographical reference. The map does not only show the areas that are at highest risk, but also how this risk relates to global population distribution.” More at Views of the World.

Atlas der Neederlanden is a Dutch-language blog that explores the restoration of a nine-volume composite atlas — a bound collection of maps from different periods and by divers hands — by the Special Collections department of the University of Amsterdam’s library. If you don’t read Dutch, there is a not-identical English version. Here’s a summary, also in English. Via @cartografie.

Via GIS Lounge, a five-part series from the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Blog about “making choropleth maps using PostGIS, TileMill, Mapnik and Google Maps” — the end result being this population map of Illinois. Start with part one, here (fortunately, each post links to the other parts).

British Map Engravers by Laurence Worms and Ashley Baynton-Williams. “An illustrated dictionary of well over 1,500 members of the map-trade in the British Isles from the beginnings until the mid nineteenth century, including all the known engravers and lithographers, all the known globemakers and retailers, the principal mapsellers and publishers, the key cartographers, the makers of map-based games and puzzles, and others.” £125, coming in June. Via MapHist and @jpmaps.

The Last Great Cartographic Myth: Mer de l’Ouest by Don McGuirk. A cartobibliography tracking the apperance on maps of “an imagined sea extending the navigable waters of the Pacific deep into the North American continent, at times nearly connecting the Pacific to Hudson Bay or the Great Lakes, and thereby promising the long sought for Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific.” $45, digital format. Via MapHist.

The Leader, a Welsh newspaper, has an article about the 16th- and 17th-century historian and cartographer John Speed, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the publication of his atlas, The Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine.

Listen to an interview with Rebecca Solnit about her book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, from 99% Invisible, a program on public radio station KALW. (Yes, my review is still coming.)

Previously: LA Times Reviews Infinite City; Infinite City: A “Fanciful” Atlas of San Francisco.

• Buy Infinite City at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Snopes debunks a fake map that has apparently been making the rounds. The map and accompanying message claims that lethal doses of radiation will blanket the northern Pacific Ocean and western North America following a Japanese reactor meltdown. Via @BadAstronomer.

Bookslut’s Christopher Merkel reviews the English translation of Belén Gopegui’s 1993 prize-winning debut novel, The Scale of Maps (La escala de los mapas), in which a geographer and a mapmaker conduct an affair.

[A]side from its focus on the idea of place, The Scale of Maps isn’t focused on any one place in particular — anything but. Despite taking place in Spain, the book isn’t about anything particularly Spanish (unless it is and I entirely missed it, in which case you know I’m good for an apology). But still, I haven’t encountered anything particularly like its intricate cartography from anywhere else. The Scale of Maps is very much an idea book of cosmopolitan character, and Gopegui seems to have intended it as such: according to Sergio, “books are the maps of men. Every act of reading involves the paradoxical act of touching a map with the tip of the index finger… I believe in maps. They establish a unique relationship between us and the world, as do books.”

• Buy The Scale of Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The Guardian on the diorama maps of photographer Sohei Nishino, now on display at the Michael Hoppen Gallery in London (until April 2).

Last year, Nishino spent a month walking the streets of London — which, come to think of it, does not seem that long a time for the task in hand. He took over 10,000 photographs, which, on his return to Tokyo, he edited down to 4,000. Then the real work began. Having hand-printed the photographs in his own darkroom, Nishino then set about cutting them up and piecing them together — slowly and meticulously — into a giant composite photographic map of the city of London. It measures 7.5ft × 4ft, and will be shown at Michael Hoppen alongside his other diorama maps.

The diorama maps can be seen on Nishino’s website: here’s the link.

If the U.S. migration maps I linked to earlier this month weren’t detailed enough for you, you should absolutely take a look at Forbes’s interactive map, which gives county-by-county information on domestic migration. Actually, it’s more detailed than that: for each county, it shows how many people moved to and from each and every other county in the U.S. (assuming that more than 10 people moved from one county to another) and the average per capita income of the people doing the moving. Based on IRS data, which you might expect. The map dates from last June but I can’t recall seeing it before. Thanks to Jason Hodge for the tip; also via @geospatialnews.

