The Map Room

I’ve seen a lot of maps in a lot of places in the eight years I’ve been writing this blog, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a map on a coin. The Royal Canadian Mint is producing a limited-edition $25 silver coin with a map of Toronto on the reverse. Via @jakubczaplicki.

Linda Zellmer passes on a link to bedsheets styled like antique maps from Cuddledown.

The Ordnance Survey Blog has announced a colour scheme that accomodates people with colour vision deficiency (CVD) — i.e., colour-blindness. “Rather than creating separate colour schemes for those with various forms of CVD and those without, we were working on a colour palette that would work for everyone. Well a year later and we think we’ve cracked it and are now close to releasing a colour scheme for use with OS VectorMap Local, our customisable digital mapping product.” Above left, their regular scheme; above right, the new CVD-friendly scheme.

Previously: Ordnance Survey Announces Colour-Blind Mapping.

Admit it: you want one of these. Via Boing Boing.

Hand-made map pillows from designer Robbi Lindeman’s Saltlabs studio, costing up to $44 apiece. Via @redgeographics.

BBC News’ interactive virtual globe of the world’s time zones isn’t the most informative or even the best time zone map I’ve ever seen (it misses Newfoundland), but it’s certainly an interesting interface. Flash required. Via @mrgeog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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….  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A whole cloth quilt based on a map of the New York subway system. Karyn’s used a diagrammatic map that confused me for a moment: since the map comes from the New York City Transit Authority, it dates from…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In response to the Houston Press’s map of the United States of Beer, which was found wanting in terms of the choices of beer for some states, GOOD has produced a map of the United States of GOOD Beer…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Erin Eby writes, “Like you, I love maps but found that many of them look old and outdated. I’m an Art Director by trade, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and create my own.” She’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cath Young of My Bearded Pigeon designs and sells handmade map cushions featuring maps of many different locations. More at Inhabitat. Via @purplehayz (hat tip to Teresa)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Daniel P. Huffman has created a map of profanity on Twitter (original PDF here). It takes a sample of 1.5 million geocoded tweets in March and April 2010 and maps the percentage of words in said tweets that are…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yes, the World BBQ is “a symbol of human consumption of natural resources”; yes, it’s a metaphor for rising global temperatures. But we still think it’s cool (if you’ll pardon the ironic pun), and we want one. Via Make….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Actual magazines about maps are rare on the ground (and on the newsstand) so it was interesting to see this report on Here Be Dragons about a bimonthly French magazine, Carto: Le monde en cartes, three issues of which…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This map by Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler that shows activity and relationships between various locations around the world. “I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Pistil SF makes custom map blankets and napkins. The blankets are fleece, the napkins (coming in 2011) are cotton, and the maps are based on OSM data (you tell them what you want mapped). At $175 for the blanket,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nicola Twilley explains how to make your own scratch-and-sniff map. “The first step, of course, is to decide what smells you are mapping.” Oh dear….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For most of the past year, the International Cartographic Association has had a Map of the Month section on its website that has featured maps and atlases from public institutions and private publishers from around the world. “At the moment…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kai Krause illustrates how big Africa really is by cramming the shapes of other countries into it — a lot of other countries. Why do you people hate Mercator so much? Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This map from the OSPAR Commission’s Quality Status Report 2010 shows the locations of dumped munitions — both conventional and chemical — from both world wars in the North Atlantic. Via io9….  •  Continue reading this entry.

More research into the phenomenon where people intuitively believe that travelling south is easier than north — i.e., that south is down and north is up. Via My Wonderful World. Previously: North Is Up, South Is Down….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Shelterpop has a post about map-inspired home decor, which it turns out goes beyond merely framed or wall-mounted maps; one or two of the items featured look new to me (such as the scratch map and the chalkboard globe). Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oh, cute: someone is selling coasters in the shape of Google Maps pushpins. Via Geospatial News….  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s pretty abstract, but with interesting jolts of thoughtfulness: David Schneider’s … And Points Inbetween: Meditations on Maps. Via The Daily Dish….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jennifer points (1, 2) to map watches here and here; note the unusual movements required in each case. Don’t ask how much they cost: I don’t know. Neither you nor I could afford it anyway….  •  Continue reading this entry.

In this brief excerpt from The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains published on the National Geographic Assignment Blog, Nicholas Carr argues that mapmaking and map reading have advanced the development of abstract thinking. Via geoparadigm. Buy…  •  Continue reading this entry.

