Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has decided to get in on the whole unilateral name-changing thing.
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’.
Morphing maps of the U.S. and Australia into one hot mess is more of a Star Trek transporter accident than a map projection, if we’re being nitpicky; what’s surprising is that the result is almost viable. Almost.
In the latest iteration of xkcd’s series of bad map projections, Randall puts Kansas—the putative centre of the contiguous 48 states—at the edge of the map.
More proof that Randall hates us and wants to hurt our eyes comes from last Wednesday’s xkcd, which does what I’m pretty sure no cartogram has ever done: size by alphabetical order.
There’s no shortage of books about phantom islands—islands on the map that later turn out never to have existed—but now the Map Men have done a video about them, using as a narrative hook the case of Sandy Island, and how it managed to stay on maps into the Google Maps era.
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.)
This Mastodon post makes a bad map of this week’s eclipse into the funniest map of this week’s eclipse.
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.
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.)
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.
Well, that’s one way to visualize the rate of continental drift.
This xkcd cartoon requires deep Nickelodeon knowledge to understand.
The xkcd from last Friday, “Island Storage,” is the most recent map-related way that Randall Munroe has hurt us in the eyes.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a take on what GPS does to our ability to navigate.
Sometimes a terrible old movie is only watchable when you add an audio track in which it’s being brutally and relentlessly mocked: this was the MO of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and RiffTrax, the latter featuring plenty of MST3K alumni. Such is the case with this 1949 educational film, late 1949, “What Is a Map,” which takes an awfully long time to (a) well, do much of anything and (b) get to the subject of maps, so RiffTrax’s version makes it a bit easier to stomach. A bit.