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

The East Cut is a neighborhood in San Francisco invented by a branding agency. Such things usually wither on the local-business bullshit vine, but thanks to Google Maps, it's now the plain reality of that part of town.

Another in Detroit is now known by a mispelling, made by the mysterious cartographers who run the service. And one LA community now there was cooked up by a realtor to make a hilly part of Silver Lake sound fancy, and somehow ended up enshrined on the service after he began using it in listings.

Timothy Boscarino, a Detroit city planner, traced Google’s use of those names to a map posted online around 2002 by a few locals. Google almost identically copied that map’s neighborhoods and boundaries, he said — down to its typos. One result was that Google transposed the k and h for the district known as Fiskhorn, making it Fishkorn.

I imagine Google's paid a lot of money to sources it appropriated in its rush to get everything online before anyone else; mapmakers who do this are caught due to Trap Streets, though the traps can be much less obvious than an imaginary street. And sometimes all a reporter need do to expose a falsehood is put two quotes next to each other:

Mr. Robinson said his team asked Google to add the East Cut to its maps. A Google spokeswoman said employees manually inserted the name after verifying it through public sources.

It's funny, but Google describing a "brand experience design company" hired by a local nonprofit as a "public source" is a clever way of making people assume it refers to "public record" or "government" without actually saying so. Read the rest

Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the world's largest model train set. It's so large—including airports, cityscapes and even seas—that to even call it a train set seems a good example of the German sense of humor. It covers 1,500 square meters, has 260,000 figurines in it , 9,250 cars, 1,040 trains, 42 planes, 385,000 LEDs, and cost 21 million Euros to construct. Read the rest

Jason Davies created a voronoi diagram of the world's airports projected onto an interactive 3D globe. Easter Island's airport claims the largest partition.

Most Remote Airport

Mataveri Airport at 27°S, 109°W is the most remote; 2,602km from the nearest airport, Totegegie Airport.

You've likely seen maps of the earth with land and sea inverted, where Asia becomes the world's greatest ocean and the Pacific a vast, sprawling continent. But high school geography teacher John M Adams took it a step further and explained what it would be like to live in this parallel world. The Marianas Mountains make the Himalayas look like a traipse up Scafell Pike...

Whereas Earth’s land averages 840 meters above sea level, New Earth averages a breathtaking 3,700 meters altitude. The highest point is Mt. Challenger in the Marianas Mountain Range (10,994 meters). Many Marianas peaks are unscalable due to the lack of oxygen ...

[via Simon Kuestenmacher] Read the rest

jamaps created a map that shows all the main roads in Britain and nothing else, giving the vague impression of something weirdly biological.

Data: Ordnance Survey (2014) Tools: QGIS

The Washington Post created some interesting maps that show levels of diversification in various American cities. They categorize cities like Chicago as examples of legacy segregation, where cities like Houston indicate rapid diversification. Read the rest

What's the longest straight-line route over land or water, uninterrupted by a shoreline? It's a question that gets complicated as soon as you recall that map projections are lies: no matter how straight you think you're going, you're always walking in circles. Computer scientists have answers.

The longest straight-line path over water begins in Sonmiani, Balochistan, Pakistan, passes between Africa and Madagascar and then between Antarctica and Tierra del Fuego in South America, and ends in the Karaginsky District, Kamchatka Krai, in Russia. It is 32,089.7 kilometers long.

Read the rest

The Guardian posted a fun gallery/quiz today: can you identify which cities these cold war spy maps represent? It's always fun to see London in Cyrillic. Read the rest

With majority support in 44 states, and more in favor than opposed in 4 others, same-sex marriage is a done deal for most Americans. Besides, it's legal nationwide after a Supreme Court ruling in 2015. But Americans in two states are holding out when it comes to moral approval: Missisippi, where more are opposed to same-sex marriage than in favor of it, and in Alabama, the last state where an outright majority oppose it.

Support rose above 50% for the first time in 2011 and has not gone below that mark since then. Support rose to 60% for the first time in 2015 and has not gone below that mark since then. Support continues to rise while opposition continues to fall each year, driven in large part by a significant generational gap.

