Moogle Gaps, for when you want to be misdirected. TrendWatching: “Whipped up by two Australian ex-Droga5 creatives, Paul Meates and Henry Kimber, Moogle Gaps is an anti-wayfinder. Users input their navigational query as they normally would, but instead of the most efficient route from A to B, the app offers misdirections — or as its builders put it, ‘a way to get lost, visit a bar that‘s not local, or go to a restaurant where no one knows you.’” [Tara Calishain]
How Google Maps Disappears Restaurants from Search Results
For the Guardian’s “It’s Complicated” feature, Josh Toussaint-Strauss looks at how great restaurants end up being invisible when you search for a place to eat on Google Maps. He talks with data scientist Lauren Leek, whose London Food Map tries to surface restaurants that, according to a machine learning model, should have a higher rating than they do. Lauren points to the Google’s ranking system’s reliance in part on “prominence”—a factor that bestows cumulative advantage on already-visible locations.
A Deep Dive on ‘The Map Is Not the Territory’
In another side-quest from his current work in progress, Matthew Edney goes down a deep rabbit hole trying to work out a specific point related to Alfred Korzybski’s famous adage that “the map is not the territory”—a metaphor for the description not being the thing described. The precise quote is as follows:
Two important characteristics of maps should be noticed. A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness. If the map could be ideally correct, it would include, in a reduced scale, the map of the map; the map of the map, of the map; and so on, endlessly, a fact first noticed by Royce.1
Insofar as I follow Edney’s line of argument,2 it’s the question of self-reflexivity—the idea that any ideal map of the territory would include itself, as part of the territory being mapped, on the map, with infinite regressions—that he is trying to grapple with, along with the question of what Korzybski and his general semantics successors were doing when they were talking about the “ideally correct map”—a subject about which Edney has had something to say.
Minnesota’s Unmappable City
The wealthy enclave of North Oaks, Minnesota got itself removed from Google Maps Street View 2008 and has stayed invisible to the service since then, thanks to the fact that the entire city of 5,272 residents, a former gated community, is private property—the property lines end at the middle of the street, so there is no public property per se, and driving the streets is considered trespassing.
Chris Parr decided to get North Oaks onto Street View anyway. Taking advantage of the fact that property rights don’t extend into the airspace above the property, he got a drone licence, collected some aerial imagery, and uploaded said imagery to Street View. Where it lasted for approximately three whole days before it was taken down, because it’s not like Chris was going to succeed where Google failed. As the 404 Media report notes: “Parr’s experiment and documentary raises questions, of course, about who gets to have privacy in America. A wealthy enclave has set up the legal and surveillance infrastructure to be able to prevent being mapped. The rest of us, meanwhile, are subject to all sorts of surveillance by our neighbors and law enforcement.” (See, for example, the cameras at every entry road enforcing North Oaks’ privacy.)
To be clear, this is specifically about Street View (and Apple’s Look Around, same deal). North Oaks is on the map on every platform. It’s not blurred in satellite imagery. It’s not a naval base or a nuclear facility, just an immensely privileged neighbourhood that wants to keep even the virtual riff-raff away.
Parking: Navigation Apps’ Next Frontier
A team of MIT researchers think that navigation systems have a parking problem. They’re capable of telling us about traffic congestion and offering us alternate routes, but once we’ve arrived at our destination, we’re on our own when it comes to finding a place to park—and hunting for a parking space can increase emissions, congestion and the effective travel time. As the Fast Company article notes, a third of New York street traffic involves drivers looking for a parking spot. So the researchers modeled a system to address it.
To solve the parking problem, the researchers developed a probability-aware approach that considers all possible public parking lots near a destination, the distance to drive there from a point of origin, the distance to walk from each lot to the destination, and the likelihood of parking success.
The approach, based on dynamic programming, works backward from good outcomes to calculate the best route for the user.
Their method also considers the case where a user arrives at the ideal parking lot but can’t find a space. It takes into the account the distance to other parking lots and the probability of success of parking at each.
The caveat is that this system relies on data, whether directly from the parking lot companies or through crowdsourcing (Waze, but for parking), and that sort of data hasn’t, to my knowledge, been systematized yet.
‘The Map Itself Should Be Messier’
In an interview in the Spring 2026 issue of The World Today, William Rankin, author of Radical Cartography, looks at cartography in the present geopolitical situation and argues that maps need to be up to the challenge of today’s complications: “[M]ainstream cartographic conventions are often inadequate to show a complexity we do understand; and there are situations where we cannot say with confidence where we would put the lines even if we tried. The map itself should be messier. It should raise questions of ambiguity and multiple claims, rather than presenting a simplified version and then walking it back in a footnote.”
Maps in Movies
John Nelson and Peter Attwood look at how maps are used in a bunch of different movies (and one TV show: Game of Thrones). They talk about using maps to indicate travel in the Indiana Jones movies (and spoofed by The Muppets), treasure maps and other maps used in the story, maps in titles, et cetera, with just the right amount of nitpicking (i.e., not too much, but not too little either).
