• An unremarkable stone circle in Mudchute Park is said to have a wild and dark history.
• Legend has it that this is where John Dee used magic to conjure up the British Empire.
• As incredible as that sounds, local geography provides some circumstantial evidence.

The mysterious stone circle informally known as the Mudchute Omphalos, with the gleaming towers of the Docklands financial district in the background. Credit: Stephen Saleh, reproduced with kind permission.

The British Empire was not founded; it was conjured up by John Dee, Queen Elizabeth the First's court magician. There are two versions to the tale: either Dee summoned a demon, or he sacrificed Christopher Marlowe, the famous playwright, in a blood ritual.

Obviously, the tale is apocryphal. There is no evidence except the very circumstantial. If the Marlowe version is to be believed, the dark magic ritual must have been performed at the end of May 1593. That is when official history says the playwright met a violent end in a tavern brawl in Deptford, just south of the Thames in the east of London.

That gives us a date. And we also have a place. Stubborn rumor has it that the conjuring was done on the Isle of Dogs, just north of the Thames in the east of London. The exact spot is allegedly marked by a mysterious stone circle, tucked away near an elder grove in the northwest corner of Mudchute Park.

I visited the spot years ago, but going by recent pictures, the location is as unremarkable now as it was then. There is neither a signpost pointing to the circle nor any explanation as to why it is there. It's just there. Only when you start researching some of the more esoteric aspects of local geography and folklore do the pieces fall into place.

Literally. The stone circle sits on a line that connects a great number of locations with special significance. According to some, that makes it the omphalos, Greek for "navel," of the British Empire. And that "ley line" – the term for a straight line between prominent landmarks infused with an 'energy' of some sort – intersects rather curiously with another one, which links to two major buildings by Sir Christopher Wren.

Does all this add up to proof of John Dee's ritual? It is a pertinent question, but it gets in the way of a more interesting one: is this a good story? For local writer Stephen Saleh, the answer to the latter is a definite yes.

Front cover of Dark Lines of London, a comic based on the omphalos tale.Credit: Dark Lines of London.

Intrigued by the omphalos rumor, Saleh managed to fit together a whole bunch of puzzle pieces, then neatly sidestepped the first question by using his findings as the basis for a work of fiction. In 2019, he published (with Tony Lee and Mariela Malova) Dark Lines of London, a comic book that turns the omphalos mystery into a time-travelling adventure story that scans like an action-packed Hollywood blockbuster. (Saleh is indeed reworking his story for the screen).

The following is an interview that I conducted with Saleh. It has been lightly edited for clarity, style, and grammar.

Stephen, I found out about the omphalos via an oblique reference in, I think, Fortean Times. How did you find it?

About ten years ago, I stumbled across a story about it on the front page of a local newspaper. I have not seen the article since — if anybody has, let me know — but my interest was piqued. Gradually, I found out more about John Dee, about the omphalos, and about others interested in the same thing.

John Dee is the key figure. What is his significance?

John Dee was Queen Elizabeth's chief scientist and magician — there was not that much difference between the two roles yet. He was the first to translate Euclid's works on geometry into English. But he also had an actual crystal ball. You can go see it at the British Museum.

Because he stood on the border between science and magic, Dee was a peculiar and important figure. It was rumored that he had a hand in creating the sudden, violent storm that wrecked the Spanish Armada. Shakespeare, a contemporary, supposedly modelled Prospero from The Tempest on Dee.

Around Dee's time, there was a secret society called the "School of Night," which met to discuss science. Known members included Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, and Christopher Marlowe. Dee's name is not mentioned, but I would be very surprised if he was not a member. That society plays a crucial role in our book.

Both in the story and in real life, Dee was an advocate for Britain's expansion into the New World. He said it was the Queen's "birthright." He also was the first to coin the term "British Empire." Perhaps he took it upon himself to create the psychic conditions for the creation of that empire, establishing the omphalos as its magic center.

The location of the omphalos on the Isle of Dogs.Credit: Google Maps

And as your research shows, the omphalos is not an isolated point.

There is no official explanation as to who built the circle or why. What is clear, though, is that it is on a ley line that connects a number of significant sites in east London, from Queen Mary's College at Mile End in the north to All Saints Church at Blackheath in the south.

And if you extend it thousands of miles further north, it passes through the area, now in Canada, where the British were looking for the Northwest Passage. At that time, finding that fabled waterway to Asia was more important to them than actual colonization.

What are those sites, and how are they significant?

To the north, the line passes through St Anne's Limehouse, one of six churches designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor — and, in fact, right through a mysterious pyramid standing just outside the church building. Its purpose is unknown. It is not a tomb. And it has "Wisdom of Solomon" carved into it.

To the south, the line passes exactly between both wings of the Old Royal Naval College, right on the south bank of the river in Greenwich. It is on the spot where once stood Placentia Palace, the birthplace of Elizabeth I. A bit further south, it passes through the Queen's House.

The line crosses the Prime Meridian right next to Greenwich Observatory, where that meridian was established. It touches the statue of General Wolfe, who defeated the French at Québec and won Canada for the British.

Also quite remarkable: there were two working nuclear reactors on the line, a few miles apart, on either side of the omphalos. One for research at Queen Mary's College, which was moved to Stratford in the 1980s — until it had to move from there as well, to make way for the Olympic Park for the 2012 Games.

The other one was at the Old Royal Naval College for training nuclear submarine crews. That one was decommissioned in the mid-1990s. The locals never even knew there was a nuclear reactor beneath their feet. Ironically, that was about the time the local left-wing council had declared Greenwich a nuclear-free zone.

Center: John Dee's Monas Hieroglyphica. Left: that symbol on the ley line. Right: woman-with-fish statue in the middle of the circle. Credit: Dark Lines of London.

But how does all of that tie into John Dee?

The title of Dee's key work Monas Hieroglyphica is also the name for a symbol he devised. That symbol can be seen along the ley line.

Also key to Dee's thinking is the vesica piscis, a symbol from Euclidean mathematics, not unlike the early Christian ichthys sign that stands for both fish and woman. Now, exactly in the circle formed by the Monas Hieroglypica stands a statue of a woman holding a fish. The woman looks straight down the ley line; the fish is looking due south, right at another Hawksmoor church across the river [St. Alphege's in Greenwich].

The terrain at Mudchute Park is much higher than it was in Dee's time. So the omphalos is much more recent than Dee's time.

Back then, that part of the Isle of Dogs was swampland — an excellent place to do magic! As the park's name suggests, the land here was levelled up with mud dug up a bit further north to create London's docklands. So the stone circle is actually several meters above the location where Dee supposedly performed his magic ritual.

Which must mean that...

...some people remembered what had happened here and cared enough about it to commemorate the spot. Perhaps the secret society that created the omphalos is still around to guard it. In fact, as you follow the ley line from the omphalos south to the river, you notice that almost the entire stretch is undeveloped: parks, gardens, football pitches.

Did you find any other evidence on the ley line that would indicate recent updates to the line?

Docklands has been completely transformed into a financial district. The biggest building is topped by a pyramid. The southwest corner of that pyramid touches the ley line. The name of that building? Perhaps a coincidence, but it is One Canada Square. Could this be an indication that the actual British Empire has by now been replaced by a financial one?

And on a somewhat smaller scale: near Island Gardens, just before the line reaches the Thames, a road was marked by two triangles on either side, exactly where the line crossed — they have only recently been removed.

All Saints Church on Blackheath Common, the southern terminus of the leyline, seats exactly… 666.Credit: Dark Lines of London.

What is the significance of the second line, coming in from the west?

Sir Christopher Wren fits the profile of someone who may also have been involved in a secret society like the School of Night. That is why I drew a line between his two most important buildings, St. Paul's Cathedral and the Monument [a memorial for the Great Fire of 1666]: a dome and a pillar, representing the female and the male principle — as you also find in other world cities, like Rome or Washington DC [which has the Capitol Building and Washington Monument]. Well, if you continue that line further east, it intersects with the omphalos line exactly at the statue of the woman and the fish!

You have unearthed a network of remarkable connections. But what do they mean?

For the uninitiated like us, it is hard to know. And purposely so. Not coincidentally, the very last line of the Monas Hieroglyphica reads: "Here the vulgar eye will see nothing but Obscurity and will despair considerably."

Will we ever find out?

After we published Dark Lines of London in 2019, a public information sign was put up on Blackheath Common near All Saints Church — by the way, a late-19th century map clearly indicates the church has 666 seats, a curious number for a Christian congregation. The text acknowledges that the church is built on a Grand Axis. To my knowledge, that is the first public acknowledgment of the ley line. I like to think that maybe someone is responding to the publication of our book.

All images from Dark Lines of London reproduced with kind permission. Check out their page here.

Strange Maps #1106

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• In 1900, a local historian discovered a curiously engraved stone slab in a Bronze Age grave.
• It took researchers almost a century to realize that it might be a map — but by then, the stone had gone missing.
• Rediscovered in 2014 and analyzed until earlier this year, the slab is Europe's oldest map linked to a territory.

Thousands of prehistoric monuments dot the landscape of Brittany, including this megalithic tomb in Carnac. A locally discovered Bronze Age map may be the oldest of its kind in Europe.Credit: Damien Meyer via AFP / Getty Images

It's about 4,000 years ago, and you are the ruler of a prosperous little Bronze Age kingdom at the end of the world. To celebrate your success, you commission a map of your bountiful domain: a stone slab 2.2 m by 1.53 m (6.5 ft by 5 ft), representing an area of 30 km by 21 km (19 mi by 13 mi). But all good things come to an end. You, or one of your successors, is buried with the slab — broken to indicate the overthrow of your dynasty.

You have the last laugh, though. Your name and that of your little empire have been forgotten, but that slab is now recognized as Europe's oldest map that can be matched to a territory — even if it took the supposedly clever scientists of the distant future more than a century to figure that out.

In a nutshell, that is the story of the Saint-Bélec slab. In 1900, local archaeologist Paul du Châtellier retrieved it from a prehistoric burial mound in Finistère, the French department on the western edge of Brittany. (Its name means "end of the world.")

Waiting for a Champollion

After unceremoniously gluing the pieces of the broken stone back together with concrete, Du Châtellier faithfully reproduced the markings on its surface for a report, in which he noted: "Some see a human form, others an animal one. Let's not let our imagination get the better of us and let us wait for a Champollion [the Egyptologist who in 1822 deciphered the hieroglyphics, Ed.] to tell us what it says."

Drawing of the Saint-Bélec slab by Paul du Châtellier (1901).Credit: Bibliothèque Nationale de France / Public domain

Du Châtellier had the stone, weighing more than a ton, moved to his ancestral home, Château de Kernuz, where he maintained a private museum. The slab was placed in a niche near the moat of the castle. After the amateur prehistorian's death in 1911, his artifacts were acquired by France's National Archeological Museum at Saint-Germain-en-Laye but remained on site.

The stone languished in obscurity for decades. In 1994, researchers revisiting Du Châtellier's original drawing found that the intricate markings on the stone looked a lot like a map. The stone itself, however, had gone missing. It was "rediscovered" in the castle cellar only in 2014.

From 2017 to earlier this year, researchers from INRAP (France's National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research) and other institutions carried out extensive research on the slab. Their conclusion was published in March 2021 in the Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française.

And it is spectacular: this is the earliest known example in Europe of a map for which we can identify the territory it depicts. The slab was engraved in the early Bronze Age (2150-1600 BC), which makes it contemporaneous with the Nebra Sky Disk, a map of the cosmos discovered in Germany (but not conclusively identified with any particular constellations).

A map with 80 percent accuracy

Another famous prehistoric map, from Bedolina in Valcamonica (northern Italy), is dated later, to the Iron Age. The landscape it depicts has not been identified; possibly it is a purely imagined one.

Close-up of the territory depicted on the Saint-Bélec map. In yellow: two possible locations for the royal enclosure; in red: Roman road (upgrade of an older pathway); black square: tomb burial; black circle: burial mound. Credit: IGN, Fily 2008, DRAC/SRA Bretagne, DAO, C. Nicolas via INRAP.

The Saint-Bélec slab is the first map of its kind and age that has been identified with a particular territory. The researchers found that the markings on the slab corresponded to the landscape of the Odet Valley, oriented east-north-east to west-south-west. Using geolocation technology, the researchers established that the territory represented on the slab bears an 80 percent accurate resemblance to an area around a 29-km (18-mi) stretch of the Odet river.

The map is centered on the present-day municipality of Roudouallec, in the neighboring department of Morbihan, but also includes the location of the burial mound in which it was found, more to the west in Leuhan, as well as the foothills of the Montagnes noires ("Black Mountains").

The surface of the slab had been worked to represent the terrain's undulations — also making it Europe's oldest 3D map. Lines correspond to river tributaries. Various other markings (circles, squares) are thought to represent parcelled fields, settlements, and/or burial mounds and perhaps the ancient road from Tronoën to Trégueux. A circular symbol near the source of the Odet (and those of two other rivers, the Isole and the Stêr Laër) may represent the local ruler's residence.

Rise and fall of Bronze Age kingdoms

Map of "royal" Bronze Age tombs in Brittany with theoretical boundaries between their domains. Slab location marks the area depicted by the Saint-Bélec map.Credit: IGN, Fily 2008, DRAC/SRA Bretagne, DAO, C. Nicolas via INRAP.

The early Bronze Age was the time when the first primitive states emerged in western Europe and along with them a network of commercial, cultural, and diplomatic exchanges. This was an interconnected world, and the sea that surrounds Brittany on three sides was a passageway, not a border. In local Breton graves of that time, objects have been found that originated in southern England and northern Spain.

The study speculates that the map might have been made as an expression of political power. But prestige need not have been the only reason. The map may also have served as a land register, to keep track of who did what where — and how much they owed in tax as a consequence.

