Strange Maps | Big Think

550 - The City and the Kitty, and Other Urban Analogies

Frank Jacobs — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:13:46 -0500

Surprise meeting with an old acquaintance in the Whitechapel Gallery - Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman (discussed in #241). “It’s the work that draws the most people, and gets the most laughs”, said the attendant. No wonder. Perry’s Map is a masterful blend of vaguely Tolkienish fantasy ...

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549 - Missouri Pukes and Illinois Suckers: a 'Pignominious' Map of the States

Frank Jacobs — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:50:53 -0500

Last April, this blog discussed a map, dating from 1875, that showed the lower 48 states of the US in the shape of a hog: [T]his must be the world’s finest - and possibly only - example of sustained porcineography. (see #511). How wrong, how fortunately, gloriously wrong! Here is another fine ...

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548 - Wishful Mapping: a Half-baked Alaska, and the Passage That Wasn't There

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:59:04 -0500

What a strange concoction this late-18th-century French map is. Centred on the northwestern part of America, it is an eclectic mix of geographic fact and fiction. Some continental contours are instantly recognisable, for instance the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia’s Far East, and Canada’s Baffin and ...

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547 - Too Soon? The Whisky Flavour Map

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:16:31 -0500

Happy 2012! By now, you’re probably still in the earnest stage of your New Year’s resolutions. If one of those is about your determination to cut back on drink, this might not be the best thing to read right now. Maybe you should bookmark this post for that moment when you again feel like ...

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546 - The Underwritten States of America

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:24:25 -0500

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. But eating that apple is not enough. Where you eat it matters almost as much. At least it did in the mid-19th century, as demonstrated by these two maps. They show the territory of the United States divided, for the purpose of medical insurance underwriting ...

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545 - The Mapa Cor-de-rosa: A Portuguese Empire That Never Was

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 19:10:50 -0500

Philip K. Dick never found the source of the mysterious messages he received during his ‘mystic episode’ in early 1974. The science fiction writer had a few theories, though: Soviet scientists experimenting with psychotronics, the Rosicrucians [1], an alien satellite, even an entity called the ...

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544 - Alphabet Maps of Great Britain and Ireland

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 20:12:13 -0500

If you’re in the north of England and you’re in a town ending in -by, you’re in former Danish-ruled territory [1]. If the toponym starts with beau- or bel-, it was probably named by Normans [2]. And if it contains the prefix Avon- or the suffix -combe, it is one of many place names of Celtic origin ...

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543 - Double-Dip Cartography

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 20:34:00 -0500

The second dip of the worldwide recession is a bit like that scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where two guards stupidly stare at a horseless knight approaching in the distance. The camera cuts countless times between the knight, who doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, and the witless duo ...

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542 - Untamed Wilds to Whiskers End: Travels in Beardland

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:21:30 -0500

How is your 'tache hanging? As Movember [1] is drawing to a close, this might be a good time to examine the tenuous, yet undeniable and intriguing overlap between cartography and facial hair. Exhibit A: take a look at any picture of any great cartographer. What do you see? Beards and moustaches ...

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541 - Ten Map Shorts

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 20:47:30 -0500

Finding maps that are sufficiently strange and beautiful is only half the joy of making this blog; the other is writing up the story to go along with them. But sometimes, fascinating maps are resistant to exegesis - maybe because all they need to explain is right there, in the image itself. Or maybe ...

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