NOAA’s magnetic declination calculator is handy: enter your coordinates and date and get the difference between magnetic north and true north. Where I live it’s more than 13 degrees, which explains some troubles I’ve been having getting an equatorial telescope…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Make, this coffee table in the shape of California, 56 inches (142 cm) from tip to tip and made from salvaged wood, is being sold on Etsy for the low, low price of $2,500….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bill Warren wrote to me earlier this month: On May 8th, the California Map Society held a meeting at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA. One of the speakers was Joshua Miele, Ph.D., Associate Scientist at the Smith Kettlewell Eye…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Lexicalist’s Demographics of Fast Food in America uses mentions on Twitter and other social sites to determine which fast food chains are dominant in which U.S. regions; on the maps, “blue represents a particularly strong presence compared to other states….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Under a bill passed by the Louisiana state senate, crimes committed with the aid of “virtual street-level maps” — obviously Street View and its ilk — will get additional minimum sentences: an extra year for burglary, an extra 10 years…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This road map of the U.S. created by a slime mold actually has real-world applications, Popular Science reports. In searching for food, the slime mold Physarum polycephalum settles on the most efficient path to food sources. You can model…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This 1927 map by Paramount apparently was for financial backers; it indicates shooting locations in California that could stand in for more exotic locales. Via Matt….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bill Dollins discovered this quilt map of Monongahela National Forest at the Cranberry Mountain Nature Center in West Virginia….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Oliver Moss’s Walk Instead t-shirt, illustrated with a map in the shape of running shoes, is sold out, alas. Via Cartophilia….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another look at gender and navigation. “Women may not have discovered Australia or the Americas, but new research by scientists shows they can be better navigators than men if they have visited a place before,” the Times reports. “Men may…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As part of a series on learning new life skills, Sam Watts learns how to read an Ordnance Survey map. Though not necessarily how to fold them. They’re, ah, big. Via OrdnanceSurvey….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another entry in the microscopic-map sweepstakes: IBM researchers, demonstrating a new manufacturing technique, have created a tiny three-dimensional map of the earth. At 22×11 µm, it’s smaller than the 40-µm map of the world I blogged about in January,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

According to a market analysis by Experian Simmons, about 21.6 percent of U.S. adults own some Apple product or other, Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech reports. A map shows how each market area deviates from that norm, with the national average…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a lighthearted interactive map showing the celebrity recolonization of Africa — which is to say, which African countries have become the pet project of which A-list celebrity. What, no love for Guinea-Bissau? Via Andrew Sullivan….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Not a Google initiative or an April Fool’s gag, Google Mail Envelopes is a project by two industrial design students at Syracuse University, who posit a “send envelope” button in Gmail that prints a map showing directions from the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

John McKinney argues that paper maps may have some life left in them; among other things, he cites a Japanese study that found that “people on foot using a GPS device make more errors and take longer to reach their…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stephen Von Worley has built upon his previous mapping of McDonald’s locations, producing a map that shows where McDonald’s’s dominance is overwhelmed by other burger chains. Collectively, other chains outnumber McD’s two to one; separately, there are regional concentrations…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A brief but interesting article in Yale Alumni Magazine about research conducted by Yale professor Joseph P. Simmons: In a series of studies published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Simmons and a coauthor found that people generally assume it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In this map from Wikimedia Commons (reproduced here under its Creative Commons Licence), blue areas use daylight saving time, orange areas no longer use it, red areas never have….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii of MIT’s Tangible Media Group have created Relief, “an actuated tabletop display, which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. It allows users to experience and form…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Congratulations to Ed Parsons, Google geospatial technologist and map blogger, on receiving an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Kingston University. Via Mapperz….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Look what designer Beste Miray Dogan has come up with: envelopes lined with a Google Maps printout of the return address. Via Make….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Pete Warden has been visualizing Facebook connections, and has noticed that some local networks form clusters in surprising ways. [I]t’s been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Wapenmaps are contour maps made of stainless steel. The company, Wapentac, produces several maps of locations in various British national parks. Relatively inexpensive at £20, and small enough (17×8.9 cm) to be shipped by mail, they require some assembly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Neil Freeman’s map imagining 50 U.S. states with equal populations, thereby equalizing congressional overrepresentation from small states and rural areas, is making the rounds of the blogosphere (and Twitterverse™) lately (see, for example, here); we first saw it five…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A tourist map financed by the German embassy in Rome indicates which shops in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, don’t pay extortion money to the Mafia, AFP reports. Inspired by the Addiopizzo movement protesting widespread extortion payments to the Mafia,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Soft Maps are quilted maps of cities and neighbourhoods; the maps are stitched into the quilt through a combination of hand and machine stitching. Not inexpensive, to be sure; a number of cities are available, as are custom orders….  •  Continue reading this entry.

