Bloomberg explores land use in the United States with a series of low-resolution maps that become more and more like infographics in the shape of the lower 48 states. It’s a revealing look at the big picture, with some surprises: 41 percent of U.S. land is used to feed livestock.
Here’s a short video from the British Museum about a 13th-century celestial globe; it goes into the history of the globe, who made it, and how the stars appear on it (i.e. if the sky is represented as a globe, we’re on the inside: how do the stars appear on that globe?).
Earlier this year Google Maps changed the terms of its API and in the process jacked up its prices, leaving web developers to consider other alternatives. These include (among others) OpenStreetMap, which posted a switching guide in June; Apple, which announced its API for websites that same month; and Here Maps, which (a) is still around1 and (b) has announced a freemium plan with reasonably generous transaction limits. As Engadget points out, Google’s trying to profit off its market dominance; its competitors, seeing an opening, are making their move. [Engadget]
Google is assigning names to neighbourhoods that, the New York Times reports, have little basis in reality—but once on Google Maps, those names swiftly come into a popular usage they never had before. The East Cut, in San Francisco, was the product of a branding agency; Fiskhorn, in Detroit, is actually a misspelling of Fishkorn, taken from a typo in the source map. (Searching for “Fishkorn” works just as well, though.) How such names end up on Google Maps, and therefore get a certain canonicity, is what’s interesting: it seems to be the result of a tech giant processing diverse data with remote fact checkers and not much in the way of local knowledge. [Boing Boing]
Hey look, GIS people: Randall Munroe made an xkcd comic just for you.
In the wake of reports that fitness apps’ user data was exposed and could be used to identify military and intelligence personnel in sensitive areas like bases and deployment zones, U.S. military and defense employees can no longer use geolocation features in devices and apps in operational areas. The new policy was announced last Friday. Also see coverage at Stars and Stripes. [Gizmodo]
Previously: Strava Heat Map Reveals Soldiers’ Locations; Non-Anonymized Strava User Data Is Accessible; Strava, Responding to Security Concerns, Disables Features; Polar Flow User Data Can Be Used to Identify Military and Intelligence Personnel.
The Washington Post maps the largest of the wildfires burning in northern California: the Carr Fire threatening the city of Redding and surrounding communities. The Redding Record Searchlight has drone footage of the destruction wreaked by the Carr Fire in Shasta County. NASA has natural and false-colour imagery (Earth Observatory, Visible Earth) of the Carr Fire, as well as the Ranch and River Fires to the south, the so-called Mendocino Complex. See the Mercury News’s fire map of the Mendocino Complex, whose two fires’ combined acreage is now larger than the Carr Fire. Meanwhile, German astronaut Alexander Gerst observed the California wildfires from the International Space Station. [San Francisco Chronicle]
BBC News looks at how satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus program is being used to help fight wildfires in the Scottish highlands.
Meanwhile, the Copernicus program captured images of wildfires in Sweden last month.
Web mapping uses Web Mercator. As Kenneth Field points out, this is fine at large scales, but at small scales you end up replicating the problem of using the Mercator projection on a wall map of the world.2 Zoom out in Apple Maps: using the map layer you get a Mercator; using imagery you get a virtual globe (basically, an orthographic projection you can spin). Ditto in Google Earth. But Google Maps, after some tests and starts, now does this in its map layer—and not just in Chrome, either. This means, among other things, that Antarctica is usably visible, as are the Arctic regions—and, of course, Greenland is its proper size at small scales.
At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival? You may want to check out The OS Map Fan Club, an hour-long solo performance about Ordnance Survey maps that sounds relevant to our interests. Written and performed by Helen Wood, The OS Map Fan Club has been making the fringe and festival circuit this year and has been getting good reviews (see here, here and here). At the Edinburgh Fringe until 18 August; details and tickets here. [Map of the Week]
Previously: Cartography: ‘A Gently Interactive Show’ at the Halifax Fringe Festival.
CBC Ottawa looks at four hand-drawn maps of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham of 1759, in which British forces captured the city of Québec. The maps are held in the vaults of the Canadian War Museum and are too delicate to put on display; I have not as yet been able to find online versions of these maps there or at Library and Archives Canada.
Dave Imus is in the news again: he’s the subject of this profile by Oregon Public Broadcasting, which looks at his childhood, his career, and his sudden launch to fame and fortune when his iconic, award-winning map of the U.S. was called “the greatest paper map of the United States” by Slate. It also drops a bit of news: Imus is working on a new edition of his map, which will see a limited release in November before the regular version is published in 2019. [Gretchen Peterson]
Previously: The Best Map of Alaska?; David Imus’s Map of Oregon; David Imus in the Oregonian; A Paper Maps Roundup.
In 2016 I told you about Michael Plichta’s first globe, a delightfully retro hand-crafted globe of Mars based on Percival Lowell’s maps that showed the world covered in canals. Plichta’s second globe project is also cool and unusual, but in a completely different way: it’s a relief globe of the Moon. No globe gores were used to make this 30-cm globe: the textured surface is cast in artificial plaster and then painted by hand, a compulsively exacting process laid out in this short video:
Hand-crafted globes are never inexpensive, and though Michael never mentions prices, this one cannot be either. (I’ve seen his Mars globe listed for $1,850.) That said, this is a definite lust object. I desperately want one.
Previously: A Globe of Percival Lowell’s Mars; New Moon Globe Released; Globes of the Solar System.
The Library of Congress’s Geographers on Film collection is a video archive of interviews with cartographers and geographers conducted during the 1970s and 1980s. About 300 interviews were apparently conducted; 28 are online so far. Interview subjects include Walter Ristow, Arthur Robinson (in 1972 and 1984) and Waldo Tobler, among others.
Diagrams of Power, a group exhibition taking place right now at OCAD University’s Onsite Gallery in Toronto, “showcases art and design works using data, diagrams, maps and visualizations as ways of challenging dominant narratives and supporting the resilience of marginalized communities.” Curated by Patricio Dávila, it runs until 29 September. Free admission.
Update: The above is lacking in some detail; here’s the Toronto Star review to make up for it.
