Tag: funny

How xkcd Does Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Randall Munroe, author of the xkcd web comic, posts a surprising amount of map-related content, which I invariably end up linking to here. With some exceptions, they fall into one of two categories, each of which has a recent example.

The first category is a hand-drawn infographic map showing, in earnest, some interesting or surprising information. See, for example, this map showing the most observed animal or plant in each U.S. state:

Randall Munroe, “iNaturalist Animals and Plants,” xkcd, 21 Jul 2025.

Other maps of this ilk include drainage basins, lesser-known towns sharing a famous place name, least informative Google Trends maps, and maps of the 2016, 2018 (challengers) and 2020 elections.

The second category is where Randall chooses the path of violence, with maps clearly designed by Black Hat Guy to hurt our brains. These include a series of maps that mangle U.S. state borders (1, 2, 3). But the most insidious are his Bad Maps Projections series, the most recent of which projects continents onto their own globes:

Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: Interrupted Spheres,” xkcd, 30 Jul 2025.

Thing is, this one isn’t as brain-curdling, because similar globes—globes that depict a portion of the world on an entire sphere—exist in the real world.

The Map Men Visit the Ordnance Survey, and Also Wrote a Book

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Map Men Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones visit the Ordnance Survey in a (sponsored) set of two (vertically aligned short) videos: part one, part two. Complete with map-folding mishaps, gratuitous hi-viz vest wearing, and a Google Maps dig.

Meanwhile, they’ve also gone and written a book: This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and Why It Matters) will be out from HarperCollins imprints in the fall of 2025: the U.K. edition will come out from Mudlark in October (£17) and the U.S. edition from Hanover Square Press in November ($30). Amazon (Canada, UK), Bookshop.

A Globe Safety Tip from xkcd

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Randall Munroe, “Globe Safety,” xkcd, 7 May 2025.

In Wednesday’s xkcd comic, Replogle has apparently been taken over by mad scientists. I’m having a hard time resisting the urge to explain the joke (I doubt many of my readers are physicists, but then I’m not one either). But in a weird Einsteinian way Randall is doing with globes and mass what Carroll, Borges and Eco did with maps and space: assume a 1:1 ratio between the map and the mapped.

Getting on the Name-Changing Bandwagon

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has decided to get in on the whole unilateral name-changing thing.

An important announcement from the Governor of Illinois.

— JB Pritzker (@jbpritzker.bsky.social) 2025-02-07T20:34:44.620Z

See also Barry Blitt’s cartoon in The New Yorker.

Previously: Naming the Gulf; Google Maps to Use ‘Gulf of America’–Others Not So Much; More Reactions to ‘Gulf of America’.

xkcd: ‘Every Eclipse Path Map’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An xkcd cartoon about eclipse path maps.
Randall Munroe, “Every Eclipse Path Map,” xkcd, 17 Apr 2024.

Looks like we’re not quite done with eclipse maps, especially the whimsical sort, and it’s not at all invalid for xckd to have (what is probably going to be) the last word on the subject (at least for a while), with this fictional map showing the fictional path of a fictional eclipse over a fictional landscape, with rueful descriptions of fictional places where trying to see the fictional eclipse will come to a bad end for the fictional observers. (And you thought it was bad you got clouds.)

xkcd on Greenland’s Size

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

xkcd: Greenland Size (25 Mar 2024)
Randall Munroe, “Greenland Size”, xkcd, 25 March 2024.

The 25 March 2024 xkcd honours Greenland’s place as a measure of cartographic distortion. It’s also, unexpectedly, a riff on the idea of the 1:1 scale map (cf. Borges), especially if you consult the comic’s alt text: “The Mercator projection drastically distorts the size of almost every area of land except a small ring around the North and South Poles.”

Previously: xkcd: The Greenland Special.

xkcd’s Geography Challenge

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

An xkcd comic by Randall Munroe called Label the States
Randall Munroe, “Label the States,” xkcd, 15 Dec 2023.

Stare at this map for a while until you figure out what Randall Munroe has done in last Friday’s xkcd. Then scream. (Kottke says: “This is evil.”) It’s not the first time that xkcd has committed mischief and violence on an outline map of the contiguous United States: see, for example this one, or this one. I worry it may not be the last.

Previously: xkcd’s United States Map; The Contiguous 41 States—Wait, What?

‘Where Comedy Meets Geography’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Geographical magazine has a profile of the Map Men—that is, Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper-Jones, who’ve been posting funny videos on YouTube that explain some cartographical or geographical silliness since 2016, on and off.

‘As little as ten years ago, maps were something that you just had to live with and everybody had an A-to-Z in the car,’ says Jay, who is the main comedic influence behind the channel, having already found success with a series on London’s architecture called Unfinished London. ‘But now that everyone has a sat nav, I think maps have become, for want of a better word, more geeky. You get people who didn’t realise that they were interested in maps or geography until they see an episode of Map Men and they’ll say: “Oh, yeah, maps are my guilty pleasure.” And I don’t think people would have necessarily talked like that about maps ten years ago, because they used to be something that we depended on. And now they have become something that we enjoy.’

(See previous posts.)

‘Whoops, Made All Longitudes Positive’

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

xkcd:Bad Map Projection: ABS(Longitude)
Randall Munroe, “Bad Map Projection: ABS(Longitude),” xkcd, 26 Jul 2023.

The latest in Randall Munroe’s Bad Map Projection series on xkcd is perhaps his most evil yet: it turns all longitudes positive—i.e., it turns west longitude into east longitude, putting Quebec somewhere in Kazakhstan and the Panama Canal off Sri Lanka.