io9 and MetaFilter collect a series of maps produced last September on an alternate history discussion board illustrating zombie (and golem) attacks throughout history. At right, The Scourge of 1866 by Nymain1….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m awfully impressed by the New York Times’s interactive map showing Netflix rental patterns, by neighbourhood, for a dozen U.S. cities. That’s an incredibly complex amount of data to display — especially when you consider that there’s a map for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s still about a hundred times larger than this nanometres-wide map of North America, but the 40-micrometre map of the world produced by the Photonics Research Group of Ghent University-IMEC is almost certainly the smallest map of the world….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mark Graham has mapped the half-million or so geotagged Wikipedia articles to show how many have been written about each country. Not surprisingly, the U.S. leads with 90,000 articles; Anguilla, on the other hand, has four. Almost all of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As a way of promoting itself during the holiday shopping season, eBay has mapped “all U.S.-based buyer and seller transactions on eBay on Black Friday, November 27, 2009 (12:00:00 AM to 11:59:59 PM EST).” Via All Points Blog and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Economics professor Patrick Chovanec has grouped the provinces and autonomous regions of China into what he calls the Nine Nations of China — regions with their own “resources, dynamics, and historical character.” Of course there’s an interactive map. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Al Franken’s uncanny ability to draw all 48 contiguous states of the U.S. from memory inspired the National Geographic Society to ask other senators to draw their home states from memory, labelling at least three important places on that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Webdesigner Depot’s 30 Superb Examples of Infographic Maps: “Map illustrations are a dime a dozen; however, a strong and balanced display of graphics, information, and colors is what makes an infographic stand out and reach its target audience effectively.” Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Morning News has a different kind of map quiz: “We’ve removed the legends and all other telltale labels from the maps below, and challenge you to guess what each map depicts using only clues contained within the maps: the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Like Cartophilia, designer Elizabeth Daggar sent me a copy of her unusual project, Calendria, the full title of which is the World Atlas of Calendria for the Year 2010 of the Common Era, as Observed and Faithfully Recorded by…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Very Spatial points to an amusing geocaching t-shirt on Zazzle.com: “I use multi-million dollar satellites to find Tupperware in the woods. What’s your hobby?” A look at the t-shirt page’s recommendations reveals lots of other geocaching-themed t-shirts on the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Our latest example of map miscellany comes in the form of quilting fabrics with a pattern resembling a New York subway map from a quilt shop in New York City. Probably not for use in navigation. Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Busted Tees’ Map Marker Death: Best. T-shirt. EVAR. Via James….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Hold your mouse over this map to see how it would appear to someone with colour-blindness. The Ordnance Survey has announced a product that will, they say, make it easier to produce maps for people with colour-blindness. For the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stephen Von Worley has compiled a map showing the location of every McDonald’s in the lower 48 states, as an exercise in determining “just how far away can you get from our world of generic convenience.” Where in the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Times reports that the World Islands, an artificial archipelago of several hundred private islands in the shape of a world map being constructed off the coast of Dubai, has been, like so many other Dubai construction projects, cancelled: “Mile…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Austrian design company Fluid Forms creates things from customer-submitted topography. Bowls, clocks and tables are carved out of a laminated block of wood; lampshades are produced on a 3D printer; and silver brooches (pictured) are first 3D printed in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Southeast Review interviews Michele Battiste, a poet whose work frequently makes use of map themes and imagery. Place is one of those big ideas I can’t fully grasp, so I won’t try to explain. I like maps because they…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Following up on this post, a number of readers have written in to provide additional links to map shower curtains. Several of you have noted that the curtain Jamie referred to is available at Target; it’s also available on…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The World Freedom Atlas is a project by cartographer Zachary Forest Johnson (who also has a blog). The Atlas combines a number of datasets from non-governmental and intergovernmental organizations that attempt to measure human rights, freedom, democracy and all…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re at all interested in map-related paraphernalia, then Jamie at Cartophilia is your guy. His latest find, from photos sent by a friend, is a map shower curtain and a map bikini: the bikini was from Victoria’s Secret and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t think I’ve encountered Andy Woodruff’s Cartogrammar blog before, but his latest entry, about his latest project, is a beaut: “Last month, as I was driving through Ohio,” he writes, “it dawned on me: There are 88 counties…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Coming Anarchy speculates about a balkanized western Europe in 2020 — with a map, of course. “It is purely speculative and in no way a firm prediction, but rather a sketch of the possibilities and list of the most…  •  Continue reading this entry.

About.com Geography and Catholicgauze point to another resource for blank and outline maps: Daniel Dalet’s d-maps.com, which has, at this particular moment, 3,860 maps in six different formats. Previously: Outline Maps; National Atlas Outline Maps….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Al Franken, now the junior senator from Minnesota, has a hell of a party trick: he can draw, freehand and from memory, a map of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S. He’s been doing it for decades: Talking…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The caption for this photo from the White House’s Flickr photostream: “President Barack Obama looks at a map donated to the White House by the National Geographic Society, in the Oval Office, June 10, 2009.” Official photo by Pete…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze explains how to figure out a map’s age by checking for known changes, like the reunification of Germany, the breakup of the Soviet Union, or the independence of East Timor. I’ve done this too, actually, but it’s just as…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sean Gorman proposes a corollary to Waldo Tobler’s well-known First Law of Geography (“everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”). Inspired by developments in mobile applications, he adds a temporal element: things…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In case you haven’t already seen this: a map showing where sitcoms were set, from, I believe, folks at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Not that most of them weren’t filmed in a Hollywood studio regardless of their putative location. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Platial, a do-it-yourself guide to creating a purse out of a map. Some craftiness (and a sewing machine) required….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Good Magazine’s map of the death penalty around the world is interesting not only for its information, but for its design: look closely and you’ll see that it’s superimposed on the pattern of a chain-link fence replete with barbed…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MSNBC political commentator Rachel Maddow has a map room (no relation), the purpose of which is to provide maps and infographics in support of The Rachel Maddow Show. Via Cartophilia….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A lot of maps of the lower 48 lately. The New York times maps organic farms in the United States, which aren’t distributed the same way as farms in general; they’re clustered in a few areas. “Areas in the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