Via MapHist comes word of a forthcoming book by Tom Koch, due out in June: Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground. From the publisher’s website:

Disease Maps begins with a brief review of epidemic mapping today and a detailed example of its power. Koch then traces the early history of medical cartography, including pandemics such as European plague and yellow fever, and the advancements in anatomy, printing, and world atlases that paved the way for their mapping. Moving on to the scourge of the nineteenth century — cholera — Koch considers the many choleras argued into existence by the maps of the day, including a new perspective on John Snow’s science and legacy. Finally, Koch addresses contemporary outbreaks such as AIDS, cancer, and H1N1, and reaches into the future, toward the coming epidemics. Ultimately, Disease Maps redefines conventional medical history with new surgical precision, revealing that only in maps do patterns emerge that allow disease theories to be proposed, hypotheses tested, and treatments advanced.

• Buy Disease Maps at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The Google LatLong blog is the last place I’d expect to see a post about map art, but last month there was a post about just that subject — more specifically, about the fact that map-inspired works by Ben Joyce now adorn the walls of the Google Earth team’s offices. The exhibition, entitled “Abstract Topophilia,” opened at the end of January for a three-month run. Artinfo has more.

GOOD has a piece on Grassroots Mapping, an initiative that started by using balloons and kites to get aerial imagery of the Gulf oil spill in areas that were otherwise off-limits and that has since evolved into the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. An activist bent on both websites, but lots of resources on using inexpensive equipment to create high-resolution aerial imagery for mapping.

GPS Tracklog’s hands-on review of the five-inch Garmin nüvi 2460LT only finds fault with the “wonky routing” occasionally thrown by the navigation unit’s use of its historical road speed database. “With that caveat, the nüvi 24xx models may actually lay claim to being the top of the line nuvi right now.”

• Buy Garmin nüvi 2460LT at Amazon.com (UK)

Franklin Jarrier’s maps of urban rail systems are neither network diagrams nor geographically accurate maps, though they have elements of both: they’re extremely precise maps of the metro systems that include the number of tracks, platforms, closed stations and routes, date of opening, and more. Coverage of French metro systems — Paris, Lille, Lyon, Marseille — and tramways is extensive; other European cities, like London and Barcelona, are there as well. Mapping London looks at the London map.

This post collects links to maps of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake in Japan and the ensuing tsunami. It may be updated if new maps are made available.

Earthquake. USGS maps of the quake. USGS real-time earthquakes layer for Google Earth (KML). Two earthquake maps in GeoCommons: 1, 2. A screencap of a quake intensity map from an unknown iPhone app. MapLarge’s earthquake map (via APB). Esri’s earthquake map (via APB). // 2:15 PM: OpenStreetMap wiki page. // 7:00 PM: NASA Earth Observatory map showing the location of the earthquake, its foreshocks and its aftershocks off the coast of Japan. // 7:12 PM: PBS Newshour map of live seismic data from Japan; Google Earth interface (via Boing Boing). // 8:20 PM: Esri’s Japan earthquake and tsunami map; the previous link was to Esri’s generic Disaster Response map. // 3/13 4:55 PM: Japan Earthquake Map Viewer from Texas Tech’s Center for Geospatial Technology (via @geospatialnews).

Tsunami. NOAA maps forecasting tsunami energy propagation (above) and tsunami travel times. This story includes a map showing Philippine provinces under tsunami alert (via @cartografie). // 2:15 PM: NOAA’s map of DART stations (FYC). Another tsunami wave map (FYC). // 3/12 9:00 AM: MODIS satellite images of the tsunami flooding in Sendai, Japan. // 3/13 3:12 PM: Video of the tsunami’s propagation from NOAA (via The Map Scroll). // 3/14 9:18 PM: Satellite view of tsunami damage near Ishinomaki, Japan.