Whichever purpose it served, the slab may have been in use for centuries, before it was placed in a grave and broken in situ — perhaps a deliberate act of iconoclasm, to indicate the end of the unnamed Bronze Age kingdom. Perhaps the broken map is even an echo of a wider societal change: the end of the Bronze Age kings altogether. After all, it would not be France without the occasional revolution.

The original article: La carte et le territoire : la dalle gravée du Bronze ancien de Saint-Bélec (Leuhan, Finistère) can be previewed and purchased from the Société Préhistorique Française.

For more background see this interview with researchers Yvan Pailler and Clément Nicolas at INRAP (in French).

Strange Maps #1105

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• September's here, and the leaves are starting to change color.
• Dependent on latitude and altitude, the process is fairly predictable.
• These maps show the progress of fall foliage from now until November.

Beautiful fall foliage in Synevyr National Park, Transcarpathia (Ukraine).Credit: Rbrechko via CC BY-SA 4.0

In the northern hemisphere, the longest day is more than two months gone. Since the summer solstice, each day is about two minutes shorter than the previous one — which makes our nights already two hours longer than the year's shortest night.

And those nights are getting chillier too: autumn is in the air. Or fall, if you prefer. The more formal term for the season has an obscure Latin origin; the more popular name refers to its main feature: the falling of the leaves. Right before the foliage abandons the trees to bare-branched winter, it draws extra attention to itself by exploding into a riot of colors; first on the trees, then on the ground.

That visual fiesta feels like a last hurrah against the waning of the year's vital forces. Yet those very colors are in fact proof of death (for the leaf, anyway). The leaves turn because the plant has decided to shut down chlorophyll production, after which it ejects the leaves. Their various color changes are sort of like death throes — early stages of decomposition.

Choice words from the prince of comedy

The leaves first start to turn in the Rockies, near the Canadian border, and in Appalachia. The areas expand rapidly.Credit: SmokyMountains.com

Nothing like a Greek playwright to twist that pointy knife with a few choice words. In Birds, Aristophanes links the fate of the falling leaves to our own: "Weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream (…)"

Pretty grim reading, especially from someone known as "The Prince of Ancient Comedy." But perhaps Aristophanes had a point. The popular pastime of leaf-peeping is a displacement of our own anxiety about death, further pacified by the certainty of spring ( a.k.a. the hope of resurrection).

Or perhaps foliage tourism is simply all about experiencing and enjoying pretty colors. Either way, the colors change in predictable patterns, both geographically and chromatically.

The steady march of color

As fall color territory expands, the colors deepen. The South puts up scant resistance. By October 18 this year, only the southern bits of Texas and Florida remain unaffected.Credit: SmokyMountains.com

Directionally, the changing leaves are like a wave that ripples from north to south. Topographically, it hits high altitudes like the Rockies and Appalachians before it does the lowlands. And in terms of scale, it shifts from light to dark: yellow, orange, then red. Light brown, dark brown, done.

Based on those parameters, you can predict with some accuracy which colors will predominate where and when. And that's exactly what the Fall Foliage Prediction Map does. The map is updated each year by David Angotti and Wes Melton, co-founders of SmokyMountains.com.

In weekly increments from the end of August to the beginning of November, it shows the steady march of color across the North American landscape — north to south, high to low, light to dark.

The map's scale refers to the typical discoloration process of leaves, but that does not mean the trees in any particular area are monochromatically yellow, red, or brown. Various tree species and even individual trees change color at differing speeds. The scale denotes that mixed picture on the ground. That is why the legend changes from "minimal" and "patchy" over "partial" and "near peak" to "peak" and "past peak."

Don't sue the mapmakers

The South has fallen, but the leaves have yet to turn completely, as they already have in most of the North.Credit: SmokyMountains.com; Ina Fassbender/AFP via Getty Images.

Of course, weather may influence the advance of the foliage frontlines this way or that. So do not bank on these predictions, the mapmakers say — or at least, do not sue them when the leaves on the trees at your holiday destination are the wrong shade: "While no tool can be 100% accurate, this tool is meant to help travelers better time their trips to have the best opportunity of catching peak color each year."

Leaf-peeping is a pastime not limited to the dip in the arboreal life cycle. In the spring, go to Japan for an opposite version. Cherry blossom viewing (or hanami) is such an integral part of Japanese culture that the national weather bureau forecasts the progress of the "cherry blossom front" (or sakurazensen), south to north through the Japanese archipelago. (See Strange Maps #371).

Check out the 2021 Fall Foliage Map on SmokyMountains.com.

Strange Maps #1104

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• This map shows when school starts across America — way too early according to specialists.
• Due to early school starts, America's students are "chronologically sleep-deprived."
• California is spearheading a change, which should result in improved academic results.

A student napping in a lecture hall. American adolescents are "chronically sleep-deprived and pathologically sleepy."Credit: Sean Gallup / Getty Images

Louisiana's state bird is the brown pelican. It should be the early bird. High school students in the Bayou State start school on average at 7:30 am. That is much earlier than anywhere else in the United States.

But it is doubtful those Louisiana students will catch the worm. Studies show that early school starts contribute to sleep debt in adolescents, which is detrimental to their health, both physical and mental.

No earlier than 8:30 am

That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended in 2014 that school for middle and high school students should start no earlier than 8:30 am. It is good advice that largely goes unheeded. The AAP found that fully 93 percent of American high school bells ring before that time. This map, compiled from data provided by the National Center for Education Statistics for the years 2017 and 2018, supports that finding.

In only three places — Washington DC, Alaska, and South Carolina — did a student's day start at or after the recommended earliest time of 8:30 (on average, aggregating the starting times from the various school districts). Here is an overview, enough to make all but the most hardcore morning-persons shudder:

• 7:30 am — Louisiana's sleepy-eyed students shuffle into class.
• 7:36-7:45 am — lessons start at public high schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Nevada, and New Hampshire.
• 7:46-7:55 am — it is not even 8:00 am yet, but high school students are already taking classes in Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
• 7:56-8:05 am — now it is the turn of high schoolers in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah, and Washington.
• 8:06-8:15 am — well past the hour, students file into class in Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, and Vermont.
• 8:16-8:25 am — Just two states start school this late: Iowa and Minnesota. But they are not the latest.
• 8:26-8:35 am — that is how late high school starts in Alaska and South Carolina. But wait…
• Only in Washington DC, Alaska, and South Carolina does the school day start at or after the recommended earliest time of 8:30 am.

Only in Washington DC, Alaska, and South Carolina does the school day start at or after the recommended earliest time of 8:30 am.Credit: u/1ew via Data is Beautiful

Overall, about 40 percent of American high schools start before 8 am and more than 20 percent start at 7:45 am or earlier. Only 15 percent start at or after the recommended earliest starting time of 8:30 am.

The school bus problem

Why do American high schools generally start so early? One large part of the answer: school buses. A lot of school districts re-use the same buses to pick up students from different schools: first the high schoolers, then the middle schoolers, and finally the elementary schoolers. In South Carolina, the order is generally reversed, which is why it is among the "latest" states on this map.

Early school starts are not the only cause of teenage drowsiness, but they are a crucial factor — especially because natural sleep cycles make it difficult for post-puberty teenagers to fall asleep before 11 pm.

A poll by the National Sleep Foundation found that 59 percent of 6th through 8th graders and 87 percent of high school students got less than the recommended amount of sleep (8.5 to 9.5 hours) on school nights. In the words of America's leading soporific publication Sleep Review, the average American adolescent is "chronically sleep-deprived and pathologically sleepy".

Chronic sleep loss in adolescents has been linked to a host of negative consequences:

• Adolescents with sleep debt and/or disrupted sleep-wake cycles may suffer from poor judgment, lack of motivation, and overall reduced alertness, leading to poor academic performance.
• There is a bidirectional relationship between sleep disturbances and mood disorders, especially depression.
• Irregular and insufficient sleep in high school students has been found to predict certain types of risky behavior such as drunk driving, smoking, taking drugs, and delinquency.
• Adolescents with insufficient sleep have an increased risk of suicidal ideation.
• Several studies found links between sleep deprivation and obesity. One study estimates that for each hour of sleep lost (over a long period of time), the odds of being obese increased by 80 percent.
• Sleep deprivation leads to metabolic perturbations that increase the risk of type 2 diabetes.
• Sleepiness increases the risk of traffic accidents. Young people are particularly affected. A 1995 study found that 55 percent of crashes due to drowsiness were caused by drivers 25 years or younger.

Because of all those reasons, not just the AAP but also the CDC recommends later school start times and urges parents to advocate for them. Fortunately, this has met some success. In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Bill 328, which requires middle schools to begin no earlier than 8:00 am and high schools no earlier than 8:30 am. It will go into effect in 2022.

If the measure proves successful, other states may consider similar moves. And there is some evidence that starting school later is beneficial. Around 400 school districts around the country have already moved their start time to 8:30 or later, often resulting in dramatically improved test scores, attendance rates, and graduation rates. (One Texas school district reported an 11 percent increase in its graduation rate.)

The map by u/1ew is found here on the Data is Beautiful subreddit.

Strange Maps #1103

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• Early 19th century heart-shaped map remains a popular allegory of love.
• Looking beyond its shape, the map shows the social restrictions of its time.
• Its lesser known male twin reveals an even more pessimistic take on love.

"Kiss me quick": a humorous take on the social minefield that had to be navigated in early 19th century courtships. Credit: Currier & Ives, New York City (ca. 1840) / Public domain

Times and attitudes change, but love is love. We recognize its joys and perils even as it manifests itself in other ages and under different constraints. That may explain the enduring popularity of this decidedly antique allegory of love. It is entitled A Map of the Open Country of Woman's Heart.

The map continues the centuries-old conceit that the various aspects of love (and marriage) can be represented as an actual landscape and that a map can serve as a guide into their interrelatedness — a road map of love, so to speak. The map's title indeed goes on to specify that it "exhibit[s the heart's] internal communications and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein."

Other famous amorous topographies include George Skaife Beeching's Map of Matrimony (ca. 1880) and the Carte de Tendre (1654), a double-entendre invented for Madame de Scudéry's historical novel Clélie (see Strange Maps #245). But what sets this map apart, and what may explain its continuing appeal, is that it presents the landscape of love not as random continents but in the very shape of a heart — not the actual organ but the stylized one we still associate with tender feelings (and playing cards).

By its recognizable form, sentimental topic, and visible antiquity, Woman's Heart has become a staple of graphic design to this day. However, a closer examination reveals its contents to be more era-specific than its sympathetic shape suggests.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an eligible young woman looking for true love must be in want of a map.Credit: Boston Rare Maps / Public domain

The map is anonymous ("by a lady") and undated, but thanks to a reference to its lithographer (D.W. Kellogg & Co. in Hartford, Connecticut), it can reliably be dated to 1833-1842. In other words, the map shows how women were supposed to feel about relationships, love, and marriage in mid-19th century New England. In short, love is an "open country" with many choices — all bad, dangerous, and detrimental except for one. Starting from top right:

• The Land of Love of Display is washed by the Sea of Wealth and contains the towns of Belles-maisons and Mavoiture (fancy houses and carriages?), a Bay of Establishment, a Jewelry Inlet, an Opal Isle, and a Promontory of Golden Fetters. We did not fail to notice Old Man's Darling Bay (sugardaddyism has some pedigree).
• The Pyramids of Fashion dominate the Land of Love of Dress, home to the towns of Cashmere and Tambourton (?) and such natural features as the Satin Plains, Bonnet Ridge, Feather Hill, and the rivers Drain the Purse and Wilful Waste.
• The region of Sentimentality is a particularly dangerous one with its Ego Mountains, the Plain of Susceptibility, its rivers of Novel Reading (vade retro, Jane Austen!), Pensive Musings, and the town of Dandy's Rest.
• How much safer is the region of Sentiment, dominated by Platonic Affection, Friendship, Hope, Enthusiasm, Good Sense, Discrimination (not that kind), and Prudence. This area is crisscrossed by the Patience Canal and the River of Consciousness. Did it really need to be underlined that these lead straight to the Country of Solid Worth?
• Oh, but so narrow is the part of righteous love. Right next door is the Land of Selfishness, home to the City of Moi-Même, District No. 1, and the Indulgence River. In the region of Fickleness, you can visit Caprice, the Town of Lady's Privilege, and the road of False Hopes. Obviously, the next stop is the Land of Oblivion.
• North of there, we find the Land of Love of Admiration, with its districts of Vanity and Affectation, its Lake of Self Conceit, and the Flattery River; and the Land of Coquetry, almost bare except for the Tenting Ground of Uncertainty.
• The northern borders of Coquetry and Love of Fashion are the High Grounds of Matrimonial Speculations with the Country of Eligibleness just beyond. But look out for the Valley of Mothers' Artifice and the Province of Deception.

Dear heavens, there are so many ways the voyage out of the City and District of Love, at the center of the heart, can go wrong. Love's saving grace is that it naturally borders and easily connects to Sentiment, the one and only pathway toward Esteem.

Clearly, love in 1830s Connecticut had to fit into a strict corset of social mores, ultimately dictated by religious piety. While this map showed that the true course was clear, it also demonstrated that the potential pitfalls were several — but many are no longer recognized as such in today's consumerist society. (Few people still seem to worry about the corrupting nature of satin.)

So, Woman's Heart is more out of step with today's relationship goals than a superficial glance suggests. But there is more. The map is only one half of a long-forgotten pair, which together paint a decidedly pessimistic picture of love.

A map for the lesser half

A man's heart is his fortress. Pity the woman wanting to conquer the citadel.Credit: Boston Rare Maps / Public domain

Boston Rare Maps recently sold only the second known pair of those maps. The other map shows the Fortified Country of Man's Heart. This is a decidedly less "open" place than Woman's Heart: the map shows its defences, and modes of exposure to attack.