With all the nonsense going on about Texas seceding from the U.S. — remind me again how well that worked out the last time? — one of the things that has also been noticed in the hullaballooery is that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Geography of Buzz, a project of Columbia University’s Spatial Information Design Lab, “set out to analyze the unique spatial and social dynamics that are created by the arts and entertainment industries in New York City and Los Angeles.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze points to a profile of the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Geographer and Global Issues in the March 2009 issue (PDF) of the State Department’s employee magazine, State. It’s not the first time State has profiled the office;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The United Countries of Baseball, a map showing the boundaries of team loyalty, is something I’ve seen before, but I thought I’d posted it. Apparently not, so here it is. Via The Map Scroll. Previously: CommonCensus Map Project. Update:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s a pity that this hoodie with a map of the New York subway printed on it seems to be sold out, because, you know, want. Via Platial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Earth Point Coordinate Converter not only converts between latitude/longitude and Universal Transverse Mercator, it’s also a handy way to convert between, say, decimal latitude/longitude and degrees, minutes and seconds. Via Free Geography Tools….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Map Reader is an independent film from New Zealand whose protagonist is an introverted teenager obsessed with cartography: trailer; reviews here and here; IMDB entry….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Inuit mapping and routefinding continues to be a subject of interest — and, it turns out, of considerable complexity. “Inuit trails are more than merely means to get from A to B. In reality, they represent a complex social network…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nathan Yau has created an animated map showing the growth of the Target store empire across the United States; he previously made a map showing the same thing for Wal-Mart. He’s also released the code so that others can…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A man reading a map while driving got into an accident in California; GeoCarta notes wryly that it’s not just GPS that gets you into trouble. Me, I’m just worried California will ban maps from cars….  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Cartocacoethes” is, apparently, the uncontrollable urge to see maps everywhere, in everything. It’s a flavour of apophenia, which is the experience of seeing patterns in meaningless or random data (e.g., canals on Mars). A well-known version of apophenia is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via The Where Blog (which needs to clean up its comments), an interesting find on the Communes of France Wikipedia entry: a user-generated map of every commune in France. (The French commune is equivalent, more or less, to a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Those pissed off by the redrawn map of the Middle East may appreciate the implicit payback in the following. A Russian academic is ardently predicting that the U.S. will break apart from internal pressures in 2010, with six pieces…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett takes a look back at the year in maps; I spoke to Drake a while back about potential items for this article, some of which made it into the final product. Highlights include local stories,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apparently, Ralph Peters’s proposed redrawn map of the Middle East has generated a lot of controversy in Pakistan; Fasi Zaka tries to calm things down by pointing out that the map is only an intellectual exercise — some people…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Part of Adidas’s “impossible” ad campaign during the Euro 2008 competition, the Impossible Map is a contemporary take on “caricature maps” from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Links to previous examples of which below. Via MapHist. Previously:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

There’s more to a disputed boundary than just a dotted line on a map; the Indian magazine Frontline looks at the history of the disputed India-China border. (It’s worth noting that you’d be hard pressed to find two countries more…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It’s John McCain’s night, so let’s have a little map-related fun at his expense. The Senator had earlier raised eyebrows with some geography- and cartography-related gaffes — referring to Czechoslovakia in the present tense, talking about the Iraq-Pakistan border…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The NFL TV Distribution Maps site, which we’ve seen before, has been publishing maps of TV coverage for each NFL season since 2005. This year, though, they’ve switched to a Google Maps interface, which is actually an improvement, cartographically…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mental Floss’s three controversial maps will be familiar to regular readers of The Map Room: Percy’s 38-state map of the U.S. (Rob even draws a new version of Pearcy’s map), the Mercator projection (in the context of the Peters projection…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The genetic map of Europe, which shows the genetic relationships between various European populations and which was published in Current Biology, “bears a clear structural similarity to the geographic map,” the New York Times’s Nicholas Wade writes. “The major genetic…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Durham University’s International Boundaries Research Unit has produced a map of the frequently overlapping boundaries, jurisdictions and claims of various countries in the Arctic. In the wake of Russia’s planting a flag on the seabed under the North Pole,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Kolby Kirk shares some examples of his collection of National Geographic maps. Around 1994, when I moved away from home to attend college, I was forced to get rid of most of my National Geographic magazines — a nearly…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More map tchotchkes. Dan Catt has discovered that Zazzle — a CafePress-type store that lets you put your images on various things like shirts and postcards — now does shoes, and goes a little crazy with the maps-on-shoes thing….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Nikolas Schiller points to several t-shirts with map-based designs, including this one; he’s not happy about their likely sweatshop origins, though….  •  Continue reading this entry.

“When I stated operating this site in 1997, the most common question I received was related to locating a place on the planet,” writes About.com’s Matt Rosenberg. No more: Today, site like Google Maps and software like Google Earth have…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A few quick map and map-related gems to share with you: Claire showcases another collection of map tattoos. Indiana Jones and the Fonts on the Maps: Mark Simonson notes that the maps used in the Indiana Jones movies are anachronistic….  •  Continue reading this entry.

