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. Read the rest

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.

USA PIXELART MAP!!Thank you very much to @neomammalian for the support and give me this opportunity!! 😃

FULL HD MAP 👉https://t.co/7HQZmtYkYj 👈#pixelart #pixelanimation #pixelworld #usa #unitedstates #country #art #map #cartography pic.twitter.com/EZRWfpUcVq

— Danc3r (@PixelDanc3r) March 8, 2019

Read the rest

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. Read the rest

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!

Read the rest

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. Read the rest

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. Read the rest

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".

🤔 https://t.co/TOJvHsxdD9 pic.twitter.com/UtHG6Jpgxz

— Tim Hopper 🗑🦝 (@tdhopper) May 28, 2019

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.

Read the rest

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

Yahoo News' Adriana Belmonte reports on the fastest-growing jobs in America.

Construction and extraction jobs are in high demand in the U.S., along with installation, maintenance, and repair services. Production jobs are also quickly developing, as are mathematical and technology-focused occupations.

Read the rest

The David Rumsey Map Collection shares an amazing collection of photographs and the history of this 42 by 38 foot WPA built wooden map of San Francisco. Visit their site for high quality images.

I will be lost in these images for hours.

Full collection here.

For the first time since 1942, the entire immense 42 by 38 foot WPA built San Francisco Model can be seen assembled virtually. Digitally knitting together all 158 separate pieces with over 6,000 blocks gives the viewer a sense of the extraordinary accomplishment the model represents. Recently recovered after decades of dusty storage, the model has been cleaned and photographed by a dedicated team of individuals as part of the SFMOMA and San Francisco Public Library project called Public Knowledge: Take Part. The model pieces were expertly photographed by Beth LaBerge. David Rumsey created the large Composite image below of the 158 pieces, as well as the image and metadata database of all the images, which he hosts. Rumsey also georeferenced the large Composite image and placed it in Google Earth.

Some details of the model's history: it is a 42 by 38 foot wooden replica of the city of San Francisco as it was in 1940 in 158 pieces at a scale of 1 inch to 100 feet. The pieces contain about 6,000 removable city blocks. The model was built by The Works Progress Administration in the late 1930's, under the New Deal. It was first displayed in sections in the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1939.

Read the rest

EotBeholder on Deviantart nails decades of derivative genre fiction and gameplay with "the only fantasy world map you'll ever need."

Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. ... To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns... I mean it hardly qualifies as "original", so as long as you're comfortable stealing from someone who steals from the people who only steal from the best, knock yourselves out :)

If I could make some additions (which I suppose I could, but, nah) I'd call out the Boring/Doomed Pastoral Village somewhere in the Tiny Bickering Fiefdoms or the Land of Poncy Knights, and also add a Giant Wall to Keep the Monsters Out. Giant walls are so hot right now.

I love the comments and tweets from fans of specific franchises (such as Forgotten Realms or Riftwar) who think it is specifically a parody of their favorite fantasy world. See TVTropes' entry for the fantasy world map and, specifically, the left-justified fantasy maps.

The map of Allansia from the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series is a nice professionally-drawn example.

Previously. Read the rest

My new favorite subreddit is Accidental Maps, specializing in a pareidolia of places.

Read the rest

New York City was vandalized in OpenStreetMap, and as a result renamed as "Jewtropolis" in Snapchat and other applications that ultimately depend on the service for mapping.

The company called it an act of "vandalism" and said it was working with its partner Mapbox to "get this fixed immediately".

In a statement, Snap said the defacement was "deeply offensive".

Screenshots on social media appeared to show other apps had also been affected.

The problem with outsourcing content to third parties is that it pins your reputation to their reliability and trustworthiness. And here there appears to be a chain: Snapchat (etc) pulling data from Mapbox pulling data from OpenStreetMap pulling data from antisemitic users.

I'd been waiting for a major wikipedia page to "fall" to an organized clique on the far right without being successfully reverted to the prior editorial consensus. This incident tastes like an apéritif. Read the rest

The Ancient Earth Globe is an interactive 3D globe that depics the Earth at various points in geological history from 750m years ago until now. Here it is 300m years ago.

Late Carboniferous. Plants developed root systems that allowed them to grow larger and move inland. Environments evolved below tree canopies. Atmospheric oxygen increased as plants spread on land. Early reptiles have evolved, and giant insects diversify.

And here it is 0 million years ago, right before the Post-anthropocene Extinction Event.

Amazing! Look how green it all was. Read the rest