Strange Maps | Big Think

552 - When Macbeth Met Hamlet: a Scandinavian Scotland?

Frank Jacobs — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:50:50 -0500

To be or not to be Scandinavian, that might be the question soon enough for Scotland, if it decides to become independent. For the time being, Scotland is still a part of the United Kingdom, as it has been since the Acts of Union in 1707. But with the Scottish National Party firmly ensconced in ...

Read More

551 - Desperately Seeking Dalston: A Field Study

Frank Jacobs — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:18:18 -0500

Where is this? The question is simple enough, and in a non-metropolitan environment, the answer may be correspondingly unambiguous. But in large cities, where the flow of human traffic is fast and vast, place names are fluid. They change over time, and expand or contract according to the ebb and ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More

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 ...

Read More