Link roundups. Google Maps Mania’s roundup. // 2:15 PM: Google Earth Blog: Google Earth resources for the Japanese earthquake. // 3/12 9:00 AM GIS Lounge; Google Maps Mania’s second roundup. // 3:12 2:07 PM: Google Maps Mania links to maps of photos and videos; All Points Blog’s list of map resources. // 3/13 3:12 PM: Chartporn points to a few visualizations (via @mrgeog). // 3/14 8:30 AM: Google Earth Blog roundup of imagery and resources.

Post-earthquake imagery. 3/12 2:00 PM: Google Earth Blog points to fresh imagery of Japan taken after the quake; it’s available here in a Google Maps interface. // 3/13 3:12 PM: Google LatLong post on post-earthquake imagery. Good before/after imagery interface from ABC News. L.A. Times story. // 3/14 8:30 AM: Follow the @earthoutreach Twitter feed. The New York Times has an interactive before/after imagery viewer with slider (via @HodderGeography). The German Aerospace Center (DLR) has maps and an interactive imagery viewer (Flash).

Updated at 2:15 PM, 7:00 PM, 7:12 PM and 8:20 PM (EST). Updated March 12 at 9:00 AM, 2:00 PM and 2:07 PM (EST). Updated March 13 at 3:12 PM and 4:55 PM (EDT). Updated March 14 at 8:30 AM and 9:18 PM (EDT).

C. G. P. Grey’s map of U.S. passport ownership by state has been circulating the Intertubes lately (Boing Boing, a little snarkily, correlates it with U.S. diabetes rates).

Via @awoodruff, Yuri Alexander’s typographic map of Tacoma, Washington — “a personal design project of mine to hide a 48in×30in piece of bare wall in my living room” — which he’s selling as a rather large print.

Post-earthquake imagery of Christchurch, New Zealand is now available through Google Earth and via a special Picasa web album link; both options allow you to see images from before and after the quake.

Via Mapping London, a couple of neat visualizations of trips on London’s public transit systems. This animation (above) shows a five-percent sample of Oyster card users on the Tube throughout the day, with trips inferred from start and end points. This animation is a simulation of buses on London’s 744 routes.

A satellite radar interferogram of land deformation resulting from last month’s earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand has been released. BBC News coverage. Via @MattArtz.

GPS is ubiquitous and an essential component of many critical things — and, as New Scientist points out, GPS reception can be knocked out in a wide area by an inexpensive device, thanks to the fact that GPS signals are comparatively quite weak.

[GPS jammers] can be bought on the internet, and tend to be used by say, truckers who don’t want their bosses to know where they are. Their increasing use has already caused problems at airports and blocked cellphone coverage in several cities. One jammer can take out GPS from several kilometres away, if unobstructed. No surprise, then, that researchers across the world are scrambling to find ways to prevent disastrous GPS outages happening. […]

Though illegal to use in the U.S., U.K. and many other countries, these low-tech devices can be bought on the internet for as little as $30. Sellers claim they’re for protecting privacy. Since they can block devices that record a vehicle’s movements, they’re popular with truck drivers who don’t want an electronic spy in their cabs. They can also block GPS-based road tolls that are levied via an on-board receiver. Some criminals use them to beat trackers inside stolen cargo. “We originally expected that jammers might be assembled by spotty youths in their bedrooms,” says [consultant David] Last. “But now they’re made in factories in China.”

Via @gpstracklog.

The public version of the Libya Crisis Map is now online.

The CrisisMappers Standby Task Force has been undertaking a mapping of social media, news reports and official situation reports from within Libya and along the borders at the request of OCHA. […] The public version of this map does not include personal identifiers and does not include descriptions for the reports mapped. This restriction is for security reasons. All information included on this map is derived from information that is already publicly available online.

Via @timoreilly.

On MarthaStewart.com, a step-by-step guide to making coasters out of old maps. They posted this at least a year and a half ago; I’m surprised I missed it. Via FYC!

Previously: Google Maps Pushpin Coasters.