From 1988 to 2009, support for same-sex marriage increased between 1% to 1.5% per year, but thereafter support began to rise at an accelerated pace.

As of 2016, 83% of Americans aged 18 to 29 support same-sex marriage.

As of 2018, for the first time in Pew's research, more Americans over 65 favor same-sex marriage than oppose it. To find a broad national demographic opposed, you have to filter your way down to categories like "Republican Boomers" or "Weekly Church Attendees." Read the rest

Outside the big cities, England and Wales is aging. From Plumplot:

In 2002, 40% of the population was over 44 years old. Fourteen years later it was 43.5%. The share almost equaled to the population below 35, which was 43.7%. Life expectancy also increased. For people aged 65 years or older, the expectancy increased by more than two years. Their share increased by 2.1% between 2002 and 2016. There were 7.1k centenarians in 2002 and 13.7k in 2016.

I was curious about the white-hot sliver of youth in the wilds of Wiltshire. There are military bases around those parts, but couldn't immediately confirm that's the reason why. Read the rest

Páraic McGloughlin's Arena is "brief look at the eart from above" mesmerizes us with the shapes we made upon it, culled from satellite imagery then ordered frame-by-frame to give the uncanny appearance of a single plot of land rapidly changing.

Check out Páraic's Instagram for more work from the Sligo-based artist.

Pearse McGloughlin and I collaborated on the audio resulting in something between music and a soundtrack.

Audio mastered by TJ LippleHear

more of Pearse's music here : open.spotify.com/track/0mvfR4zmmxDTvlYyWmmJvG?si=KIHR2daoe

sweetnocturnes.com

Arena soundtrack available here: store.cdbaby.com/cd/pearsemcgloughlin3

open.spotify.com/album/2RNXEQZlBaBgeVmyLESIgb

Amber Willams at Directors Notes took the time to make an interview with me about the making of "Arena" and my work in general , you can check it out here: directorsnotes.com/2018/04/04/paraic-mcgloughlin-arena/

Thanks a million Amber.

Here's another short movie from Páraic, titled Chase, compiled using the same technique but at ground level.

Read the rest

This Google Earth image of Antarctica's South Georgia Island depicts either a UFO that crashed and skidded across the snow or a hunk of ice that rolled along after an avalanche. According to this YouTube video from Secureteam, with 2.5 million views, it's definitely the former. Keele University physical geographer lecturer Richard Waller suggests it's the latter. Below, a zoomed-out view of the area. (Space.com)

Previously: Another UFO found in Google Earth image of Antarctica

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In much of the world, addresses are difficult to convey because they refer to locations on unnamed streets, in unnumbered buildings, in unincorporated townships, sometimes in disputed national boundaries (I have often corresponded with people in rural Costa Rica whose addresses were "So-and-so, Road Without Name, 300m west of the bus stop, village, nearest town, region"). Read the rest

Earth Wind Map shows the winds blasting over a beautiful, rotatable 3D animated globe. Various modes (click the text on the bottom left) show air, oceanic, particulate and even auroral maps. Read the rest

Crying in Public is described as an "emotional map of New York City, made out of the important things that happen to us outside." To use it, you drag a one of 15 different emojis (crying, dancing, sex, drugs, vomit, etc) onto a map of New York City and briefly describe the incident. The creator of the site, kraykray, is going to add more cities.

Read the rest

The United States is a bit more corrupt than tight-arsed northern European and richer Commonwealth nations, but isn't particularly corrupt all considered. Trump's slackin'! Movers and shakers: Britain itself cleaned up its act after years of politicans dipping into the public kitty, but Australia's slipping--reportedly a crisis of perception more than actual corruption, but alarming all the same.

Since 2012, several countries significantly improved their index score, including Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and the United Kingdom, while several countries declined, including Syria, Yemen and Australia.

Here's the least corrupt/

1. New Zealand 2. Denmark 3. Finland, Norway, Switzerland 6. Singapore, Sweden 8. Canada, Luxembourg, Netherlands, United Kingdom

16. United States

And the most corrupt.

180. Somalia 179. South Sudan 178. Syria 177. Afghanistan 175. Yemen, Sudan 171. Lybia, North Korea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea

Here's an embed that may or may not work:

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