Blue Sky GIS: Maps in comics

Monty pair

2013-05-22T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a pair of comics from Jim Meddick's Monty that are loosely related to each other via a "navigation" theme:

Aerial navigation. It has been windy here lately and my son recently got a stunt kite.

Tracking is kinda like navigation, right?

Chart with Heart

2013-05-21T00:47:00.000-07:00

Peter Steiner gives us this selection of charts from the early '90s in the New Yorker magazine.

Accentuated

2013-05-20T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here's an article about some guys who made a map of accents in the US. And here's their interactive and overflowing-with-information site... and their map:

Hard bargain

2013-05-19T00:47:00.000-07:00

And that's how we got most of the United States of America.

From above

2013-05-18T00:47:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back there was a post from a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner that included a from-underneath shot of Antarctica. This time he used a from-above view of the north pole (panels 9 & 10). Still ends in disaster. Here's a link to a larger version of it.

You are horse

2013-05-17T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here is a debut of The Dark Side of the Horse by Samson doing a You are here gag, an example of which i haven't posting for a while:

College tour

2013-05-16T00:47:00.000-07:00

Dan Wasserman's commentary on student debt and for-profit colleges (although the non-profit colleges aren't much better debt-wise, are they?)

Chocolate map

2013-05-15T00:47:00.000-07:00

Another example of a map-related cartoon from The New Yorker by Roz Chast:

Map of all music

2013-05-14T00:47:00.000-07:00

This is the link to Every Noise at Once, an interactive map of all genres of music.

Click on a genre to hear an example. Click the ">>" on any genre to see artists in that genre... and then click on any artist to hear an example of their work: Click "Scan" to let it play random samplings of everything on the page. I wonder how long it will take before this gets monetized by iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Songza, etc.?

It worked for me in Chrome, but not in Firefox.

Pair of Uncle Sams

2013-05-13T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a pair of Uncle Sam themed maps in comics from Amanda. The first is from Aislin (alias Terry Mosher) from about 2002. The second is from John Collins from about 1953.

For now?

2013-05-12T00:47:00.000-07:00

A contemplative moment from Questionable Content by J. Jacques ...with some unfulfillable foreshadowing? In an only slightly related manner, here's a link to an article discussing whether technologically-imbued "superpowers" would make humans more or less altruistic (there's a video).

Super Mario Bros tube map

2013-05-11T00:47:00.000-07:00

Somebody named Chris Evans made this Super Mario Bros map in the style of the London Underground tube map. It's like these others:

Very, very large dog

2013-05-10T00:47:00.000-07:00

How about we actually do a map in a comic in this Maps in Comics themed blog: That second panel in this "Birchard, The Very, Very Large Dog" spoof comic from Ruben Bolling's "Tom the Dancing Bug" has that globe with those Americas-looking land masses.

Mess with Google

2013-05-09T00:47:00.000-07:00

There has never been a shortage of people ready and willing to mess with Google's StreetView cars:

Which isn't to say that Google Maps also doesn't have plenty of quirks. For those of you who may not understand why this cemetery in Wisconsin might be funny, in modern parlance YOLO = You Only Live Once:

2 Berlins

2013-05-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

One artifact of the division between East & West Berlin can be seen from space in the lighting of the different halves of the city:

Even more stark, of course, is the divide between North and South Korea:

But none of this should be a surprise because there are artifacts of human divisions from hundreds of years ago that still express themselves in various ways today. Take this map of Poland that shows the electoral map of Poland in 2007 and the borders of the late 1800s - early 1900s German empire:

Or this map that shows areas of intense cotton production in 1860 and counties voting for Obama in 2008:

And there's more, always more, of this kind of thing.

Ingrid Dabringer's maps

2013-05-07T00:47:00.000-07:00

This is the artwork of Ingrid Dabringer. She has made a series of pictures by anthropomorphizing maps. Here are just a few. There's more on her site and here:

Emperor Pierre Bourque

2013-05-06T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here's another submission from Amanda: Mayor of Montreal Pierre Bourque depicted by cartoonist Garnotte (aka Michel Garneau) as emperor Napoleon:

Harry Potter's iPhone

2013-05-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here we have a Photoshopped conceptualization of Harry Potter's iPhone, complete with the Marauder's Map app:

Earthist

2013-05-04T00:47:00.000-07:00

Robert Mankoff cartoon in the New Yorker magazine.

Bizarre

2013-05-03T00:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner.The from-underneath shot of Antarctica is novel. This could be a HHGTTG reference.

Staple City

2013-05-02T00:47:00.000-07:00

100,000 staples arranged over 40 hours by Peter Root

The Making of Ephemicropolis from Peter Root on Vimeo

Tidal wave of love

2013-05-01T00:47:00.000-07:00

This is from Safely Endangered by Chris...[lastname?].

Stratographic two-fer

2013-04-30T00:47:00.000-07:00

Here's a pair with a comic and humorous images on the theme of geology and plate tectonics. First xkcd by Randall Munroe:

The "title-text" at the actual webcomic says:

All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.

Next we have plate tectonics as illustrated by an Oreo cookie:

Montreal bull

2013-04-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty sure these are connected and relate to political issues surrounding attempts to get Montreal to operate with more unity, right? Our friend Amanda contributed these and possibly could explain. I'm liking the anthromorphification of Montreal as a bull... or would that be faunamorphifocation?:

Google Earth resolution

2013-04-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

xkcd by Randall Munroe. The "title-text" at the actual webcomic has an additional GPS-related joke in it:

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying the 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'.

I think the flaw here is that humans can't actually look at the Earth at Plank Length resolution. We are actually at least a dozen orders of magnitude away from being able to detect things that small in any way as this wonderful interactive tool shows. So we're probably much closer tot hat intersection than this graph indicates. Professionally I've already worked with 2-inch resolution imagery and that was at least 5 years ago.