Again, various regions are presented, only one of which leads to matrimonial bliss. Starting from top right:

• The Lands of Better Judgment and Love of Ease both border a region where Irresolution reigns, feeding the Frozen Lakes of Indifference via the Trop de Trouble river. In the south, a Cigar Grove leads to a Morass of Indolence. Silence and Reflection are walled off from the outside world by a Wall of dread of a woman's tongue.
• Is all well in the land of Romance? It's unclear: there is a river of Day Dreams (surely not a good thing) and one of Novel Reading (judged too Sentimental for women) and a Forest of Fancy. Nevertheless, this is the only part of Man's Heart that is not walled off. An Angel Gate corresponds with an Avenue of Beauty.
• To the west is the significantly larger Land of Love of Money, where we find Lakes Pocket Book and Bank Stock, a Sell Soul Market, Whisker Prairie, and the Corner Towers of Suspicion.
• Northward, we enter the lands of Love of Eating (featuring Gingerbread Palace), Economy (with the River of Hard Earnings), and Love of Power (dominated in the south by the Mountains of Pride and in the north by the Inner Breast-work of Fears of Petticoat Government).

At the center of it all is the virtually impenetrable Citadel of Selflove. But for the breach along the Land of Romance, Man's Heart is entirely surrounded by fortifications with only a handful of avenues communicating with a woman's Good Sense, Housewifery, Fortune, and Good Temper.

Faced first with the difficulty of mastering her own heart, the eligible young woman of mid-19th century New England was then tasked with conquering that of an eligible young man. As this map shows, that heart was a citadel, designed to deflect virtually all amorous intentions. And no matter how well she prepared, the only surefire avenue into the undefended portion of his heart was one beyond anyone's control: beauty.

How disheartening (no pun intended). Perhaps it is not surprising that the second of this pair of hearts has mostly gotten lost over time.

Strange Maps 1102

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• Rule of thumb: four colors are all you need to distinguish the countries on any map.
• But why? It's a simple question with a difficult answer, eluding scientists for a century.
• In the end, the four-color problem was the first theorem that was cracked by a computer.

Graffiti in Örs Vezér Square in Budapest by Hungary's Two-Tailed Dog Party, illustrating the four-color theorem. Credit: Szilas via public domain

Four colors: that is all you need for giving each country on a map a color distinct from all its neighbors. Perhaps for centuries, that has been a rule of thumb among cartographers. But halfway through the 19th century, people started wondering: Does that rule have some grounding in logic or reason?

A 19th century scramble

On 10 June 1854, an anonymous contributor only identified as F.G. wrote in The Athenaeum:

"In tinting maps, it is desirable for the sake of distinctiveness to use as few colours as possible, and at the same time no two coterminous divisions ought to be tinted the same. Now, I have found by experience that four colours are necessary and sufficient for this purpose — but I cannot prove that this is the case (…) I should like to see (or know where I can find) a general proof of this apparently simple proposition, which I am surprised never to have met with in any mathematical work."

That may have been the starting point for a good old 19th century scramble, in this case toward a four-color theorem — in other words, definite mathematical proof that four colors is sufficient to distinctively mark all countries on any map.

That theorem really ties the room together.Credit: Inductiveload via CC BY-SA 3.0

The late 19th century was an era of major scientific breakthroughs with huge societal consequences. To name but three: electricity, telephony, and photography. Yet even in that practical age, some scientists found time for this rather more esoteric topic.

On the face of it, the quest for the four-color theorem does not even sound like much of a scientific challenge, especially for mathematicians. But appearances are deceptive: some math problems are easier explained than solved. For a similar one, see Euler's perplexing Seven Bridges Problem (Strange Maps #536).

In 1879, Alfred B. Kempe published an article "On the Geographical Problem of the Four Colours" in the American Journal of Mathematics, in which he confidently stated:

"the experience of the map-makers has not deceived them, the maps they had to deal with, viz: those drawn on simply connected surfaces, can, in every case, be painted with four colours."

Kempe then developed a mathematical proof several pages long.

Weak link in the Kempe chain

Illustrative addendum to Kempe's article. Unfortunately, the journal was printed in black and white only, so the colors had to be named rather than applied. Credit: American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Sep 1879), via JSTOR / public domain

Proof delivered, theorem established? Not so fast. As mentioned above, the four-color theorem states that only four colors are needed to ensure adjacent regions have different colors — the point being to make sure that each is distinguishable from the other. But this means that there are a whole raft of special cases: for instance, enclaves and exclaves or where multiple regions touch at a single point (as in Fig. 6 on Kempe's illustration above).

As those examples show, where map theory meets map practice, things will get complicated. That is why, to prove his point, Kempe had to develop so-called "Kempe chains," logical tools that helped him analyze various possible map configurations. Unfortunately, Kempe made a mistake in building his tools, and it took longer than a decade to catch a particularly well hidden one.

Percy J. Heawood (1861-1955, nickname "Pussy") was a British mathematician who spent most of his life working on the four-color theorem. In 1890, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics, he exposed the flaw in Kempe's proof. To remedy and salvage the original theory, he proposed a five-color theorem instead.

For almost a century, the four-color theorem was dead. It had been downgraded to a four-color conjecture, lingering in a kind of cartographic limbo between the everyday evidence that four colors do indeed suffice and the scientific inability to explain exactly why this is so.

A whole new branch of math

Over the decades, countless papers and articles were devoted to the four-color problem. It even proved instrumental in developing graph theory, a whole new branch of mathematics.

Five countries, four colors — and the graph structure underpinning the color scheme.Credit: GrandEscogriffe via CC BY-SA 4

The problem proved so popular that, in 1887, it was published as a "challenge" in the Journal of Education, attracting a host of replies, one penned by the Bishop of London. In 1980, Edward R. Swart published an article on "The philosophical implications of the four-color problem," proposing a new mathematical entity halfway between a conjecture and a theorem.

Even though Kempe's proof had been flawed, in the long run it turned out he had been right. However, he himself did not live long enough to see his name cleared. In 1976, Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken, two researchers at the University of Illinois, published Every Planar Map is Four Colorable, in which they unveiled the final proof that four colors are enough to distinguish between all regions on a map.

Appel and Haken were one of several teams racing to find that proof using the raw calculating power of a computer, which was of course unavailable to either Kempe or Heawood. In fact, the four-color theorem was the very first theorem proved by a computer.
It took Appel and Haken a 742-page book to fully make their point. "One can never rule out the chance that a short proof of the Four-Color Theorem might some day be found, perhaps by the proverbial bright high-school student," they say in the introduction. "But it is also conceivable that no such proof is possible."

Still in search of an "elegant" proof

Just four colors are enough to clearly distinguish these countries in Central Europe. The topological diagram on the right shows how.Credit: Maths Is Fun

In fact, simpler proofs have been published — in 1997 and 2005 — but in both cases still relying on computers. Incidentally, these proofs do not convince everybody. Some people are still looking for the anti-Holy Grail: evidence that the four-color theorem is bogus.

For any proverbially bright high school student out there tickled by the four-color theorem, there is still plenty of glory to be had in devising a simple, elegant proof that fits on the back of an envelope. Or, barring that, by explaining the theorem's one enduring mystery, as summarized in The Mathematical Coloring Book: "Why four? was a great question. Even today (…) we still do not really know the answer to this innocent question."

Ironically, the search for the four-color theorem has proved more valuable and useful for mathematics and computing than for cartography itself. Mapmakers do not need to rely on theorems to color their maps. Rules of thumb tend to work just fine.

For more on this topic, see also The Four-Color Theorem on Cantors Paradise, a math periodical by Medium, and this article on Massive Science.

Strange Maps #1101

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• There are more than a million named streets and squares in Germany.
• Quite a few of their names say something about the country's history.
• The East's recent communist past still reverberates, but that is far from all.

The database is mightier than both pen and sword. Ask the right questions and like an eager retriever, artificial intelligence will hunt all columns and rows for the right answers. In seconds, AI produces results that would have taken a thousand bored office clerks weeks to come up with.

450,000 unique names

Take the streets and squares of Germany. There are more than a million of them in all, and they share some 450,000 unique names between them. In the analog days, finding out just that would have taken countless person-hours.

Zeit Online took those figures as the parameters for exploring the frequency and distribution of street and square names throughout Germany. It turns out that if you look at a street map of Germany just right, you can still see East Germany, Nazi Germany, and even Roman Germany.

Let's start with a simple question, one that sounds like a parody of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale: Who's the commonest of them all?

Because there are more than a million streets and squares but less than half a million names between them, that means some names are used more than once. Like, a lot more. Germany's five most common street names alone are reproduced more than 26,000 times:

• Hauptstraße (Main Street): 7,066
• Schulstraße (School Street): 5,141
• Dorfstraße (Village Street): 5,026
• Gartenstraße (Garden Street): 4,806
• Bahnhofstraße (Station Street): 4,616

Mozart? He isn't even German

If those sound extremely generic, that is no coincidence. Of the 1,000 most common street names, less than 20 percent commemorate specific persons or events — perhaps because throughout German history, yesterday's favorite person/event has repeatedly turned out to be today's most hated criminal/crime.

Germany's five most common streets named after people account for less than 8,000 locations. They are:

• Schillerstraße: 2,215
• Goethestraße: 2,116
• Jahnstraße: 1,900
• Mozartstraße: 1,449
• Raiffeisenstraße: 1,447

Schiller and Goethe are two of Germany's most famous writers, who also happened to be friends and occasional collaborators. Jahn was the developer of a 19th century movement blending gymnastics and nationalism. Mozart's popularity as a street name is a bit surprising: of course he was a brilliant composer, but he was Austrian, not German. Raiffeisen promoted self-help among the rural poor by pioneering credit unions and cooperative banks.

On German street signs, the past is far from over. The Soviet client state of East Germany may have ceased to exist in 1990, but it is still visible on the map. (See also #1063.)

Unity but in a bad way

Ironically, abstract notions like "unity" and "youth" appear more exclusively on East German street signs than the name of Karl Marx.Credit: Zeit Online

On 3 October 1990, East and West Germany officially became one country. Ever since, that date has been Germany's national day or Tag der deutschen Einheit. But Einheit also has a much older, more sinister, and specifically East German connotation as well. In 1946, the Soviets forced the merger of the East's ruling Communist Party with the nominally independent Social Democratic Party. It was this shotgun wedding that was remembered throughout East Germany in streets and squares celebrating Einheit, after the now-merged ruling party's new name: Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands).

By the time communist rule was overturned in Eastern Europe, much of its leadership was decrepit and sclerotic with age. The revolution swept away the ironic opposition between the old men in charge and their totalitarian ideology's glorification of youth — hence, all the streets and squares named after Jugend ("youth"). The idea was that socialist societies required socialist personalities, which needed to be shaped from an early age. In other words: catch 'em when they are young.

Obviously, many streets and squares in East Germany were named after Karl Marx, the German philosopher whose work forms the basis for communist thought. However, the thinker's name made it onto street signs in West Germany too, especially in and around his birthplace, Trier.

Relations below freezing point

Despite Cold War divisions, there were still some things both Germanies (and their street names) could agree on.Credit: Zeit Online

West Germany also has its share of street names that were virtually exclusive to it and excluded from East Germany. Sometimes, the distinguishing factor was an association, close or far, with the crimes of the Nazi regime.

Very far, in the case of Konrad Adenauer. The pre-war Mayor of Cologne was ostracized and imprisoned by the Nazis and served as West Germany's first Chancellor after the war, from 1949 to 1963. At that point, relations between East and West Germany were below the freezing point, so it is no surprise that there is no Adenauerstraße in the east.

Germany lost a lot of territory after WWII, a subject that was taboo in East Germany (as those territories had been annexed by its fellow communist states) but less so in the west, the destination for most of the millions of Germans expelled from those areas. Hence, there are almost 1,500 references in West German street names to Sudetenland and Egerland (both re-annexed by Czechoslovakia) and Ostpreußen (East Prussia, divided between Poland and the USSR).

As the article in Zeit Online shows, there are still plenty of streets in western Germany named after Carl Diem, the sporting official who organized the 1936 Summer Olympics for the Nazis (and in a speech near the end of the war urged boys as young as 14 to go into "final battle" against the Soviets approaching Berlin). There are also streets named for Agnes Miegel, a poet who wrote hymns to Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. Such street names were of course unthinkable in the east, which preferred to select its tainted heroes from the far left side of the political spectrum.

However, there were some war heroes that both East and West could agree on. The Scholl Siblings — Hans and Sofie — were members of the White Rose, a clandestine student organization in Munich offering non-violent resistance against the Nazi regime. They were caught and executed in 1943.

Still visible 1,500 years later

Religious, medieval, and even Roman history: German street names have it all.Credit: Zeit Online

There is more to German history than the Second World War. There were lots of other wars before that, too. Perhaps the most devastating conflict that Germany ever suffered was the Thirty Years' War (1618-48), in which the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants played a major part.

While no longer deadly serious, the divide between both confessions remains imprinted on the German landscape. Street names with Sankt ("Saint") are more prevalent in the Catholic part of Germany, which is mainly (but not only) in the south and west of the country.

The word Kamp denotes both a language and a practice. Ultimately derived from the Latin word "campus," it is the Low German word for "field." Low German was spoken in a wider part of northern Germany. The occurrence of Kamp here refers to the prevalence of clearcutting forests and draining swamps in this particular area.

Way older than those medieval practices is the Limes, the old border of the Roman Empire, which was garrisoned by legions and defended by walls and watchtowers to keep out the barbarians. Those structures are long gone, but this analysis of street names containing the old Latin name for the border still gives a pretty good idea of where it ran, more than 1,500 years ago.

For more images like these, check out the article in Zeit Online, the internet twin of Die Zeit, one of Germany's newspapers of record. Scroll to the bottom of the article (or click here) to test the frequency of German street names yourself. (There are two German streets named after Winston Churchill, seven after Elvis Presley, and 17 after Ho Chi Minh).