Macworld has an extensive review of the GPS-equipped Casio Exilim EX-H20G. “The EX-H20G also has some of the best in-camera GPS features we’ve ever seen, thanks to its intuitive map interface, points-of-interest database, real-world location names (not just raw latitude and longitude data), and easy integration with the mapping services in Flickr, Google Earth, and Picasa.”

Previously: Casio Exilim EX-H20G Geotagging Camera.

• Buy Casio Exilim EX-H20G at Amazon.com (UK)

Via Daniel Huffman comes word that David Woodward’s relief map of Wisconsin, first published in 1971, is now available for download on the Shaded Relief Archive. The archive, the brainchild of Tom Patterson, who previously gave us the Shaded Relief website (previously), and Bernhard Jenny, is a collection of scanned manually shaded relief maps — relief maps before computers came along.

Our dual goals are giving cartographers a stylish option to generic digital shaded relief — manual relief often provides a clearer picture of major terrain features, especially at small scales, as shown in this comparison. And scanning the best hand-drawn relief before it is permanently lost. We are in a race against time. Mapping organizations having now shifted to digital production are discarding photomechanical materials, including manual shaded relief. Much of this beautiful art deserves to be used by future mapmakers.

Some lovely stuff in there.

Paper maps have been replaced by their digital equivalents in many fields, but the idea that paper aviation charts could be replaced by an app running on an iPad is something new. Wired: “The Federal Aviation Administration is allowing charter company Executive Jet Management to use Apple’s tablet as an approved alternative to paper charts. The authorization follows three months of rigorous testing and evaluation of the iPad and Mobile TC, a map app developed by aviation chartmaker Jeppesen.” Via Engadget.

A driver got stuck in the snow for three days because she followed her GPS navigation unit’s directions, which sent her along unpaved logging roads in New Brunswick that were impassable due to snow. New Brunswick is one of those places with a lot of interesting back roads, and GPS units, I’ve noticed, will blithely send you along the craziest routes if it concludes that doing so will result in a shorter or faster trip. The article advises users to read their manuals and adjust their settings, but the larger problem is, as always, a lack of situational awareness, and relying too much on a device to do the thinking for you. It’s a supplement, not a substitute.

A collection of maps of the Moscow metro is so extensive that it must have all of them. (Above, one from 1935; they go as far back as 1931, and there are nine from 2010.) In Russian. Via @spatialanalysis.

A beautiful, personal piece by Daniel Huffman on how cartography helped him overcome depression. Here’s an excerpt, but you should really read it all.

I made a lot of maps during that period; it was one of the only activities that gave me any sort of positive emotion. I had actually started a cartographic hobby a few months earlier, before I moved to Madison. As far back as I can recall, I liked reading maps. I used to be the navigator when my family would take trips. I like paging through atlases for fun. So it was natural enough that I eventually determined to learn a bit about how to make them. […]

I kept up my new mapmaking hobby when I moved to Madison. It gave me something creative to do, and I have since learned that, for me, being creative is critical to keeping a positive emotional state. Making maps was the light of my day, in a time when my days were very, very dark.

I’m not unfamiliar with depression, and I found this quite moving.

Interactive maps of domestic migration in the United States from the Pew Research Center. “They show gains and losses only from people who move from one state to another, and not from births, deaths or movement to and from other countries, which are the other sources of population change.” Flash required. Via @NBLMC.

Richard Florida’s Index of Potential Unrest attempts to predict “unrest and revolutionary activism” in the Middle East and elsewhere:

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, we pulled together statistics from 152 nations and sorted them according to eight key variables: human capital levels in combination with percent of the workforce in the creative class, life satisfaction, GDP per capita, perceptions about local labor market conditions, Internet access, freedom, tolerance, and honesty in elections. The data comes from the World Bank, the International Labor Organization, and the Gallup Organization. The map below shows how these nations stack up.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Episode three of the Geospatial Revolution Project was posted yesterday; this latest installment covers maps’ use in war, peace, security and privacy.

Previously: The Geospatial Revolution Project, Episode Two; The Geospatial Revolution Project.