For Geographical magazine, cartogrammer extraordinaire Benjamin Hennig maps the geography of hate groups in America, with a set of cartograms that show where each category of hate group—anti-Muslim, anti-LGBT, neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, and so forth—is located.
Richard Kirwan, a former director of Ordnance Survey Ireland, published a memoir in 2010 called If Maps Could Speak (Londubh). That memoir is now available in an ebook edition—or at least it is for the Kindle; I couldn’t find it in other ebook stores. [WMS]
iOS 11 won’t be available to iPhone and iPad users until the fall, but tech journalists are already noting the improvements coming to Apple’s maps, including lane guidance, augmented-reality enhanced Flyover maps, indoor maps and one-handed mode, among others.
Science fiction/fantasy novelist Alex Acks, a geologist by training, has some issues with Middle-earth’s mountain ranges. “Middle-earth’s got 99 problems, and mountains are basically 98 of them.” Basically it comes down to how Tolkien’s mountain ranges intersect at right angles—and mountains don’t do that.
And Mordor? Oh, I don’t even want to talk about Mordor.
Tectonic plates don’t tend to collide at neat right angles, let alone in some configuration as to create a nearly perfect box of mountains in the middle of a continent. […]
To be fair to J.R.R. Tolkien, while continental drift was a theory making headway in the world of geology from 1910 onwards, plate tectonics didn’t arrive on the scene until the mid-50s, and then it took a little while to become accepted science. (Though goodness, plate tectonics came down—I have it on good authority from geologists who were alive and in school at the time that it was like the holy light of understanding shining forth. Suddenly, so many things made sense.) Fantasy maps drawn after the 1960s don’t get even that overly generous pass.
And here I thought Tolkien’s mountains were better than most—but then I’m no geologist, and also than most may not be saying that much.
When it was released last April, the new version of Google Earth was limited to Chrome on the desktop and Android on mobile. Last week those upgrades came to the iOS version as well (App Store). [MacStories]
A new map fair is starting up in California. The first San Francisco Map Fair will take place from 15 to 17 September 2017 at the Regency Center. It’s sponsored by the History in Your Hands Foundation, with lectures sponsored by the California Map Society. [WMS]
An online map has been launched that marks the locations of at least 150 massacres of Aboriginal populations during the frontier wars in eastern Australia between 1788 and 1872. ABC News (Australia) has more information and talks with the project lead, Prof. Lyndall Ryan of the University of Newcastle.
It’s like Uncharted Atlas, but for cities: the Medieval Fantasy City Generator is a web application that “generates a random medieval city layout of a requested size. The generation method is rather arbitrary, the goal is to produce a nice looking map, not an accurate model of a city.” As was the case with Uncharted Atlas, the effect is accidentally damning: if an algorithm can create a fantasy setting indistinguishable from a human-made product, what does that say about the human-made product? [Ada Palmer]
Previously: Uncharted Atlas.
Another tale of a traditional map publisher surviving in the face of Google Maps, GPS and smartphones from the Star Tribune, which profiled Minneapolis mapmaker Tom Hedberg earlier this month. Hedberg Maps’s traditional map products sell a fraction of what they used to, and they have fewer employees than they used to, but the company survives, the article says, by focusing on niche publications, like college and sports maps, and custom mapmaking, though their online store still has plenty of street maps. [MAPS-L]
First published in June 2015, Thrillist’s Real D.C. Subway Map replaces Washington’s Metro station names with “an accurate depiction of what you’ll encounter when you exit the train.” It’s about what you’d expect. [Curbed DC]
Along with Regions and Seasons (previously), the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is hosting another exhibition, Who We Are: Boston Immigration Then and Now, which runs until 26 August. “This exhibition compares the landscape of today’s ‘new’ Boston with that of over 100 years ago. The maps and graphics on display here show where Boston’s foreign-born residents originate from, and where newer immigrant groups have settled, while celebrating who we are, and the vibrant diversity that is Boston.” Text is in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Vietnamese.
Eclipse maps—maps that show the path of solar eclipses across the surface of the Earth—are very much a thing. As I wrote in my first blog post about eclipse maps back in 2010, “These maps are vital to eclipse chasers, who spend vast sums travelling to places where they can see one, and those slightly less insane who nevertheless are interested in when the next one comes around.” Eclipse chasers are already getting ready for next month’s solar eclipse, which transects the continental United States on 21 August, and of course there are lots of maps.
Michael Zeiler, whose website about solar eclipse maps, coincidentally called Eclipse-Maps.com, I told you about in 2011, has launched a separate website dedicated to next month’s eclipse, called (wait for it) GreatAmericanEclipse.com. There are eclipse maps for every state the path passes through, various maps presenting additional information, and a 10-foot-long strip map of the path of totality.
But knowing an eclipse’s path isn’t always enough. There’s nothing worse than spending a fortune to get to an eclipse-viewing spot only to discover it’s clouded over. You can’t predict the skies far enough in advance, but you can factor in the likelihood that skies will be clear or cloudy for a given location, based on historical weather data. That’s what NOAA’s eclipse cloudiness maps do. [GeoLounge]
Noting for future reference: The Cartographer’s Daughter, a middle grade novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave that came out last November from Knopf. “[W]hen a series of mysterious events shakes the community, it’s Isabella—daughter to the island’s only mapmaker—who will lead a party of explorers into the forest in search of answers.”
A post on Tor.com reveals the map of the Protectorate, the world of JY Yang’s forthcoming Tensorate series (The Black Tides of Heaven and The Red Threads of Fortune, both coming in September), with a look at both the author’s initial sketch of the world with the final product created by artist Serena Malyon (who we last saw doing the map for Kij Johnson’s Dream-Quest of Vellit Boe).
Previously: Mapping the Dreamlands.
This cake in the form of an Ordnance Survey map is the creation of Scottish cake decorator World of Cake; it marks “a spot where the birthday hiker apparently got quite lost!” Now the rest of us will want one. [Ordnance Survey]