On the occasion of the CSAA’s announcement that it’s getting out of the business of publishing paper maps, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Caille Millner has this to say: I am saddened, but not surprised, about the death of the paper…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Middle Savagery has a post about tactile maps, particularly as practiced by the Inuit: The Inuit made songs, but they also made maps. These were often sketched in snow or sand, but some of them were sketched on paper with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another find from Modern Mechanix, reprinted from the October 1939 issue of Popular Science: “A colorful map of the United States, complete with rivers, mountains, boundary lines, and other geographical features, adorns a novel rain cape recently introduced. Made…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s another map showing country code top-level Internet domains, available as a 24×36-inch poster. “Each ccTLD is sized relative to the population of the country or territory, with the exception of China and India, which were restrained by 30%…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Don’t miss Cartophilia’s blog entry on inflated views — maps where one portion is distorted in size to reflect its self-importance — for example, a New Yorker’s, or California’s, or Texas’s, view of the United States or the world….  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Seattle Times column on how national boundaries obscure reality — i.e., how Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca are a single body of water: “Go to any store and look for a map depicting…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tom Patterson of Shaded Relief wrote in to announce his new project, a physical map of the world. As was the case with his relief map of the United States, it’s free and freely available in several formats, including…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps with scents? The Globe and Mail explains: Carleton University cybercartographer Fraser Taylor and his colleagues have already developed multimedia maps and atlases that use sound, music, photos and artwork to convey information about places such as Antarctica and the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This collection of blank and outline maps looks useful: the maps are available in GIF, EPS and PDF format, and they’re freely available under a Creative Commons licence. And there seem to be an awful lot of them. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

How many definitions of the word “map” have there been? According to this page, at least 321. Via a discussion on MapHist….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This time it’s for real. A year and a half after John Emerson proposed compass points at subway entrances, and guerrilla-style compass roses began appearing on city sidewalks, the New York City Department of Transportation announces temporary compass decals…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cathy Hummel couldn’t find a decent map of the Minnesota Lakes region where her family had their cottage, the Fargo Forum reports, so she started a business making her own. Her maps, which have been positively received by fellow cottagers,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The San Francisco Chronicle charts the decline of paper maps in the face of their digital competition — a subject that we’ve seen from time to time, but not necessarily drawing the same conclusions. The Chronicle reports that paper map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Wall Street Journal article discussing the end of Wal-Mart’s retail dominance includes a flash map showing the spread of Wal-Mart stores across the United States. Via Boing Boing….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is not a proof of concept or an art piece, but a real product: this cane containing a pull-out map of Boston was produced in 1940 for attendees of the American Legion’s National Convention in that city. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Lauren Caitlin Upton’s embarrassing moment at the Miss Teen USA pageant (see previous entry) has taken on a life of its own, as her garbled response to a question about cartographic literacy has become the latest Internet meme. And, since…  •  Continue reading this entry.

You’ll like this one. A Denver-based company, Art Coco, makes chocolate maps. They’ve been doing it since 1989, when they started out making chocolate topographic maps. Impulse buyers take note: they’re not shipping at the moment due to the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The government of British Columbia is in talks with Google about supplying information about the province for Google Maps and Google Earth. The potential goes beyond providing transit information, the Vancouver Sun reports: “Government input could include information on highway…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Valleywag has put together a map that shows which social networking site — Friendster, MySpace et al. — is the most popular in a given country. That Facebook dominates in Canada and Orkut in Brazil is a no-brainer, but…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I encountered a couple of cases of map-related double entendres recently (not at all salacious) that puzzled me for a while. Earlier this month, Mitch wrote in with a question: I have a United States map like the ones that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Meanwhile, how about a a mug with a map of the world on which the coastlines disappear, mimicking the projected effects of global warming, when you add a hot drink to it. Via All Points Blog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I was a kid when the Rubik’s Cube craze hit; I could never solve more than one side (my aptitudes clearly lay elsewhere). I doubt, however, that this Japanese version with a world map on it will be any…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Darek Milka’s Internet Ham Atlas provides maps of all the world’s DXCC entities and ham-radio prefixes. More at ARRLWeb….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Okay, I have now officially seen everything: this fly swatter’s webbing is patterned after a street map of Milan, Italy. Via Boing Boing and Gadling….  •  Continue reading this entry.

We first heard about Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping project last November, when I blogged about the Greenwich Emotion Map. Now Nold is in San Francisco for a five-week stint, measuring the emotional responses to various locations in the city, the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Deutsche Post, the German post office, has issued a stamp in honour of the 500th anniversary of Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map of the world — this is the map, you may remember, that first named the New World “America.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is a cartogram that shows from which countries Wal-Mart gets its products. China and the U.S. predominate; Europe and Africa, not so much. Via Kottke….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve run across several methods to provide maps for the visually impaired, and each is completely different from the other. The latest, Scientific American reports, is a virtual, three-dimensional map that is navigated using force-feedback gloves; the twist is that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

