Sasha Trubetskoy made a set of maps of Roman roads depicted in the style of Harry Beck's famous London Underground map.
It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD. Creating this required far more research than I had expected—there is not a single consistent source that was particularly good for this. ... The biggest creative element was choosing which roads and cities to include, and which to exclude. There is no way I could include every Roman road, these are only the main ones. I tried to include cities with larger populations, or cities that were provincial capitals around the 2nd century.
Obviously to travel from Petra to Gaza you would take a more or less direct road, rather than going to Damascus and “transferring” to the Via Maris. The way we travel on roads is very different from rail, which is a slight flaw in the concept of the map. But I think it’s still aesthetically pleasing and informative.
There's maps for the empire at its height, and also more detailed local ones for Britain, Hispania, Gaul. All available as posters. Read the rest
• “New transit alerts show you when your trip is likely to be affected by COVID-19 restrictions”
• “Safely avoid crowds on public transit”
“In our latest release of Google Maps on Android and iOS, we’re introducing features to help you easily find important information if you need to venture out, whether it’s by car or public transportation,” says Google Maps Product Management Director Ramesh Nagarajan in a blog post announcing some new COVID-19 features for the navigation app. Read the rest
IMGURian @KRANKARTA6 did an awesome topography visualization project in the "Ridgeline Style" that reminds us of the album cover for Joy Division's classic LP 'Unknown Pleasures.' Read the rest
The premise of 1995's Waterworld [Amazon] was flawed in that there isn't enough water in the ice caps to raise sea levels 7500m, as is established in Waterworld canon. But I wanted to see what that would look like, so here is a map of planet earth with the sea level raised 7500m, based on topographical data published by NASA.
As you can readily see, only parts of the Tibetan plateau remain above the waves. That said, while the world as we know it is gone, that's a lot dry land—an achipelago spread over an area larger than the British Isles or Japan. It seems unlikely that it would be hard to find, let alone be lost to myth or rumor.
Here's the striking intro scene from the movie, which shows the Universal Studio logo -- planet Earth -- being inundated. Even as a voiceover narrates that the melting of the ice caps put the world under water, it shows the world completely under water with ice caps still remaining. This could be interpreted as an easter egg, showing that the films' creators know the water couldn't have anything to do with melting ice caps. Read the rest
Not for much longer, sure, but here's a map of American counties whose residents enjoy a life expectancy of more than eighty years. It was drafted by Spooderman89 on Reddit using mapchart.com.
I believe the only states with not a single long-lived county are Mississippi and Delaware. Read the rest
On this Thoughty2 video, Arran tells the fascinating tale of Bermeja, an allegedly 80 square kilometers island indicated on many maps, starting in the 16th and 17th centuries. The problem is, it doesn't appear to actually exist. Many theories abound about what could have happened to it or why it would be on so many old maps if it never existed.
I love the idea that it was put there by a mapmaker as a kind of watermark to prove that other cartographers had simply copied his work. Mexico has gone to great lengths to try and prove the existence of the island because it would give them oil drilling rights for 200 miles around it.
Image: YouTube Read the rest
Jake Berman writes, "I've drawn a series of maps showing the lost streetcar and subway systems of North America." He's selling them as prints.
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Click to embiggen image
Designer Jose Garcia at Zoca Studio Inc. used a familiar Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) map to showcase the Fillmore's 50 upcoming fall concerts. Ironically, you can't take BART directly to this historic San Francisco music venue. Still, it's a really neat design.
Here's the real BART System Map for comparison:
Speaking of Fillmore and its posters, if a show sells out ahead of time, they'll hand you a cool, artist-created poster for free on the way out as a gift. These posters are uniquely sized, usually at 13" X 19", and stores carry special frames to display them. My first one was from 1995 for the Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazelwood show. It was my first introduction to the work of mosaic pop artist, Jason Mecier, who created the original art in pasta and beans.
images via The Fillmore and BART Read the rest
PixelDanc3r (also on Instagram) made this adorable and intricate map of the USA in a pixel-art style similar to the overworld maps from 16-bit era games.
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In 1997, William Moldt, then 40, called his girlfriend from a Palm Beach County, Florida bar to tell her he was on his way home. He didn't show up and was never heard from again.
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The Really Rude Map is a Glitch app that renders customizable maps of the world featuring only the rudest place names. Zoom in to reveal more geographical grotesquery!
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Trump wants to buy Greenland, because of course he does. Reading the coverage, it struck me that media generally prefer to use the Mercator projection when showing the island. This is because we think it's funny to depict Greenland as a vast place as large as North America itself.
Though all 2D projections of our very 3D planet are distorted, this particular projection was designed for navigating equatorial seas and is ludicrously obsolete and inappropriate for depicting arctic regions. Instead, here's a general perspective projection--the globe as if viewed from space--that shows Greenland's true size, relatively undistorted compared to neighboring regions.
Still a big place—just not as big as the BBC's misleading map would have it. (Which is crudely inaccurate, too, with that distance marker) Read the rest
Bernie Sanders has raised more money than anyone else standing for the Democratic nomination; more importantly, he's raised that money from more people than anyone else in the race, and even more importantly, he's raised that money from more people in swing states that the Democrats will have to flip or hold in order to take the presidency in 2020.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, the National Parks Service commissioned Heinrich Berann to produce gorgeous, panoramic paintings of America's beautiful national parks as part of an advertising campaign; this week the NPS published high-resolution scans of these images for free downloading.
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From The Pudding: a zoomable people map that shows the name of the person with the most Wikipedia traffic for any given city. I looked at Golden, CO (where I lived as a kid) and learned that actor Greg Germann is the Wikipedia champ of that little town. Read the rest
Data scientist Tim Hopper noticed that Google Maps displayed a humungous word in the outback of Magwi County, South Sudan: "DEMO".
After the discovery made it to the BBC, the DEMO sadly disappeared: a ghostly landscape feature lurking somewhere between Borges and Baudrillard on the slopes of misfortune.
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The National Library of Scotland released an online viewer that combines historical maps with the latest elevation data. The results are a remarkably beautiful wedding of old and new.
Here's a 1940s map of Loch Tay, in 3D.
The 3D map viewer includes our standard interaction options, including a zoom slider, a scalebar, mouseposition location, as well as the ability to choose georeferenced overlays and background layers. Our standard map location options, such as geolocation, the ability to locate the map with placenames and drop-down lists of counties and parishes are all included.
The 3D map viewer uses open-source technology, which has been shared on Github and described with notes in the GeoCart Historical Maps Online Workshop.
[nls.uk via John Overholt] Read the rest