Strange Maps #1100

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• In three months last year, Marcel Moran visited all of San Francisco's bus stops.
• His aim: to map the quality of their signage, seating, shelter, and other amenities.
• Correcting the imbalances he found could be the key to increasing ridership.

A bus stop in central San Francisco with proper signage, seating, and shelter. About 10 percent of bus stops in the city are so underdeveloped that they are, for all practical purposes, invisible. Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

The San Francisco County Municipal Transportation Authority (SFMTA) has nearly 3,000 bus stops in its network. Over three months in mid-2020, Marcel Moran visited every last one of them.

Not just a weird hobby

It would have been one of the weirder ways to kill time during the first months of the pandemic, but Mr. Moran's reasons were more noteworthy than that. His was the first comprehensive survey of San Francisco's bus stop amenities — more precisely, the level of comfort and security that they provide.

Previous studies show that the presence of seats, shelter, and even nearby trees make waiting for the bus seem shorter. Also, electronic screens showing estimated times of arrival (ETAs) reduce the frustration of waiting.

This suggests that a well-furnished bus stop will reassure riders and can even attract more. On the other hand, a shoddy, neglected bus stop will do the opposite. Accordingly, a number of transit agencies aim to improve the quality of their bus stops. However, what's missing from their approach is a comprehensive study of bus-stop amenities to underpin such a strategy.

Or it was, until now. Mr Moran, a Ph.D. candidate in city planning at Berkeley, has produced a "census" of bus stop amenities throughout San Francisco — the first standardized overview of its kind. For each of the stops, he wanted to know: Is it properly indicated? Does it offer seating and/or shelter? Is there an electronic message board with real-time traffic info — and does it work properly? And is the access from curb to bus unobstructed by parked cars?

No seating, no shelter, no signage — no riders?

Only 34 percent of bus stops in San Francisco offer seating (white), while 66 percent do not (red). Credit: Marcel Moran / Journal of Public Transportation – CC BY-NC 4.0

In a number of ways, San Francisco is an ideal place to test the quality of public transport amenities. The city is something of a laboratory for mobility innovation — see experiments with dynamic parking prices, shared bicycle and e-scooter programs, and a ban on private cars along Market Street.

Already in 1973, San Francisco declared itself a "transit first" city, meaning that city policies would favor public transport over private cars. The policy remains in place today, although this will come as a surprise to many who use the city's public bus network.

Because Mr Moran's survey found that:

• Only 34 percent of San Francisco's bus stops offer seating of some kind.
• Only 31 percent featured shelter from the elements.
• At 32 percent of bus stops, on-street parking obstructed curbside access to the buses.
• Only 30 percent displayed a route map, usually as part of a shelter.
• Only 23 percent of bus stops had ETA screens (and they did not work at 2 percent of stops).
• 11 percent did not appear to have any kind of visible signage at all.
• Some bus routes have seating at 75 percent of stops, while others no more than 10 percent.

The study's findings, which appear in an article in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Public Transportation, not only point to large shortcomings in San Francisco's bus stop amenities but also reveal a glaring geographical gap. While "a majority of (San Francisco) bus stops lack both seating and shelter of any kind," Mr. Moran remarks that "amenity 'coldspots' nearly all lie within the city's southern half."

North vs. South

Barrier-free access from curb to bus is almost a given in the north; you are much more likely to have to navigate a row of parked cars in the south.Credit: Marcel Moran / Journal of Public Transportation – CC BY-NC 4.0

The comfort level of bus stops is generally much higher in the northern half of the city, the location of its central and commercial districts. It is much lower in the south, which is more residential and peripheral.

• In the north, 45 percent of bus stops had seating, and 42 percent offered shelter.
• Also, more than 80 percent provided curb-to-bus access unhindered by on-street parking.
• In the south, only 22 percent of bus stops had seating, with the same share of the total offering shelter.
• The level of barrier-free bus access was also lower, at just 53 percent.

It will surprise few that there are socioeconomic and racial components to the imbalance, with the north of the city generally being wealthier and whiter than the south, which is poorer and with more people of color.

Public transport, including by bus, is key to reducing the congestion and pollution caused by urban traffic. Yet bus ridership in the U.S. has been on a slow and steady decline for years — and a precipitous one since the start of the pandemic.

Reversing the trend via the "social minimum"

These maps show hotspots (in red) and coldspots (in blue) of the availability of seating (left) and obstruction-free access (right) at bus stops in San Francisco.Credit: Marcel Moran / Journal of Public Transportation – CC BY-NC 4.0

Reversing that trend will require raising the quality of public transport, but in most such considerations, the amenities provided by bus stops play little or no part. Mr Moran's study could help change that. "When parking is abundant and free, and bus stops in many neighborhoods are genuinely hard to spot and uncomfortable to wait at, we sift out many would-be riders," he told CityLab.

In his article, he advocates the social minimum principle, which would require a minimum level of amenities at all bus stops within the network. Approached by CityLab, the SFMTA said it was aware of "imbalances" in bus stop quality but planned to provide uniform signage for all, making them more visible and user friendly. No word, however, on seating, shelter and barrier-free access.

For more on Marcel Moran's study, see his article: Are Shelters in Place?: Mapping the Distribution of Transit Amenities via a Bus-Stop Census of San Francisco, cited here by the Berkeley Institute of Transportation Studies, and soon in the Journal of Public Transportation (Vol. 23, No. 3 – July 2021).

Also, check out Bloomberg CityLab for interesting stuff on urban design issues — plus some cool cartography content in the sub-series MapLab.

Strange Maps #1099

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• This map replaces geography with another type of closeness: cultural values.
• Although the groups it depicts have familiar names, their shapes are not.
• The map makes for strange bedfellows: Brazil next to South Africa and Belgium neighboring the U.S.

Some countries value self-expression more than others.Credit: Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images

Question: On what map is Lithuania a neighbor of China, Poland lies next to Brazil, and Morocco and Yemen touch?

Answer: The Inglehart-Welzel World Cultural Map. To be precise, the 2017 map. Because on the 2020 version, each of those pairs has drifted apart significantly.

These are not, strictly speaking, maps but rather scatterplot diagrams. Each dot represents a country, the position of which is based on how it ranks on two different values (discussed below). The dots are corralled together into geo-cultural groups:

• Catholic Europe, which comprises countries as diverse and far apart as Hungary and Andorra
• Protestant Europe, taking in both Iceland and Germany
• The Orthodox world, from Belarus all the way to Armenia
• The three Baltic states
• The English-speaking world, including both the U.S. and Northern Ireland
• The huge African-Islamic world, ranging from Azerbaijan to South Africa
• Latin America, which goes from Mexico to Argentina
• South Asia, which comprises both India and Cyprus
• The Confucian world, encompassing China and Japan.

The placement of the dots indicates cultural proximity or distance. Some countries from different groups can be more similar than other countries in the same group.

See the examples indicated above: cultural neighbors China and Lithuania belong to the Confucian and Baltic groups, respectively. Poland is part of Catholic Europe; its 2017 neighbor Brazil is in Latin America. Morocco and Yemen are closer culturally to Armenia, in the Orthodox group, than they are to Qatar, despite all belonging to the African-Islamic group.

The 2017 version of the map places Malta deep inside South America and lets Vietnam, Portugal, and Macedonia meet.Credit: World Values Survey, public domain.

Creating a culture map

So, what exactly are the criteria used for plotting these dots in the first place?

These maps are part of the World Values Survey, first conducted by political scientist Ronald Inglehart in the late 1990s. With his colleague Christian Welzel, he produced an update in 2005. The WVS has been revised several times since, most recently in 2020.

The WVS asserts that there are two fundamental dimensions to cross-cultural variation across the world. These are used as the axes to plot the various countries on the diagram.

• The X-axis measures survival versus self-expression values.

Survival values focus on economic and physical security. There is not much room for trust and tolerance of "others." Self-expression values prioritize well-being, quality of life, and self-expression. There is more room for tolerating ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities.

• The Y-axis measures traditional versus secular-rational values.

Traditional values include deference to religion and parental authority as well as traditional social and family values. Societies that score high on traditions typically also are highly nationalistic. In more secular-rational societies, science and bureaucracy replace faith as the basis for authority. Secular-rational values include high tolerance of things like divorce, abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.

As indicated by the significant changes on the 2020 map, the cultural values of nations are not static:

• Countries that move up on the map are shifting from traditional to more secular-rational values.
• Countries that move to the right on the map are shifting from survival values to self-expression values.
• And, of course, vice versa in both cases.

According to the authors of the map, changes in cultural outlook can be the result of socioeconomic changes — increasing levels of wealth, for example. But the religious and cultural heritage of each country also plays a part.

The world's cultural landscape is dynamic — you could even say promiscuous, producing new bedfellows every few years.Credit: World Values Survey, public domain.

Some notable features of the 2020 map:

• The Baltic group has been dissolved; Lithuania is now part of Catholic Europe, Estonia a lone Protestant island in a Catholic sea. More worryingly, Latvia seems to have dissolved completely.
• In general, survival values are strongest in African-Islamic countries, self-expression values in Protestant Europe.
• Traditional values are strongest in African-Islamic countries and Latin America, while secular values dominate in Confucian countries and Protestant Europe.
• The United States is an atypical member of the English-speaking group, scoring much lower on both scales (that is to say, lower and more to the left). In other words, the U.S. is more into traditional and survival values than the group's other members.
• Shifting attitudes don't just separate; they also unite. Belgium and the U.S. are now culture buddies, as are New Zealand and Iceland. Kazakhstan is virtually indistinguishable from Bosnia.

The Inglehart-Welzel map is not without its critics. It has been decried as Eurocentric, simplistic, and culturally essentialist (that is, the assumption that certain cultural characteristics are essential and fixed, and that some are superior to others). Which is, of course, a very self-expressive thing to say.

For more on these maps, on the WVS surveys, and on the methodology used, visit the World Values Survey.

Strange Maps #1098

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• In the years before 1900, the United States was experiencing a spectacular spurt of growth.
• Not everyone approved: many feared continued expansionism would lead to American imperialism.
• To illustrate the threat, Uncle Sam was depicted as dangerously or comically fat.

Detail from "Charge of the 24th and 25th Colored Infantry, July 2nd 1898", depicting the Battle of San Juan Hill – a turning point in the Spanish-American War. Credit: Kurz and Allison / Public domain

The past is a different country. And not just in the poetic sense. In the early 19th century, the United States was much smaller than it is today. But by the end of that century, the U.S. had consolidated into an empire both in the continental sense as well as the colonial one: not only did it stretch across the entirety of North America, from sea to shining sea, it also had acquired significant amounts of territory and influence beyond those shores.

Decidedly non-progressive

America's imperial girth and radiance may seem like faits accomplis today, but they were vehemently contested by the domestic press of the time. At the very tail of the century, this opposition led to a curious cartographic phenomenon which, despite its anti-imperialist origins, we today recognize as a decidedly non-progressive practice: the fat-shaming of Uncle Sam.

Uncle Sam is the personification of the United States (the country and, often specifically, its government), with which he shares his initials. His exact origins are unknown, although an apocryphal reference is often made to Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, NY and supplier of American troops during the War of 1812. Authenticity concerns aside, ever since 1989, the U.S. has had an annual Uncle Sam Day on September 13th, Wilson's birthday.

However, Uncle Sam is also the continuation of Brother Jonathan, who personified the typical New England Yankee and has his origins in the 17th-century English Civil War (where the term was used by the Royalists to mock the Puritans). Sam certainly borrowed Jonathan's striped pants, stove-pipe hat, and lanky figure. The thinness and old-fashioned appearance of both Jonathan and Sam (who were interchangeable by the mid-19th century) were meant to symbolize a kind of restless thriftiness, a supposedly national trait of the Yankee — and by extension, the American nation.

A lightning rod for criticism

Around the time of the Civil War, Sam had largely supplanted Jonathan as a national figure. As a sort of shorthand of the U.S., Uncle Sam was a favorite of cartoonists in the 19th and 20th centuries. (He seems to have gone a bit out of fashion in the 21st.) Especially during the World Wars, he was used as a symbol of national resilience and an important ingredient of patriotic propaganda. Inversely, he was also easily adopted as a lightning rod for criticism of the U.S. and its international policies.

In various cartoons of the 19th century's last decade, Uncle Sam — recognizable by his goatee and tricolored clothes — is depicted as increasingly fat and mocked for it. His embonpoint is understood to be a symbol of geopolitical gluttony, making him — that is, the United States itself — appear both avaricious and ridiculous on the world stage. This was the build-up toward the Spanish-American war of 1898, from which the U.S. would emerge victorious and in possession of much of Spain's remaining overseas empire, consisting of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other smaller island territories.

This can be seen as America's Julius Caesar moment — when it, like Rome before it, changed from a republic into an empire. It was certainly recognized (and feared) as such in those days.

Trying to swallow Cuba whole

A Victor Gillam cartoon for Judge, this front-page illustration clearly shows Uncle Sam's voracious ambition toward Cuba. Credit: Cornell University Library / Public domain

On August 10, 1895, the satirical magazine Judge published a cartoon by Victor Gillam on its front page that showed a modified map of North America, enlisting the continent's geography to make a shockingly visceral, anti-imperialist point.

Cuba is shown as a small fish, attempting to swim away from the maw of Uncle Sam, who coincides with North America itself. Mexico is his lower jaw, Central America his goatee, Florida his nose, Washington, DC his all-seeing eye, and Canada his hat.

The map is entitled The Trouble in Cuba. The trouble seems to be that Cuba refuses to be swallowed by Uncle Sam, who says, "I've had my eye on that morsel for a long time; guess I'll have to take it in!"

An expansionist menu

"You're too late", says Uncle Sam: "I've eaten."Credit: National Archives / Public domain

In this cartoon, Uncle Sam, identified with President McKinley, is presented as a glutton and his detractors as too slow to stop him. In 1898, the United States had won the Spanish-American War, laying claim to Puerto Rico and the Philippines among other spoils of the now defunct Spanish empire. In the same year, the U.S. had also acquired Hawaii as a territory.