UNAM’s Instituto de Geografía has made the Atlas nacional de México — the national atlas of Mexico — available online. The atlas is comprised of literally hundreds of high-quality maps on every subject a national atlas ought to have,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Presenting spatial information to those who cannot see is not, as you might think at first glance, a lost cause: a section of Natural Resources Canada’s web site is dedicated to providing (and researching methods of providing) maps for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A map of three Arctic islands in Canada’s north, drafted by Norwegian explorer Otto Sverdrup, who discovered them, was thought to be in Canada’s national archives, after the government paid $67,000 to Sverdrup in 1930 for his diaries and maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An interesting post on Google’s Inside Book Search blog, where Matthew Gray crunches the numbers in Google Book Search to create a really interesting map: “I wanted to show the Earth viewed from books, where individual mentions of locations…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Not a map per se, but interesting and possibly useful: a 3-megabyte text file that contains ” a list of all towns, administrative divisions and agglomerations with their current population, their English name (if not equal to the international name)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The G-Econ project maps the world’s economic activity on a one-degree grid. Animations for the entire globe are available, as are maps of individual countries and data sets. The country maps reveal an unsurprising correlation between economic activity and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chad suggests that maybe Microsoft Paint isn’t the best tool to draw a map with….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m overdue in presenting a couple of links regarding maps of Israel and/or the “Holy Land,” which terms may or may not be interchangeable, but you get the general idea as to area. Holy Land Maps is an online…  •  Continue reading this entry.

From the fascinating blog Modern Mechanix, which reprints items from old popular science magazines, this item on Inuit mapping from the September 1933 issue of Popular Science: The text: “An Eskimo, who had never before seen a map, has just…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t pretend to understand anything about psychology, but there is apparently a line of research into “subjective well-being” — which is, I guess, how people measure their own long-term happiness. And enough research has apparently been done to map…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Georgia’s Department of Transportation has backed off. The Associated Press: “the 488 communities wiped from this year’s version of the state highway map will be restored, the Georgia Department of Transportation said Wednesday.” Previously: CSM on Georgia Map Controversy; Georgia…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of recent items about maps and directions for the visually impaired. Rachel Magario, a blind graduate student at Kansas University, is working to create tactile campus maps — “maps for the blind that are created by the blind”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last Wednesday’s edition of the Christian Science Monitor had a long, thoughtful article about the State of Georgia’s decision to remove 488 communities from its official map: “[T]he action has triggered a deeper debate about how Americans view one another…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The U.S. ZIPScribble Map by Robert Kosara plots U.S. ZIP codes in ascending order, one connected to the next. Pretty! A similar map applies the same method to the travelling salesman problem: it maps the shortest distance between ZIP…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Boing Boing’s update on the State of Georgia’s decision to remove 488 communities from its official map includes a link to a complete list of the affected communities in a WTVC news story. Oh yeah, and this image. Previously:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In an attempt to make the official map “clearer and less cluttered,” the Georgia Department of Transportation has removed 488 communities from that map. The communities were mostly — but not always — “placeholders” with populations under 2,500. That number…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A map of British motorways, done in the style of Beck’s London Underground Map. (Interesting FAQ: “Should I use this map to plan a road trip? No.”) From the same site, a map of the locations used on the British…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s “On the Job” feature looks at mapmaking as a career and the local GIS job market (which, in Nova Scotia, isn’t huge, but still)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is interesting, even for a non-football fan like myself: NFL TV distribution maps that show which games get broadcast where, with a discussion of how that gets determined. Via Kottke….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Greenwich Emotion Map was created by people walking around the community wearing devices that measured galvanic skin response; the compiled results suggest a collective emotional response to each location. Maps are available in Flash, PDF (20 MB) and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tom Patterson — whom we know from his Shaded Relief site — wrote to announce an excellent relief map of the United States that he made from SRTM and other data and released to the public domain. (Methodology here.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Strange Maps has been having fun with the maps of philosopher Leopold Kohr, who argued for smaller states in his seminal 1957 work, The Breakdown of Nations. An appendix to that book contained maps hypothesizing successful and unsuccessful federations…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sure, laminated paper versions are cheaper, but a credit-card-sized, stainless steel map of the New York subway or London Underground is, well … it’s something, isn’t it? It’s fifteen bucks, anyway. Via Gizmodo, where they seem to think it’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s something different. While at PopTech, Jason Kottke discovered the Twisty Table, which was developed as a way to navigate high-resolution satellite imagery. “When you spin the table, the map zooms in and out and tilting the table scrolls…  •  Continue reading this entry.

CNN’s Foliage Map shows, for the U.S., when the best time of year is for viewing fall colours. I can tell you it’s all but over where I am. Via Gadling….  •  Continue reading this entry.

From the Sydney Morning Herald: as part of an exhibition called “Australia from Space,” geographer Stephen Young has created six images of Australia that show how the continent would look if the world’s sea levels were to rise anywhere…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In 2002, Temple University began working on a flood map of the Pennypack Creek watershed, an area on the north side of Philadelphia that historically has been particularly prone to flooding. The resulting maps, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports in a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last year it was announced that MapQuest was moving into print maps. Wise commenters on that entry noted that it was not the first time that MapQuest had moved into paper, and in fact they had earlier laid off their…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Daily Mail and British Conservatives have their knickers in a twist over maps from Interreg III, an EU initiative designed to foster “cross-border, transnational and interregional cooperation.” The Interreg maps — available here as PDF files — overlap one…  •  Continue reading this entry.