The Leventhal Center Is Hiring a Curator
The Leventhal Map Center is looking to hire a curator or associate curator of maps and geography. “This position will play a leading role in advancing the Center’s broad public agenda around the study of maps, space and place, and historical geography, and will hold key responsibilities for the stewardship, growth, and interpretation of the Center’s collections.” Deadline 30 March 2026.
Faye Passow’s State Map Goods
About half of Minnesota artist Faye Passow’s Etsy store is filled with map-related merchandise—postcards, prints, napkins and towels, mugs and other stoneware—featuring colourful pictorial maps of the regional specialties of several U.S. states. For example, Minnesota hot dishes by region. What stand out most are the Minnesota and Texas casserole dishes in the shape of their respective states.
CBC News Looks at Jeff Clark of Clark Geomatics
Jeff Clark of Clark Geomatics, who’s been producing backcountry recreation maps since 2008, plus some very nice wall maps of British Columbia coastal regions, gets a profile from CBC News. Always nice to see mapmakers make the news.
Google Maps AI Updates: Ask Maps, Immersive Navigation
Google just announced a couple of fairly major Gemini AI-powered updates to Google Maps. Ask Maps is a a chatbot that produces personalized responses to questions—essentially an intermediary that sifts the data so you don’t have to, taking into consideration your known preferences (with all that entails: not necessarily good). Immersive Navigation is a 3D mode full of suggestions:
When it’s helpful, Maps will highlight critical road details like lanes, crosswalks, traffic lights, and stop signs to help you make that turn or merge confidently. This spatial understanding of your route is made possible with help from Gemini models, which analyze fresh, real world imagery from Street View and aerial photos to give you an accurate view of things along your route, like landmarks and medians.
Includes voice guidance in more natural language and explaining the pros and cons of alternate routes. All of which requires that the underlying map data be accurate and up to date. We’ve already seen what happens when people blindly follow GPS/satnav driving directions that are in error or out of date; if anything people have proven to be more even credulous with AI chatbots. So we’ll see how this goes.
More on GPS Jamming in the Strait of Hormuz
BBC News on GPS jamming in the conflict between the U.S., Israel and Iran:
The interference currently affecting ships in and around the Strait of Hormuz is far from the first time that [maritime intelligence analyst Michelle Wise] Bockmann has observed GPS jamming impacting vessels’ Automatic Identification Systems (AIS).
The same thing happened in this region last year during the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and electronic interference has also troubled vessel navigators in the Baltic Sea. But, she says, “This is next-level.”
Previously: GPS Jamming and the Iran War.
Imaginary Maps as Cartographic Guides
The Bodleian Map Room Blog looks at a specific kind of map of imaginary places, “designed to be a guide to cartographers by showing how to portray certain features, or for the map reader to show what the symbols mean.”
Here’s an example, ‘Colours and symbols used on fair sheets and fair tracing’, issued by the Hydrographic Office of the Navy in 1973. Fair here meaning a document after correction, ready to be used. But is it fair? With this ‘made-up’ map the Hydrographic Office have used real names but in random locations, so Campania, in reality a region of Italy, features, as does the English county of Rutland (though as a town here) and a made-up mountain, Montrosia. Best of all is mention of “Approaches to Valhalla”. The map shows different forms of landscape, both natural and man-made with the symbols used to show those features, and the names are added to give the whole an authentic feel.
It makes sense to do it this way: no single real map is likely to contain every single feature you’re trying to demonstrate.
La figure de la Terre
La figure de la Terre: Un débat franco-anglais (XVIIe-XXIe siècle), an exhibition running at the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris from 1 April to 20 June 2026.
This exhibition offers a historical and scientific journey through more than three centuries of research devoted to measuring, modeling and understanding the shape of our planet, from the 17th century through to the space age. Since ancient times, we’ve known that the Earth is, broadly speaking, a sphere. The key question was whether it was slightly flattened at the poles or elongated. To answer this question, scientists, astronomers, mathematicians and geodesists have developed theoretical models, designed innovative instruments and conducted vast observation campaigns around the world. The exhibition features exceptional sources drawn mainly from the collections of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Society, testifying to the intensity of scientific exchanges between Paris and London and the decisive role of international cooperation in the production of knowledge.
France seems to have quite a lot of map-related programming lately.
GPS Jamming and the Iran War
GPS jamming has become pretty much endemic in every conflict, open, hybrid or frozen, so it’s no surprise that it’s going on in the Persian Gulf: “Though commercial vessels are not the target, the electronic interference disrupted the navigation systems of more than 1,100 commercial ships in UAE, Qatari, Omani and Iranian waters on February 28, according to a report from Windward, a shipping intelligence firm.” The CNN article goes on to explain why GPS (and other GNSS systems) are so vulnerable, and how spoofing and jamming have become so commonplace.