Many in Congress worried that McKinley's policy of continued expansion would lead to imperialism. Bursting through the door to prevent Uncle Sam from gobbling up a load of overseas territories are Representative William Jennings Bryan and Senator George Frisbie Hoar. They are too late; the plates are empty. On the ground is an Expansion Menu, listing what just has been devoured: Hawaiian Soup, Portorican Rice (?), Philippine Pudding.

Cracks in the pond

Skating on thin ice? U.S. expansionism reimagined as a winter sport.Credit: Library of Congress / Public domain

This centerfold cartoon from the New York Herald of November 26, 1898 shows the comically rotund figures of Uncle Sam and President McKinley, skating across a wintery landscape on a body of water labelled Expansion Pond. A rather joyless figure in a deerstalker hat, perhaps newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer, known for his anti-expansionist stance, does not want to join in the fun. "I will not skate on your pond," he avers.

Big, bigger, best?

A cartoon from 1899, from the satirical magazine Judge, depicting the growth (and growth) of the United States.Credit: Bill of Rights Institute / Public domain

In 1899, Judge published another cartoon by Victor Gillam, entitled A Lesson for Anti-Expansionists. Showing the growth of Uncle Sam over the various stages of his life, that lesson is how the U.S. "has been an expansionist first, last, and all the time."

• On the left, the U.S. starts out as an infant (1783, 13 states).
• The second figure is a strapping young lad confidently leaning on a frontiersman's axe (1803, Louisiana Purchase).
• The third figure is a stern-looking, musket-holding soldier (1819, Florida ceded by Spain).
• The fourth figure is a supremely confident-looking gentleman, newly goateed and top-hatted (1861, having recently annexed Texas).
• Fifth is an older gentleman, slightly roguish and rotund (1898, annexed Hawaii).
• In just one year, Uncle Sam has gone from merely full-figured to morbidly obese but with a confident smirk on his face and a ship under his arm, as a symbol of the naval prowess that earned him various colonies (Cuba, Philippines, Porto Rico [sic] in 1899).

The final figure is pondering the many hands outstretched toward him, labelled as Russia, China, Germany, England, and other world powers. "And now all the nations are anxious to be on friendly terms with Uncle Sam," the caption reads. Unlike Gillam's earlier cartoon, this one can be construed as ambiguous: is this a critique of expansionism or an acknowledgement of the influence that expansion has brought with it?

Expand and explode

"1776 – 1803 – 1867 – 1898 - ?": Life magazine cartoon critical of America's expansionism.Credit: Life magazine, 26-January-1899, pp. 72-73. Via Hathi Trust Digital Library / Public domain

Gillam may have been inspired by a cartoon published earlier that year in Life magazine, which depicts a similarly inflating Uncle Sam, but with a more dramatic finale.

• Uncle Sam starts out as his full-grown, slim-figured self in 1776.
• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 seems to subtract rather than to add to his joy.
• The annexations of Alaska and Texas only add to his discomfort.
• Discomfort turns to distemper in 1898, with the takeover of the defunct Spanish empire in the Pacific and Caribbean.
• Growing ever bigger and more agitated over the course of these additions, can it be far off before Uncle Sam simply explodes?

Intervention at the tailor shop

Cartoon by John S. Pughe, published in Puck on September 5, 1900, titled "Declined with Thanks."Credit: Keppler & Swartzmann / Public domain

This cartoon from 1900 shows then-President William McKinley as a tailor, sizing up an enormous Uncle Sam. The striped pants list Sam's recent acquisitions, from Louisiana and California to Hawaii and Porto Rico.

McKinley is getting ready to cut Uncle Sam a new suit from cloth labelled "enlightened foreign policy - rational expansion." But three stern-looking gentlemen have entered McKinley's tailor shop and are keen for another course of action. They want to administer a medicine called "anti-expansionist policy."

The most prominent of the three would have been recognized by contemporaries as publishing magnate Joseph Pulitzer, campaigner against imperial expansion. He says, "Here, take a dose of this anti-fat and get thin again!" To which Uncle Sam replies, "No, Sonny! I never did take any of that stuff, and I'm too old to begin!"

And… thin again

John Bull and Uncle Sam in the year 1900, a study in contrasts. Credit: American Truth Society / Public domain

Uncle Sam and other national personifications have several advantages over real people — one of those is that they can change body type to fit the situation.

Despite years of cartoons showing Uncle Sam as getting too big for his britches, in this illustration from 1900 he reverts to type, becoming rail-thin again. The reason: to contrast with that other national archetype, John Bull, representing the British Empire, which was then at its height. How do you personify a globe-spanning empire? By fattening up the figure in question.

Without knowing anything about the content of The Fable of John Bull and Uncle Sam, it is safe to say, judging from the stance of both figures alone, that it will show the former as unworthy of his leading role in the world with the latter more capable and willing to assume that role.

Most maps were taken from this article on Carto-Caricatures, a fascinating blog about the intersection between cartography and caricature.

Strange Maps #1097

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• When Android was launched soon after Apple's own iPhone, Steve Jobs threatened to "destroy" it.
• Ever since, and across the world, the rivalry between both systems has animated users.
• Now the results are in: worldwide, consumers clearly prefer one side — and it's not Steve Jobs'.

A woman on her phone in Havana, Cuba. Mobile phones have become ubiquitous the world over — and so has the divide between Android and iPhone users.Credit: Yamil Lage / AFP via Getty Images.

Us versus them: it's the archetypal binary. It makes the world understandable by dividing it into two competing halves: labor against capital, West against East, men against women.

These maps are the first to show the dividing lines between one of the world's more recent binaries: Android vs. Apple. Published by Electronics Hub, they are based on a qualitative analysis of almost 350,000 tweets worldwide that presented positive, neutral, and negative attitudes toward Android and/or Apple.

Steve Jobs wanted to go "thermonuclear"

Feelings between Android and Apple were pretty tribal from the get-go. It was Steve Jobs himself who said, when Google rolled out Android a mere ten months after Apple launched the iPhone, "I'm going to destroy Android, because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go thermonuclear war on this."

Buying a phone is like picking a side in the eternal feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Each choice for automatically comes with an in-built arsenal of arguments against.

If you are an iPhone person, you appreciate the sleekness and simplicity of its design, and you are horrified by the confusing mess that is the Android operating system. If you are an Android aficionado, you pity the iPhone user, a captive of an overly expensive closed ecosystem, designed to extract money from its users.

Even without resorting to those extremes, many of us will recognize which side of the dividing line that we are on. Like the American Civil War, that line runs through families and groups of friends, but that would be a bit confusing to chart geographically. To un-muddle the information, these maps zoom out to state and country level.

If the contest is based on the number of countries, Android wins. In all, 74 of the 142 countries surveyed prefer Android (in green on the map). Only 65 favor Apple (colored grey). That's a 52/48 split, which may not sound like a decisive vote, but it was good enough for Boris Johnson to get Brexit done (after he got breakfast done, of course).

And yes, math-heads: 74 plus 65 is three short of 142. Belarus, Fiji, and Peru (in yellow on the map) could not decide which side to support in the Global Phone War.

What about the United States, home of both the Android and the iPhone? Another victory for the former, albeit a slightly narrower one: 30.16 percent of the tweets about Android were positive versus just 29.03 percent of the ones about Apple.

United States: Texas surrounded!

Credit: Electronics Hub

There can be only one winner per state, though, and that leads to this preponderance of Android logos. Frankly, it's a relief to see a map showing a visceral divide within the United States that is not the coasts versus the heartland.

• Apple dominates in 19 states: a solid Midwestern bloc, another of states surrounding Texas, the Dakotas and California, plus North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.
• And that's it. The other 32 are the United States of Android. You can drive from Seattle to Miami without straying into iPhone territory. But no stopovers in Dallas or Houston – both are behind enemy lines!

North America: strongly leaning toward Android

Credit: Electronics Hub

Only eight of North America's 21 countries surveyed fall into the Apple category.

• The U.S. and Canada lean Android, while Mexico goes for the iPhone.
• Central America is divided, but here too Android wins hands down, 5-2.

Europe: Big Five divided

Credit: Electronics Hub

In Europe, Apple wins, with 20 countries preferring the iPhone, 17 going for Android, and Belarus sitting on the fence.

• Of Western Europe's Big Five markets, three (UK, Germany, Spain) are pro-Android, and two (France, Italy) are pro-Apple.
• Czechia and Slovakia are an Apple island in the Android sea that is Central Europe. Glad to see there is still something the divorcees can agree on.

South America: almost even

Credit: Electronics Hub

In South America, the divide is almost even.

• Five countries prefer Android, four Apple, and one is undecided.
• In Peru, both Android- and Apple-related tweets were 25 percent positive.

Africa: watch out for Huawei

Credit: Electronics Hub

In Africa, Android wins by 17 countries versus Apple's 15.

• There's a solid Android bloc running from South Africa via DR Congo all the way to Ethiopia.
• iPhone countries are scattered throughout the north (Algeria), west (Guinea), east (Somalia), and south (Namibia).

Huawei — increasingly popular across the continent — could soon dramatically change the picture in Africa. Currently still running on Android, the Chinese phone manufacturer has just launched its own operating system, called Harmony.

Middle East: Iran vs. Saudi Arabia (again)

Credit: Electronics Hub

In the Middle East and Central Asia, Android wins 8 countries to Apple's 6.

• But it's complicated. One Turkish tweeter wondered how it is that iPhones seem more popular in the Asian half of Istanbul, while Android phones prevailed in the European part of the city.
• The phone divide matches up with the region's main geopolitical one: Iran prefers Android, Saudi Arabia the iPhone.

Asia-Pacific: Apple on the periphery

Credit: Electronics Hub

Another wafer-thin majority for Android in the Asia-Pacific region: 13 countries versus 12 for Apple — and one abstention (Fiji).

• The two giants of the Asian mainland, India and China, are both Android countries. Apple countries are on the periphery.
• And if India is Android, its rival Pakistan must be Apple. Same with North and South Korea.

Experts point to the fact that both operating systems are becoming more alike with every new generation as a potential resolution to the conflict. But as any student of human behavior will confirm: smaller differences will only exacerbate the rivalry between both camps.

Maps taken from Electronics Hub, reproduced with kind permission.

Strange Maps #1096

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• About 56 percent of the Earth's surface has not yet been mapped.
• The uncharted area corresponds to 80 percent of the ocean floor.
• But that area is shrinking fast. By 2030, the entire ocean will be mapped.

Research vessel collecting hydrographic data via multibeam sonar, fanning out sound waves beneath its hull to the ocean floor. Credit: NOAA / Public domain

Dear billionaires, are you afraid of water? While Jeff, Elon, and Richard are throwing mountains of cash at a private-sector replay of the space race, more than half of the planet they take off from remains unmapped. To be precise: 80 percent of the ocean floor. Considering oceans cover 70 percent of Earth, that works out to 56 percent of its total surface.

The Japanese, champion ocean mappers

This map puts what is missing into perspective. The light areas are already mapped. For the dark patches, we often only have the slightest understanding of the local depth and shape of the ocean floor.

The distribution of light and dark tells us something about the progress of submarine mapping. Light-blue lines crossing the dark-blue expanse are busy, well-charted shipping lanes. Larger light-blue patches correspond to the waters of countries where mapping their bit of ocean is a priority.

• As the map (and the graph) shows, Japan leads the world: only 2.3 percent of its Exclusive Economic Zone remains unmapped.
• Next, at some distance, are the UK (9.4 percent of its EEZ unmapped), Norway (18.1 percent), and New Zealand (26 percent).
• The U.S. is not doing too poorly, with just 30.1 percent of its EEZ left to chart. Yet Hawaii, mentioned separately here, has almost half (47.5 percent) of its EEZ left to explore.
• China has no maps of almost nine-tenths (88.6 percent) of its ocean floor. But that's still better than the stragglers on the list: Madagascar (94.5 percent), Bangladesh (96.7 percent), and Thailand (98.5 percent).

Up from 6 percent in 2017

As of the middle of this year, the share of the world's total ocean floor that has been mapped in detail stands at 20.6 percent. That may not sound like a lot, but it's already a great improvement over 2017, when Seabed 2030 was launched. Back then, just 6 percent of the world's oceans had been mapped by modern means.

Unmapped areas of the ocean floor, as per the 2020 dataset. Due to COVID, the coverage only progressed from 19 percent last year to 20.6 percent this year.Credit: Andrew Douglas-Clifford / The Map Kiwi. Reproduced with kind permission.

The project's goal to achieve 100 percent public access coverage by 2030 is ambitious, but they have help. Seabed 2030 is urging the many governments, companies, and institutions who privately have data on non-covered areas to release it.

It is also crowdsourcing by asking just about any vessel that is willing and able to produce depth data to contribute to the effort – even if it's just an ordinary fishing vessel or a tiny yacht.

Why do we need ocean floor maps?

Why do we actually need better maps of the ocean floor? One answer is curiosity. Another is science. Another is navigation. As a relevant example, take the tragic accident of the USS San Francisco in 2005.

Cruising at a depth of no more than 525 feet (160 m) somewhere south of Guam, this U.S. Navy nuclear attack submarine collided head-on with an uncharted seamount. The violent collision injured more than two-thirds of the ship's 137-member crew. One sailor later died from his injuries. The sub itself also sustained heavy damage.

Knowing the terrain underwater is essential for rolling out cables, pipelines, and other underwater infrastructure. It will make it easier to spot and protect marine biodiversity (with seamounts often serving as hotspots). The shape of the ocean floor also influences currents, and thus also weather patterns and climate change. And insights into submarine geography may even be instrumental in predicting the course of future tsunamis.