An article by Ralph Peters in the June 2006 issue of the Armed Forces Journal imagines a redrawn map of the Middle East, where borders are shifted and new states are created to address local — and, thanks to…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The story of Canada Post’s stamp honouring geographer James White, creator of the Atlas of Canada, issued at the end of June to commemorate the atlas’s centennial, has been picked up by the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel’s stamp columnist. (Contemplate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of geographic literacy, David Rayner wrote to tell us about Give Geography Its Place, a grassroots campaign to give geography a higher profile in the UK, and to call it geography, damn it: We are a group of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Adena Schutzberg’s column on the “long tail” and its applicability to mapping is interesting in that it mentions the long tail coming up in discussion, but not necessarily where; it might be seen as a response to Joe Francica’s column…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I don’t think Joe Francica’s article, The Long Tail of Mapping, quite grasps what the concept of the “long tail” is all about. As I understood it, the “long tail” — as first expounded in Chris Anderson’s Wired article in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More about the concept of “naive geography” — the idea that how ordinary people perceive geography has implications for the design and use of GIS applications. Alan Glennon has, for a GIS class, written two short essays looking at the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Atlas of Canada (see previous entry) is celebrating its 100th anniversary. Canada Post is issuing a stamp to commemorate the occasion; the 51¢ stamp features geographer James White, a map of Canada, and proportional dividers. It will be…  •  Continue reading this entry.

mySociety’s travel-time maps demonstrate a way to use coloured maps with contour lines to show travel times, taking as examples rail travel and driving times from points in Cambridge, Edinburgh and London (at right, rail travel time from Cambridge, with…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A couple of recent comparisons of traditional — even ancient — cartography with the latest mapping technology. First, Ben Macintyre in The Times (via Cartography): The paper map will soon die, and with it something central to human experience. There…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps of Troy, Illinois and surrounding Madison County have been produced by the Troy Area Chamber of Commerce, the Edwardsville Intelligencer reports. They’re printing 10,000 paper copies of the maps, which are also available online at the above links (nothing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First, naive geography, from a 1995 paper by Max Egenhofer and David Mark: Naive Geography captures and reflects the way people think and reason about geographic space and time, both consciously and subconsciously. Naive stands for instinctive or spontaneous. Naive…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Among the printable maps offered online by the National Atlas of the United States are a collection of reference and outline maps suitable for teaching and low-tech scribbling on. Outline maps are a longstanding interest of mine. Thanks to peacay…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last week, the National Geographic Society released the results of the 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy, which tested young American adults aged 18 to 24 on their geographic knowledge. It’s probably not surprising that the results were not…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s a map of the world that labels each country with its two-letter Internet country code; you can buy a paper version or download a big digital image from the site. Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

GasBuddy.com lists gasoline prices across the U.S. and Canada; an apparently new feature, though, is this national gas temperature map that shows relative gas prices by colour value. Right-click each county for local gas prices. Via MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Our friend Tony Campbell has added a page about map quotations to his Map History/History of Cartography site; the page doesn’t list individual quotations about maps, but points to sources where they may be found online. (He should probably add…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bleeker compass by blueneurosis John Emerson notes that you can get disoriented when you come out of a subway (I’ve noticed this too, especially in places like Paris that aren’t built on a grid) and proposes a guerrilla wayfinding campaign…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Scientists at Cal Tech (their site) have manipulated strands of DNA to create, among other things, a map of the Americas that is only a few hundred nanometres across. That’s smaller than human hair or bacteria; in cartographic terms, that’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

We’ve seen before how suburban growth in some U.S. regions can be so fast that the digital mapping companies can’t keep up. The implications of living in an area so new that it’s not mapped yet are surprising: GeoCarta points…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As an experiment, a lot of new links at once: A new Google Earth blog with a rather unwieldy title: Using Google Earth for Earth Science and Remote Sensing (via Ogle Earth). The Prejudice Map is built by querying Google…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Anthony Doerr in The Morning News: “We are mapmakers, all of us, tracing lines of memory across the spaces we enter. We embed memories everywhere; we inscribe a private and complicated diagram across the landscape; we plant root structures of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The LA Times’s Susan Spano has a column on the Ordnance Survey. She comes at it from a fairly uncritical, even naïve perspective: this is a rather breathless introduction for novices, not a history of theodolites or a critique of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tony Campbell pointed out this little gem in an article about waste reduction during the holidays: “Reuse holiday wrapping, or use old maps or comic pages from the Sunday paper for wrapping gifts” (my emphasis). The sound you just heard…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Some background, in case you haven’t been following tech news lately: it was recently discovered that certain recent compact discs from Sony BMG contained a rootkit that secretly installed hidden files when you tried to play it on your PC….  •  Continue reading this entry.

