Moon Lidar is a visualization of some six billion measurements from the LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter produced by software consultancy Hobu. Details here. Pretty impressive, and pretty, but it’s more of a proof of concept than a useable tool: no labels, only an alphabetical list of features in the menu that you can zoom to. [Kottke]
The Icelandic Institute of Natural History has mapped every known appearance of polar bears in Iceland: “Polar bears are not native to Iceland, although they do occasionally turn up in Iceland and are thus classified as vagrants. Information exists on just over 600 polar bears recorded as having arrived in Iceland from the beginning of human settlement on the island to the present day. This is a somewhat imprecise figure, since polar bears have undoubtedly come ashore without their presence going noticed, while bear sightings and encounters were not always documented in the past. The last polar bear observation was at Höfðaströnd in Jökulfirðir in September 2024.”
The Public’s Radio talks with Andrew Middleton, who you will remember took over the Map Center in Pawtucket, RI in 2023. The focus of the piece is on how Andrew came to own the store and why he doesn’t see Google and Apple as competitors. “I see them as selling information. I do not sell information. I sell a good story.”
Previously: Paper Maps: New Business, Lost Loves; A Map of Map Institutions.
Carla Lois’s Terrae Incognitae: Mapping the Unknown (Brill, Dec 2024) sounds interesting: it’s a look at the concept of terra incognita—the unknown land on the map—and the different forms it can take. An English translation of a book that first appeared in 2018 in Argentina. [Matthew Edney]
Almost missed this. Rivers & Roads: The Art of Getting There is an exhibition in the corridor gallery of Harvard’s Pusey Library that runs until 31 January 2025. It’s about getting from point A to point B over the centuries, and that hasn’t always meant using a map with a grid system. For more, see the Harvard Gazette’s interview with the exhibit’s curator, Molly Taylor-Poleskey.
In the wake of the recent wildfires in southern California, Watch Duty—a simple, free app that provides real-time fire maps and alerts, and which prizes, and is prized for, accurate data, collated by its volunteer reporters—has become the most popular app on the App Store and is being hailed as an essential lifeline: see The Hollywood Reporter, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Verge, Washington Post (paywalls on some links).
Bob Wegner, an illustrator who spent 42 years drawing railroad maps and model train track plans for the Kalmbach line of magazines—Trains, Model Railroader and Classic Trains—died last week at the age of 83. Classic Trains has a rememberance; obituary here.
Karen Wynn Fonstad, the cartographer of fantasy worlds best known for her Atlas of Middle-earth, died in March 2005 aged 59. Nearly twenty years later, she gets a comprehensive obituary in the New York Times, replete with lots of examples of her mapmaking, as part of its Overlooked series, which gives belated obituaries to “remarkable people whose deaths […] went unreported in The Times.” Paywalled; workarounds via the usual suspects.
Miguel García Álvarez of Mapas Milhaud has been writing a Spanish-language newsletter about maps for nearly two years. Now he’s started a newsletter in English: A Cartographer’s Tale. He writes: “In this newsletter, I will adapt some of the work I publish (and have published) in Milhaud Maps into English. I like to talk about adapting, as it takes more than a mere translation to let a text make sense and take shape in another language. There will also be articles that I will first publish in English and later adapt to Spanish.”
Restoration work has been completed on the Palazzo Vecchio’s Map Room (no relation); see this Popular Archaeology article for details and photos. In tandem with the restoration, there is now a virtual version of the Map Room that allows you to explore the maps in a virtual facsimile of the room. The maps can also be superimposed on the globe. If this is all a bit too virtual, there’s also an index.
Last April, CBC News ran an interactive, map-rich story about buried waterways in Canada’s large cities—buried largely for sanitary reasons—and initiatives to restore old and forgotten creeks and rivers to the surface. Focuses on Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, but there are links to other cities at the end.
Online maps of the current wildfires burning near Los Angeles:
Update, 3:50 PM EST (via Lauren Tierney):
Update, 10 Jan at 1:45 PM EST:
Update, 13 Jan at 9:35 PM EST:
A Stranger Quest, the documentary about David Rumsey by Andrea Gatopolous, is now available to the public online, having made its debut last year at the Torino Film Festival (previously) and made the rounds of the film festival circuit. In it, Rumsey, who turned 80 this year, ruminates about loss and mortality, filtered through various lenses: the loss of a friend, the legacy created by a lifetime of map collecting. And let me tell you, it’s a trip. It’s not so much about maps (though the Urbano Monte reconstruction makes several appearances), or map collecting, as it is about a particular map collector; and it approaches its subject edgewise. With long silences, and long scenes shot from enough distance that they make the viewer feel like they’re eavesdropping on private conversations rather than watching a documentary, to say nothing of extended sojourns in Second Life, it’s far from what I would have expected, but I cannot deny the overwhelming art of it.
Reimagining Rural Cartographies is a series from independent rural news outlet Barn Raiser that “features written and photo essays that create or examine nontraditional and living maps of the Midwest. How does the path a cougar took to roam into the heart of Chicago help us understand how urban, suburban and rural landscapes are changing? What really happens in the forest at the center of a recent Landback movement? How does the USPS serve as a rural lifeline, connecting neighbors and faraway places, despite service cuts?” Three articles so far.
“Someone needs to tell him that the lines on maps are not supposed to be this entertaining.” Drew Gallagher reviews Jonn Elledge’s Brief History of the World in 47 Borders in the Washington Independent Review of Books. “Throughout, Elledge’s writing is equal parts insightful and amusing, and his myriad footnotes contain some of the funniest writing.” (Published too late to make this month’s book roundup.)