The return of Boaty McBoatface

Seabed 2030 is a project funded by the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO, the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans. The project's aim is to bring together all available bathymetric data to produce a definitive, all-encompassing, and open-access map of the world's ocean floor by 2030.

The Drake Passage between South America and Antarctica has been mapped thanks to the tweaking of usual sailing routes.Credit: Andrew Douglas-Clifford / The Map Kiwi. Reproduced with kind permission.

It seems the project is already creating its own weather, so to speak. British research vessels plying the waters of the Drake Passage have modified their usual routes in order to map more of the area, with noticeable results.

One of the British ships contributing to the global mapping effort is the RRS Sir David Attenborough, specially equipped with a deep-water multibeam echo-sounding system. The research vessel is perhaps better known for its initial name, chosen by the British public in a poll the result of which was sadly rejected by the authorities: Boaty McBoatface.

Increasingly, so-called USVs (uncrewed surface vessels) — essentially, underwater drones — are deployed to map ever larger parts of the ocean. And yes, the mysteries of the deep have also captured the imagination of at least one billionaire. As explained by the BBC's Jonathan Amos, Texan billionaire Victor Vescovo has led expeditions to the deepest parts of the world's oceans. With his vessel DSSV Pressure Drop, Vescovo recently mapped an area the size of France in a mere ten months.

Thanks to his efforts and those of many others, future versions of this map will turn increasingly light blue. Around the year 2030, there will finally be nothing new left to map on this planet.

Map produced by Andrew Douglas-Clifford, a.k.a. The Map Kiwi. Reproduced with kind permission.

The map shows the world in the Spilhaus projection. For more on that see Strange Maps #939, Finally, a world map that's all about oceans.

Strange Maps #1095

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• In green: where people like free speech the most. In red: where free speech is not popular.
• Despite continued strong support, this recent survey shows approval of free speech declining in the U.S.
• Free speech helps create prosperity, but if forced to choose, people prefer prosperity over free speech.

September 24th, 1933: Communist Member of Parliament Saklatvala Shapurji addresses a crowd at Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park.Credit: Keystone / Getty Images

Who loves free speech? As this world map shows: not everybody — at least not in equal measure. Of the 33 countries surveyed, free speech gets its highest approval in those shaded green. Approval is "medium" in yellow countries and lowest in red ones.

Some democracies are more nominal than others

• Some of the highest-rated countries are what you might expect: in North America (U.S.) and northern Europe (UK, Denmark, Norway, Sweden). Also on that list: Spain and Japan. Surprising inclusions: Venezuela and Hungary, two countries not recently noted for the fair and balanced nature of their public discourse.
• Countries with "medium" interest in free speech are scattered across Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Argentina), continental Europe (France, Germany, Czechia, Poland), the Middle East (Israel), Africa (South Africa), and the Asia-Pacific region (Australia, Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea).
• Interestingly, all the countries on the red list, professing the least interest in free speech, are nominal democracies, although some are more nominal than others. They include countries in Europe (Russia, Turkey), the Middle East (Lebanon), Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria), and Asia-Pacific (Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia).

Global variation in the Justitia Free Speech Index. Maximum score: 100.Credit: Justitia

Orwell, defending the Freedom of the Park

The survey, conducted in February 2021 for Danish think tank Justitia, is about popular attitudes rather than legal frameworks. That is relevant because, as George Orwell observed in "Freedom of the Park" (1945), free speech depends less on the law of the land than on the will of the people.

Justitia's report, titled "The Future of Free Speech", opens with a quote from Orwell's essay:

"If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."

To find out about those attitudes, Justitia weighed the responses of a total of 50,000 people across 33 countries worldwide to several potentially controversial statements, including:

Government censorship should not apply to

• what people say;
• what the media reports;
• how people use the internet.

People should be able to

• publicly criticize the government;
• publicly offend minority groups;
• criticize the respondent's religion and beliefs;
• voice support for homosexual relationships;
• insult the national flag.

The media should be able to publish information

• that might destabilize the economy;
• about sensitive aspects of national security;
• that makes it more difficult to handle pandemics.

George Orwell at the BBC in 1940. He sensed that free speech depends less on what laws dictate than on what people want.Credit: Public domain

Russians among the least pro-free speech

Some key findings of the report:

• Of the nationalities surveyed, Scandinavians and Americans are the most supportive of free speech. The least supportive are the Russians, Muslim-majority nations, and the least developed nations.
• Support for free speech in general is typically expressed by great majorities and has remained stable or has even increased since 2015. There is one exception: the U.S., where the acceptance of unrestricted criticism of the government has declined. The report specifically notes that young people, women, the less educated, and people who voted for Joe Biden are generally less supportive of free speech.
• While support for free speech is strong in the abstract, it drops when specific controversial statements are mentioned. In general, left-leaning individuals are more accepting of insulting national symbols and right-leaning individuals of offending minority groups, particularly in Western countries.
• In all countries surveyed, a majority would like to see social media subjected to some kind of regulation, but only a few respondents want governments to take the sole responsibility for this.

Free speech deficits and... surpluses

When matching Justitia's Free Speech Index (which measures attitudes) with a separate Freedom of Expression Index (which measures regulations) developed by an organization called V-Dem, it turns out that there is a clear and positive association between both.

• In other words: in countries with strong popular demand for free speech, there typically are good government provisions for the supply of free speech. For example, Scandinavia, the U.S., the UK and Australia all score relatively high on both indexes, while Pakistan, Malaysia, and India get relatively low marks on both indexes.
• There are exceptions, in both directions. The popular demand for free speech exceeds the actual level of freedom of expression in Egypt, Hungary, the Philippines, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela. You could call this a classic free speech deficit.
• In contrast, there are three countries where there seems to be a free speech surplus: in Kenya, Tunisia, and Nigeria, the relatively high values on the Freedom of Expression Index are not matched with equally high values on the Free Speech Index.

Support for free speech is generally stable or improving, except in the United States, where the acceptance of unrestricted criticism of the government has declined.Credit: Justitia

Choosing between free speech and prosperity?

Justitia also asked its interviewees how they thought their freedom of expression had evolved over time. The results are mixed.

• People in Tunisia, Pakistan, and Kenya reported the greatest improvements in their freedom of expression.
• Despite significant "democratic backsliding" in the Philippines and India, people in those countries also reported improvements.
• The greatest perceived losses in terms of free speech were reported in Hungary, Poland, the U.S., and Turkey. As the report points out, all of these countries are highly polarized with (present or recent) leaders very critical of independent media.
• People in France and Germany also reported shrinking space for free speech.

"Fortunately (…) much evidence speaks in favor of (a positive) association (between freedom of expression on the one hand and human welfare and prosperity on the other) — particularly, when free speech is combined with effective electoral rights over longer periods of time," the report concludes.

However, "the numbers indicate that, if people believe they cannot have both, many are willing to sacrifice free speech." Disconcertingly, "support for free speech might be shallower than one would expect — and hope for — in relation to this fundamental right."

For more on Justitia, visit their homepage. Read more about The Future of Free Speech here. Download the report in its entirety here.

Strange Maps #1094

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• As the old adage goes, you must spend money to make money.
• Just about anywhere, setting up shop requires a significant bit of cash.
• But as this world map shows, the cost varies greatly by country.

Starting a business in the U.S. costs $735, which is relatively affordable at just 16 percent of the average monthly paycheck.Credit: Jason Kempin/Getty Images for iHeart Media

Starting your own business should be cheap, right? Because if you're successful, you create jobs, wealth, and tax revenue. Everybody wins. And yet, becoming an entrepreneur is not cheap — at least not everywhere.

As a budding businessperson anywhere, you must jump through a series of administrative hoops by acquiring the proper approvals, permits, and licenses. Those cost money as well as time.

A world map of the cost of starting a business.Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

So, how much cash do you have to fork out before you can start forking it in? Based on World Bank data, BusinessFinancing.co.uk produced a map for that. And it shows some pretty stark differences between countries. But first, some context:

• For the benefit of comparison, the map has converted all local currencies into U.S. dollars. By that metric, the United Arab Emirates is the most expensive country in the world to start a business: $7,443.51. The cheapest countries are Rwanda, with no cost for the first two years; and Slovenia, where there are no fees, only a requirement to have capital of €7,500 ($8,900).
• However, these absolute amounts should not just be compared to each other. They should also be considered against the local living standard, which determines relative affordability. For example, setting up shop in Kazakhstan costs $12, which is just 2 percent of the average monthly wage. Doing the same in Congo costs $1,232, which is more than two times the Congolese annual income.

Europe: UK beats Belarus

The greener, the better; orange is expensive. Italy, Austria, Netherlands and Belgium are expensive places to start businesses.Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

Europe is a pretty diverse place when it comes to the cost of setting up a business. On the low end of the scale, twelve countries have fees of less than $100. On the high end, eleven countries require more than $1,000.

• Apart from Slovenia (see above), the UK is the cheapest country in Europe, even beating Belarus ($18.18). All you need to pay is a £12 ($17) fee to register at Companies House, and you're good to go.
• The most expensive place? Italy, where setting up an azienda will set you back a whopping $4,895. That's more than twice the average monthly income ($2,403).

North America: U.S. in the Goldilocks zone

The Bahamas and Mexico are the most expensive places in North America to set up a business. Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

The U.S. ($725) is in North America's Goldilocks zone: only half as expensive as Mexico ($1,463.81) but more than four times as dear as Canada ($166.19).

• Still, the U.S. cost of setting up a business is just 16 percent of the average monthly paycheck ($4,458). That compares favorably to the affordability of becoming a company owner in Mexico, where it equals nearly two and a half average monthly paychecks.
• The absolute cheapest place in North America is Belize ($99.31), which is about 33 percent of the average monthly wage in the country.
• In absolute terms, the Bahamas are the most expensive country ($1,810.92), but in relative terms, it's Haiti: setting up a company costs $932.80, which is close to 14 Haitian monthly paychecks ($67).

South America: Venezuela, land of opportunity?

In Venezuela, setting up a business will set you back no more than 21 cents.Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

Setting up a business is very expensive in Suriname, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay but relatively affordable elsewhere. It's even super cheap in Venezuela and Chile.

• Suriname is the most expensive country in South America, both in absolute and relative terms: it costs $3,030 to set up, which is more than 11 times the monthly income. And that's before an extra 8 percent on top for a notary service.
• What a difference one country over: in Venezuela, all you need is 21¢. That pays for the reservation of your company name, its publication in a local newspaper, and other formalities. That is less than 1 percent of Venezuela's relatively low monthly income ($1,232). Then again, as Venezuela inches closer to economic collapse, it makes sense for its government to remove as many barriers to entrepreneurship as possible.

Africa: improving, but a long way to go

Starting a business costs you $900 in Somalia but less than $13 in South Africa. Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

Africa's low wages are a double-edged sword. They are a boon to companies in search of manual labor but a barrier to local entrepreneurs looking to invest in a company of their own. In many places, those barriers remain firmly in place, but others have realized the benefit of encouraging start-ups.

• The most expensive African country in absolute terms is tiny Equatorial Guinea ($2,322), where entry into business eats up 7.2 average monthly paychecks.
• In relative terms, it is nearby Congo (not DR Congo, but its smaller neighbor), which has the highest relative cost of starting a business, not just in Africa but the world: 25.5 average monthly paychecks.
• However, across the Congo River, in the DRC, the cost of starting a business is just $80. It's one of more than a dozen African countries where you can set up shop for less than $100. And that includes economic powerhouses like Egypt and South Africa.

Middle East & Central Asia: very expensive to very cheap

In Pakistan, you can get your own company for just under $20. That's a fraction of the cost in Syria, nearly $1,400. Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

This is not one region, but two: the very expensive countries are in the Middle East, and the very cheap ones are in Central Asia.

• As mentioned, the UAE is the world's most expensive place to start a business but not the least affordable: all you need is 2.25 monthly paychecks.
• Neighboring Qatar ($3,951.94) and Saudi Arabia ($1,266.57) aren't cheap either. However, Bahrain ($230.78) is curiously cheap, less than a third of the cost of starting up a company in war-torn Yemen ($807.79).
• Kyrgyzstan ($8.35) is the cheapest country in its part of the world, but most of the surrounding countries are pretty cheap as well. Perhaps low start-up fees are not the decisive factor for Afghanistan's business climate right now; its looming civil war is.

East Asia & Oceania: New Zealand is both easy and cheap

Starting a business costs you $900 in Somalia but less than $13 in South Africa.Credit: BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission.

With not a single four-figure fee in sight, and relative cost low as well, setting up business in this part of the world is both cheap and affordable.

• Cambodia stands out, but not in a good way. The cost of going into business ($746) in the country is equal to about 7.5 monthly paychecks, the highest figure in the region.
• The cheapest country is Timor Leste ($10), but that still sets you back 9 percent of your monthly income.
• When the chips are down, New Zealand has the best cards. Starting a business in NZ costs $43.48 — low in absolute terms and even lower in relative terms: just 2 percent of the average monthly paycheck ($2,838). On top of that, the World Bank rates New Zealand first in terms of ease of starting a business: just one procedure, and you're up and running in less than a day.

Maps by BusinessFinancing.co.uk, reproduced with kind permission. Find their article on this topic here.

Strange Maps #1093

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• In 1739, a strange, twelve-sided hollow object from Roman times was discovered in England.
• Since then, more than a hundred dodecahedrons have been unearthed, but their purpose remains unknown.
• The only thing we know for sure is where they were found, which points to a Gallo-Roman connection.

Some outliers notwithstanding, almost all Roman dodecahedrons were found in Britain, Gaul, and Roman Germany.Credit: Imperium Romana

In the first episode of Buck Rogers, the 1980s television series about an astronaut from the present marooned in the 25th century, our hero visits a museum of the future. A staff member brandishes a mid-20th-century hair dryer. "Early hand laser," he opines.