To raise funds, OpenStreetMap is selling a limited-edition poster. The approximately 84×119-cm poster, which displays all the GPS data the project has collected for the London area, sells for £10 plus postage and shipping tube. Via Boing Boing. See previous…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google has removed “Province of China” from its reference to Taiwan in Google Maps (see previous entry). From the San Jose Mercury News article: “[C]ompany officials said the controversial label simply repeated information from outside data sources used to build…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Taiwan has asked Google to stop labelling it as a “province of China” in Google Maps. BBC coverage (via Cartography). Google Maps Mania has an excellent post that includes links to other news sources. Google Earth Blog and Ogle Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve briefly mentioned maps’ normative function before: they not only describe reality, but, by assigning names and boundaries, they define it. National mapping agencies make use of maps’ normative function all the time: to pick a relatively non-controversial example, Canadian…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The story about how someone was able to get out of paying a traffic ticket by pointing to Google Maps via WiFi during his court appearance was posted all over the Web today. Cute….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Personal World Map’s purpose “is to give awareness of the user’s actual position in the world in relation to other places by taking into account the ‘effort’ needed to get to a certain destination.” Travel time and cost play…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps can be normative as well as descriptive; the names contained thereon can reflect politics as much as common usage. Thanks to a new law, maps and road signs of western Ireland will be in Gaelic only, even if the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MapQuest. Remember them? You wouldn’t know it from all the buzz about Google over the last few months (er, guilty), but MapQuest still claims to have a 70 per cent share of the online mapping market. Now, whereas traditional businesses…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Geograph: “The Geograph British Isles project aims to collect a geographically representative photograph for every square kilometre of the British Isles and you can be part of it.” Via Clean Slate….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Worldclocks, by design company This Is It, rotate a polar projection of the world around a 24-hour dial, simultaneously showing the time in dozens of cities at once. The 2001 version is a 48-inch wall clock; the 2002 version is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Chandu Thota wants to organize a mapping geeks meetup at MEDC next week. I suspect that few of my readers are attending a Windows Mobile developers convention, but there it is anyway….  •  Continue reading this entry.

When you’re used to the idea that the map you’re looking for is frequently only a click away, it’s disconcerting to read about Shobhit Mahajan’s attempts to buy maps from the Survey of India, where it seems that “the idea…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been away working on a web development project for most of the last week — without broadband — so I’ve been without my usual source-checking and web surfing routine. Because if I hadn’t been away, I would have immediately…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GoogleMaps Satellite View Real-World-Mix, uploaded by kokogiak. The funniest take yet on the Google Maps screenshot craze that’s sweeping Flickr (see previous entry), from kokogiak. Update: Not on Flickr, but just as funny….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The World Islands is a $1.8-billion project to construct several hundred artificial private islands off the coast of Dubai — in the shape of a world map. The glitzy official site is here. Via Boing Boing and MetaFilter….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sometimes it’s all about knowing what your search term is. I wanted to do some species range maps for one of my other projects. Since I’m not wise in the ways of cartography, and because Illustrator would be serious overkill…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Behavioural psychologists are using navigating techniques as a means of testing whether gay men and women show “cross-sex shifts” in some of their cognitive abilities — i.e., whether gay men think more like straight women and lesbians like straight men….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jim Weber writes to inform us about a non-commercial project he’s started: Links 4 Maps is a links directory for maps and cartography. It’s already got a number of good links already….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here come the Map Ladies: Susan Pietrantoni and Kathleen Cote are the “Map Ladies” who travel to schools throughout the surrounding communities including Tewksbury and introduce the art of cartography. They have developed a two day program about maps, why…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Found at Flickr: la worldmap, a collection of photos by Bertrand Eberhard of people interacting with what appears to be a large world map on the floor of the Beaubourg museum in Paris….  •  Continue reading this entry.

In the 1970s, geography professor C. Etzel Pearcy proposed reconfiguring the United States into 38 states that were, in his view, more physically and culturally coherent. This page has the story — and, more importantly for our purposes, the map….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Maps of theme parks, dating back as far as 1931. Quite an extensive collection. Via Boing Boing….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now this is odd. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has scanned the text of a whole whack of documents from the Civil War era that “demonstrate the Confederate States of America’s unsuccessful attempt to create a…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rappahannock County, Virginia has a new road map; the Rappahannock News has the story on how it came to be….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Now playing on BBC Two: a television program about maps! The Map Man is an eight-episode series that began running on September 16. Each episode — see the program guide in Word format — looks at a specific map and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

And now for some fun at the expense of people who don’t know their geography. Fool’s World Map has been linked to all over the web — I saw it first on MetaFilter — and, as usual, I’m just about…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

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…  •  Continue reading this entry.

One more from inflight correction, whose author would like to see a map of what he calls “personal globalization”: Not what’s been imported around you, though that’s interesting, but what is your world via the internet? Mine covers the broad…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A 1632 map of Canada by Samuel de Champlain and a satellite image of the country are featured on the back of the new Canadian $100 bill, which went into circulation today (CBC)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

An entry from Ian’s blog called Cartophilia: “I like it when states reach for something that they might not deserve. Take Alabama and Mississippi, for instance, both violently sticking out a body part to touch the Gulf of Mexico ….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Owen sends along a link to this profile, in the Victoria Times-Colonist, of Melissa Edwards, the person behind Geist magazine’s quirky Caught Mapping feature. See previous entries: Caught Mapping, Caught Mapping Archives….  •  Continue reading this entry.