As an observation of how common knowledge gets lost over time, it's both funny and poignant. Because our museums also stock items from the past that completely baffle the experts.

One of the strongest clues: the map

Few are as intriguing as the hundred or so Roman dodecahedrons that we have found. We know next to nothing about these mysterious objects — so little, in fact, that the various theories about their meaning and function are themselves a source of entertainment.

One of the strongest clues we have is this map, which tells us that they were particularly popular in one corner of the Roman Empire: northern Gaul and Roman Germany.

So, what do we know?

Roman dodecahedrons — or more properly called Gallo-Roman dodecahedrons — are twelve-sided hollow objects, each side pentagonal in shape and almost always contain a hole. The outer edges generally feature rounded protrusions.

Most of the objects are made from bronze, but some are in stone and don't have holes or knobs. The dodecahedrons are often fist-sized yet can vary in height from 4 to 11 cm (about 1.5 to 4.5 in). The size of the holes also varies, from 6 to 40 mm (0.2 to 1.5 in). Two opposing holes typically are of differing sizes.

Objects of this type were unknown until the first one was found in 1739 in Aston, Hertfordshire. In all, 116 have been dug up from sites as far apart as northern England and Hungary. But most have been found in Gaul, particularly in the Rhine basin, in what is now Switzerland, eastern France, southern Germany, and the Low Countries. Some were found in coin hoards, indicating their owners considered them valuable. Most can be dated to the 2nd and 3rd century AD.

Drawing of a partial dodecahedron found in the late 19th century in France. Credit: G. Garitan, CC BY-SA 4.0

A toy, a tool, a calendar?

No mention of the dodecahedrons from Roman times has survived. Any theory as to their function is based solely on speculation. Some suggestions:

• A specific type of dice for a game since lost to history.
• A magical object, possibly from the Celtic religion. A similar small, hollow object with protrusions was recovered from Pompeii in a box with either jewellery or items for magic.
• A toy for children.
• A weight for fishing nets.
• The head of a chieftain's scepter.
• A kind of musical instrument.
• A tool to estimate distances and survey land, especially for military purposes.
• An instrument to estimate the size of and distance to objects on the battlefield for the benefit of the artillery.
• A device for detecting counterfeit coins.
• A calendar for determining the spring and autumn equinoxes and/or the optimal date for sowing wheat.
• A candle holder. (Wax residue was found in one or two of the objects recovered.)
• A connector for metal or wooden poles.
• A knitting tool specifically for gloves. (That would explain why no dodecahedrons were found in the warmer regions of the Empire.)
• A gauge to calibrate water pipes.
• A base for eagle standards. (Each Roman legion carried a symbolic bird on a staff into battle.)
• An astrological device used for fortune-telling. (Inscribed on a dodecahedron found in Geneva in 1982 were the Latin names for the 12 signs of the zodiac.)

Two Roman dodecahedrons (left, center) and the only known example of an icosahedron (with 20 sides, right), all on display in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany. Credit: Kleon3, CC BY-SA 4.0

An Indochinese connection

The geographic spread of the dodecahedrons we know of is particular: they were all found in territories administered by Rome, inhabited by Celts. That enhances the theory that they were specific to Gallo-Roman culture, which emerged from the contact between the Celtic peoples of Gaul and their Roman conquerors.

Intriguingly, archaeologists in the 1960s have found similar objects along the Maritime Silk Road in Southeast Asia, except smaller and made of gold. They do not appear to predate the Gallo-Roman artefacts and may be evidence of Roman influence on the ancient Indochinese kingdom of Funan.

For now, and perhaps forever, the mystery of the Roman dodecahedrons remains unsolved.

Strange Maps #1092

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• The Kazungula Bridge has turned a cartographic near-miss into a geopolitical marvel.
• It's where maps show the world's only quadripoint, and the bridge is built across the world's second-shortest border.
• The bridge has the potential to completely revamp Africa's economy and transportation situation, from Cape to Cairo.

The arrow points to the only place on any world map where four countries meet — until you zoom in really close.Credit: Mapswire via public domain

On 10 May of this year, half a dozen African presidents came to Kazungula to inaugurate a bridge. Not just any bridge, then: the Kazungula Bridge, linking Zambia to Botswana across the mighty Zambezi River, is a game-changer. It has the potential to redirect the flow of traffic throughout much of Africa as well as provide a major boost to the entire region's economy.

A gentle but curious curve

There's more going on with the Kazungula Bridge, though. As it connects one country to the other, it makes a gentle but curious curve. There is no structural reason for it, only a geopolitical one: this is to avoid touching two other countries located on either side of the bridge. Because the bridge passes by the point where the world's only international quadripoint isn't.

An international quadripoint is a place where four countries meet. World maps show just one: a point in southern Africa where Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and Namibia all touch, right in the middle of the Zambezi River. But they're wrong.

Like a magic trick in reverse, the point disappears if you examine it too closely. Zoom in and the world's only international quadripoint turns into two tripoints. The western one is where Botswana and Zambia meet Namibia. The eastern one is where they meet Zimbabwe.

The reason we're so easily fooled – and so grievously disappointed – is that those two tripoints are separated by no more than 443 feet (135 m).

To add to the cartographic near-miss, that doesn't even make the international border between Zambia and Botswana the shortest in the world. That distinction goes to a line just 279 feet (85 m) long, separating the tiny Spanish peninsula of Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera from the Moroccan mainland.

A clear top-down overview of the border situation, still showing the launches for the Kazungula Ferry.Credit: Sovereign Limits, reproduced with kind permission

In short, the border here is a bit of a mess. In the 1970s, the question of whether there existed a quadripoint was a highly contentious matter between Zambia and Botswana on the one hand and the white-minority-ruled regimes of South Africa (which then occupied Namibia) and Rhodesia (as Zimbabwe was then known) on the other.

A geopolitical flashpoint no more

Should the quadripoint exist, South Africa and Rhodesia would control all cross-river traffic between Zambia and Botswana. Operating under that assumption, South Africa declared the Kazungula Ferry, which linked Zambia to Botswana, illegal. This ultimately led to an armed confrontation in 1970. A few years later, the Rhodesian Army actually sank the ferry, claiming it was serving military purposes.

With both racist regimes now consigned to the dustbin of history, the specter of a Kazungula turning into a geopolitical flashpoint has largely receded. What's more, the Kazungula Bridge shows what excellent lemonade you can make with the lemons that geography hands you.

Cutting exactly through the "quadripoint zone," the bridge is 3,028 feet (923 m) long and 60.7 feet (18.5 m) wide. It's a cable-stayed construction carrying two car lanes each way, a single rail track, and pedestrian walkways on either side. It took South Korea's Daewoo E&C six years to complete at a cost of $259 million. Financing was provided by the Zambian and Botswanan governments, the African Development Bank, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, and the EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund.

The bridge replaces a pontoon ferry which could carry just two trucks at a time. That means the busy road traffic between the Copper Belt in southern DR Congo and northern Zambia now has a viable alternate route to the South African port of Durban, one that doesn't lead through Zimbabwe. That route is often congested at the Beitbridge border crossing into South Africa.

The Kazungula crossing in 2006, long before the bridge, with the borders marked out on the territory.Credit: Brian McMorrow / Julieta39 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5

It was exactly for fear of losing the lucrative toll on that traffic that former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe withdrew from the consortium building the bridge. Zimbabwe's "Second Republic," under his successor Emmerson Mnangagwa, has taken the more sensible approach of requesting to rejoin and is already upgrading its roads towards the crossing.

From landlocked to "landlinked"

Either way, the bridge will ease congestion, lower the cost of doing business, and boost trade between Zambia and Botswana as well as for the wider Southern Africa Development Council (SADC), the 16-country economic and political cooperation body covering Africa's southern third.

Africa still suffers from poor or non-existent road infrastructure. The SADC sees a well-maintained road network as key for promoting integration and development across the continent. The Kazungula Bridge is considered an essential instrument in turning Zambia and Botswana (and soon perhaps also Zimbabwe) from landlocked into "landlinked" countries.

Perhaps one day when cars and trucks can drive smoothly from Cape Town all the way up to Cairo, they'll do so across the Kazungula Bridge.

One country that hasn't been mentioned but is essential to the story — because there is no quadripoint without four countries — is Namibia. Located mainly on the Atlantic coast and inland desert of southwest Africa, it projects this one panhandle into southern Africa's wet heart.

That is the Caprivi Strip, named after the German chancellor who obtained it in 1890. He wanted the then-German colony of South-West-Africa to have access to the Zambezi in the hope that it would be navigable all the way down to the Indian Ocean. It isn't: 40 miles (70 km) east of Kazungula, the majestic Victoria Falls block off that option.

If Caprivi's gamble had paid off, the "quadripoint zone" could now have been a bustling transit area for people and goods all across southern Africa. Thanks to the Kazungula Bridge, that vision may soon come true, if slightly differently configured.

Strange Maps #1091

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• Here's one pandemic project we approve of: a map of the United Fonts of America.
• The question was simple: How many fonts are named after places in the U.S.?
• Finding them became an obsession for Andy Murdock. At 222, he stopped looking.

The Neon Museum (a.k.a. Neon Boneyard) in downtown Las Vegas, a monument to the siren call of typography. Credit: Dale Cruse, CC BY 2.0

Who isn't fond of fonts? Even if we don't know their names, we associate specific letter types with certain brands, feelings, and levels of trust.

Typography equals psychology. For example, you don't want to get a message from your doctor, or anybody else in authority, that's set in comic sans — basically, the typeface that wears clown makeup.

A new serif in town

If you want to convey reliability, tradition, and formality, you should go for a serif, a font with decorative bits stuck to its extremities. Well-known examples include Garamond, Baskerville, and Times New Roman. Remove the decoration, and you've got a clean look that communicates clarity, modernity, and innovation. Arial and Helvetica are some of the most popular sans serif fonts.

There's a lot more to font psychology, but let's veer toward another, less explored Venn diagram instead: the overlap between typography and geography. That's where Andy Murdock spent much of his pandemic.

Mr. Murdock is the co-founder of The Statesider, a newsletter about (among other things) travel and landscape in the United States. He remembers his first encounter with a home computer back in 1984 and learning from that Macintosh both the word "font" and the name for the one it used: Chicago.

A map of the United Fonts of America — well, 222 of them.Credit: The Statesider, reproduced with kind permission.

You can see where this is going. Mr Murdock retained a healthy interest in fonts named after places. Over the years, he noted Monaco, London, San Francisco, and Cairo, among many others. "And then, the question of how many fonts are named for U.S. places came up in an editorial meeting at The Statesider," Mr Murdock says.

It's the sort of topic that in other times might never have gone anywhere, but this was the start of the pandemic. "I was stuck for days on end, so I actually started looking into it. At some point, I realized that I could probably find at least one per state." Cue the idea for a map of the "United Fonts of America."

Challenge turns into obsession

But that was easier said than done. Finding location-based fonts turned out to be rather time-consuming. "I definitely didn't realize what I was getting myself into," Mr Murdock recalls. "I could quickly name a few — New York, Georgia, Chicago — but I had no idea that I'd be able to find so many."

What started as a quirky challenge turned into an obsession and a compulsion that would have the accidental font-mapper wake up in the middle of the night and think: Did I check to see if there's a Boise font? (He did; there isn't.)

"The hardest part was knowing when to stop," said Mr Murdock. "Believe me, I know I missed some." In all, he found 222 fonts referencing places in the United States and its territories.

Beautiful but fontless: Boise, Idaho.Credit: Jyoni Shuler, CC BY-SA 4.0

For the most part, these fonts are distributed as the population is: heavy on the coasts and near the Great Lakes, but thin in most parts in between. California (23 fonts) takes the cake, followed by Texas (15), and New York (9).

Some of the fonts have interesting back stories, and in his article for "The Statesider", Mr Murdock provides a few:

• Georgia was named after a newspaper headline reading "Alien Heads Found in Georgia."
• Fayette is based on the handwriting of the record-keeper of a place called Fayette, now a ghost town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
• Tahoma and Tacoma are both pre-European names for Mount Rainier in Washington state.

Mostly, the fonts repeat the names of states and cities, but some offer something more interesting, such as the alliterating Cascadia Code or the lyrical Tallahassee Chassis. Other less than ordinary names include Kentuckyfried and Wyoming Spaghetti.

Capturing the spirit of a place

As an unexpected expert in the geographic distribution of location-based fonts, can Mr. Murdock offer any opinion on the qualitative relation between place and typeface?

"Good design of any sort can capture the spirit of a place, or at least one perspective on a place," he says, "but frankly, that only occasionally seems to have been the goal when it comes to typefaces."

In his opinion, the worst fonts reflect a stereotype about a place, rather than the place itself: "Saipan and Hanalei are both made to look like crude bamboo. Those are particularly awful. Pecos feels like it belongs on a bad Tex-Mex restaurant's menu."

California (lower left) is a rich source of location-based typefaces.Credit: The Statesider, reproduced with kind permission.

"Santa Barbara Streets, on the other hand, is quite nice because it captures the font that's actually used on street signs in Santa Barbara. I prefer the typefaces that have a story and a connection to a place, but it's a fine line between being artfully historic and being cartoonishly retro."

Let's finish off Route 66

Glancing over the map, some regions seem more prone to "stereotypefacing" than others: "Tucson, Tombstone, El Paso — you know you're in the Southwest. Art Deco fonts are mostly in the east or around the Great Lakes. In general, you find more sans serif fonts in the western U.S., and more serif fonts in the east, but that's not a hard-and-fast rule."

Noticing a few blank spots on the map, Mr. Murdock helpfully suggests some areas that could do with a few more fonts, including the Carolinas, the Dakotas, Maine, Missouri, West Virginia, New Jersey, and Rhode Island.

Oh, and Route 66. Nearly all of the cities mentioned in the eponymous song have a typeface named after them. "We need Gallup and Barstow to complete the set."

And finally, America's oft-overlooked overseas territories could be a rich seam for type developers: "Some of these names are perfect for a great typeface — Viejo San Juan, St. Croix, Pago Pago, Ypao Beach, Tinian."

To name but a few. Typeface designers, sharpen your pencils!

Map found here at The Statesider, reproduced with kind permission. For more dispatches from the weird interzone between geography and typography, check out Strange Maps #318: The semicolonial state of San Serriffe.

Strange Maps #1090

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• On these maps, each hexagon represents one-thousandth of the world's economy.
• That makes it easy to compare the GDP of regions and nations across the globe.
• There are versions for nominal GDP and GDP adjusted for purchasing power.

Shanghai's skyline at night. According to the GDP (PPP) map, China is the world's largest economy. But that oft-cited statistic says more about the problems of PPP as a yardstick than about the economic prominence of China per se.Credit: Adi Constantin, CC0 1.0

If you want to rank the regions and countries of the world, area and population are but crude predictors of their importance. A better yardstick is GDP, or gross domestic product, defined as the economic value produced in a given region or country over a year.

Who's hot and who's not

And these two maps are possibly the best instruments to show who's hot and who's not, economically speaking. They are in fact cartograms, meaning they abandon geographic accuracy in order to represent the values of another dataset, in this case GDP: the larger a region or country is shown relative to its actual size, the greater its GDP, and vice versa.

So far, so familiar. What's unique about these maps is how this is done. Both are composed of hexagons, exactly 1,000 each. And each of those hexagons represents 0.1 percent of global GDP. That makes it fascinatingly easy to assess and compare the economic weight of various regions and countries throughout the world.

Did we say easy? Scratch that. GDP comes in two main flavors: nominal and PPP-adjusted, with each map showing one.

Nominal GDP does not take into account differences in standard of living. It simply converts local GDP values into U.S. dollars based on foreign exchange rates. GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) takes into account living standards. $100 buys more stuff in poor countries than it does in rich countries. If you get more bang for your buck in country A, its PPP-adjusted GDP will be relatively higher than in country B.

Nominal GDP is a good way of comparing the crude economic size of various countries and regions, while GDP (PPP) is an attempt to measure the relative living standards between countries and regions. But this is also just an approximation, since it does not measure the distribution of personal income. For that, we have the Gini index, which measures the relative (in)equality of income distribution.

In other words, PPP factors in the high cost of living in mature markets as an economic disadvantage, while giving slightly more room to low-cost economies elsewhere. Think of it as the Peters projection of GDP models.

Who's number one: the U.S. or China?

The economy of the world, divided into a thousand hexagons.Credit: BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission

The difference is important, though, since the versions produce significantly different outcomes. The most salient one: on the nominal GDP map, the United States remains the world's largest economy. But on the PPP-adjusted GDP map, China takes the top spot. However, it is wrong to assume on this basis that China is the world's biggest economy.

As this article explains in some detail, PPP-adjusted GDP is not a good yardstick for comparing the size of economies – nominal GPD is the obvious measure for that. GDP (PPP) is an attempt to compare living standards; but even in that respect, it has its limitations. For example, $100 might buy you more in country B, but you might not be able to buy the stuff you can get in country A.

Both maps, shown below, are based on data from the IMF published in the first quarter of 2021. For the sake of brevity, we will have a closer look at the nominal GDP map and leave comparisons with the PPP map to you.

For the nominal map, global GDP is just over U.S. $93.86 trillion. That means each of the hexagons represents about U.S. $93.86 billion.

The worldwide overview clearly shows which three regions are the world's economic powerhouses. Despite the rise of East Asia (265 hexagons), North America (282) is still number one, with Europe (250) placing a close third. Added up, that's just three hexagons shy of 80 percent of the world's GDP. The remaining one-fifth of the world's economy is spread — rather thinly, by necessity — across Southeast Asia & Oceania (56), South Asia (41), the Middle East (38), South America (32), Africa (27), and North & Central Asia (9).

California über alles

California's economy is bigger than that of all of South America or Africa.Credit: BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission

Thanks to the hexagons, the maps get more interesting the closer you zoom in on them.

In North America, the United States (242) overshadows Canada (20) and Mexico (13); and within the U.S., California (37) outperforms not just all other states, but also most other countries — and a few continents — worldwide. To be fair, Texas (21), New York (20), Florida (13), and Illinois (10) also do better than many individual nations.

Interestingly, states that look the same on a "regular" map are way out of each others' leagues on this one. Missouri is four hexagons but Nebraska only one. Alabama has three but Mississippi only one.

The granularity of the map goes beyond the state level, showing (in red) the economic heft of certain Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs), within or across state lines. The New York City-Newark-Jersey City one is 20 hexagons, that is, 2 percent of the world's GDP. The Greater Toronto Area is five hexagons, a quarter of all of Canada. And Greater Mexico City is three hexagons. That's the same as the entire state of Oregon.

By comparison, South America (32) and Africa (27) are small fry on the GDP world map. But each little pond has its own big fish. In the former, it's Brazil (16), in particular, the state of São Paulo (5), which on its own is bigger than any other country in South America. In Africa, there is one regional leader each in the north, center, and south: Egypt (4), Nigeria (5), and South Africa (3), respectively.

Economically, Italy is bigger than Russia

Europe's "Big Five" represent three-fifths of the continent's GDP. The Asian part of the former Soviet Union is an economic afterthought.Credit: BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission

Europe is bewilderingly diverse, so it helps to focus on the "Big Five" economies: Germany (46), UK (33), France (31), Italy (22), and Spain (16). They comprise three-fifths of Europe's GDP.

Each of these five has one or more regional economic engines. In Germany, it's the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, and in France, it's Île de France (both 10). In the UK, it's obviously London (8), in Italy Lombardy (5), and in Spain, it's a photo-finish between Madrid and Catalonia (both 3).

Interesting about Europe's economies are the small countries that punch well above their geographic and/or demographic weight, such as the Netherlands (11) and Switzerland (9).

Slide across to Eastern Europe and things get pretty mono-hexagonal. Poland (7) stands out positively and Russia (18) negatively. The former superpower, spread out over two continents, has an economy smaller than Italy's. Three individual German states have a GDP larger than that of the Moscow Metropolitan Area (5), the seat and bulk of Russia's economic power.

China, the biggest fish in a big pond

Australia and South Korea's GDPs are about equal, and each is about a third of Japan's. But even put together, these three add up to barely half of China's economic weight.Credit: BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission

In the 1980s, the United States was wary of Japan's rise to global prominence. But as this map shows, that fear was misguided — or rather, slightly misdirected. It's China (177) that now dominates the region economically, putting even the land of the Rising Sun (57) in the shade. South Korea (19) and Taiwan (8) look a lot larger than on a "regular" map, but it's clear who rules the roost here.

Interestingly, China's hubs are mainly but not exclusively coastal. Yes, there's Guangdong (19), Jiangsu (18), and Shandong (13), plus a few other provinces with access to the sea. But the inland provinces of Henan (10), Sichuan (9), and Hubei (8) are economically as important as any mid-sized European country. Tibet (1) and Xinjiang (2), huge on the "regular" map, are almost invisible here.

In the ASEAN countries (36), Thailand (6), Singapore (4), and the Indonesian island of Java (7) stand out. Economically, Oceania is virtually synonymous with Australia (17) — sorry, New Zealand (3).

As for South Asia and the Middle East, India (32) is clearly the dominant player, outperforming near neighbors Bangladesh (4) and Pakistan (3), as well as more distant ones like Saudi Arabia (9), Turkey (8), and Iran (7). But that's cold comfort for a country that sees itself as a challenger to China's dominance.

The PPP-adjusted GDP world map looks slightly different from the nominal GDP one. China is the #1 country and East Asia the #1 region.Credit: BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission

Maps created by Reddit user BerryBlue_BlueBerry, reproduced with kind permission. For a closer look and for detailed rankings of the regions, check out both maps here at the MapPorn subreddit.

Strange Maps #1089

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• In the 1780s, as humanity mastered flight, a "balloon craze" swept across the world.
• Thomas Baldwin had just one sky-trip, but he wrote an entire book about it — Airopaidia.
• At times lyrical and technical, the curious volume also includes the world's first aerial maps.

An exact Representation of Mr. Lunardi's New Balloon, as it ascended with Himself – 13 May 1785.Credit: Public Domain Review / Public domain

On 8 September 1785, Thomas Baldwin saw something nobody had ever seen before: the English city of Chester and its surroundings from above. And then he did something nobody had ever done before: he produced maps of what he saw — the very first aerial maps in history. They're included in Airopaidia, a curious book that devotes hundreds of pages to Baldwin's one and only balloon trip.

People have been flying planes for 117 years. But the history of human flight goes back another 120 years before the Wright Brothers' first airplane ride at Kitty Hawk. On 21 November 1783, a balloon manufactured by the Montgolfier brothers took off near Paris, transporting two passengers 5.5 miles through the air in 25 minutes.

Balloonapalooza

Almost immediately, the first manned flight set off a "balloon craze" throughout Europe. Balloonists travelled from city to city, attracting large crowds with their "flying circuses" (hence, the term well-known to Monty Python fans). The novel apparitions caused some to faint, others to vomit. Destruction and rioting were not uncommon.

Certainly spectacular, ballooning itself was not without danger. Pilâtre de Rozier, one of the two passengers on the first montgolfière, died in June 1785 while attempting to cross the English Channel, when his balloon caught fire.

Lamenting the "balloonomania" of his day, novelist Horace Walpole complained that "all our views are directed to the air; balloons occupy senators, philosophers, ladies, everybody." He hoped that these "new mechanic meteors" would not be "converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science."

The first British balloonist was a remarkable Scotsman named James Tytler, who on 27 August 1784 managed a 10-minute flight in a hot air balloon just outside Edinburgh.

A jack of all trades, Tytler was also a pharmacist, surgeon, printer, poet, pamphleteer, and editor of the second edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Less tastefully, he was the anonymous author of Ranger's Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh, a review of 66 of the city's prostitutes.

Tytler's ballooning exploits fizzled out, and he was soon overshadowed by the flamboyant Vincenzo Lunardi, the "Daredevil Aeronaut."

The Daredevil Aeronaut

On 15 September 1784 — hardly a month after Tytler — Lunardi took off from the Artillery Ground in Finsbury on the first balloon flight in England. In attendance were the Prince of Wales and 200,000 other Londoners.

Lunardi was accompanied by a dog, cat, and caged pigeon. Flying north, he briefly touched down at Welham Green in a place still called "Balloon Corner." There, he released the cat, as he thought it had become unwell from the cold. Minus the feline, Lunardi took off again. England's first manned flight came to an end in a field near Standon Green End, 24 miles north of Finsbury. A memorial stone still marks the spot.

The next year, Lunardi toured England and Scotland with his Grand Air Balloon, drawing large crowds everywhere. Many of his flights were spectacular but not all were a success. On one of his Scottish flights, he drifted off over the North Sea and crashed into the waves. He was only rescued thanks to a passing fishing boat.

The Lunardi Balloon Stone in a field in Standon Green End, Hertfordshire, marking the end point of the first manned flight in England. Credit: PSParrot, licensed under CC BY 2.0

On 8 September, Lunardi's flying circus arrived in Chester, and here, Thomas Baldwin enters the play. Baldwin was a local clergyman's son and sometime curate himself. He was more interested in science than religion, though, and had lately gone completely balloon-crazy. In December of the previous year, he had proposed building a "Grand Naval Air-balloon," complete with sails, oars, and a rudder. Nothing came of it.

Nevertheless, Baldwin had a healthy belief in his own relevance for the ballooning industry. He in fact contended, at one point, that French balloonists had stolen his ideas and that "montgolfières," as hot-air balloons were then called, should rightly be known as "baldwins."

Baldwin's flight

Before his take-off in Chester, Lunardi burned himself on the acid used to make the hydrogen for the balloon. Because of his injury, he couldn't make the ascent himself, so he agreed to rent out his Grand Air Balloon to Baldwin instead. And with that unbelievable stroke of luck, Baldwin lifted off from Chester Castle at 1:40 pm on 8 September 1785, for his first (and only) trip between the clouds. The new-fangled aeronaut certainly came well equipped. Baldwin brought tools for writing and sketching, a speaking trumpet, half a mile of twine, a hardboard map (which could also serve as a table), and — as apparently was de rigueur among balloonists — a pigeon.

Once aloft, Baldwin conducted several experiments. He used inflated bladders to get a sense of differences in air pressure, and he sampled various foods to find out whether they would taste differently high up in the air. (They did not, despite testimonials to the contrary reported from "the Peak of Tenerife" in Spain.)

Toward the end of his journey, Baldwin was forced to climb up on the rigging of the balloon to fix a stuck valve to release gas so he could descend. The balloon eventually came down at Belleair Farm in Rixton, 25 miles northeast of Chester, seven minutes shy of 4 pm.

A view from the balloon at its greatest elevation. In the center, the city of Chester in Cheshire.Credit: Internet Archive / Public domain.

After barely two hours in the air, Baldwin is a man transformed. He sets down his experiences in Airopaidia, which is published the next year. Filling out 362 pages, it's as much a gushing eyewitness report as it is a detailed scientific account of his trip — plus advice to future "aeronauts."

Much to his chagrin, not much has been made of Baldwin's contributions to ballooning. Yet this one-shot amateur did produce a few firsts.

The first true aerial maps

He appears to have been the first to observe the "pilot's glory," a halo that appears around the shadow of a person's head. This is the result of sunlight refracting on tiny water droplets in the atmosphere.

He was also the first to map out what he saw from a balloon. Bird's eye perspectives were nothing new in cartography. Mapmakers often represented cities from elevated perspectives in order to better show the layout of streets, for example. Leonardo da Vinci even pioneered the "satellite view," drawing a plan of the city of Imola in 1502 as if from straight above.

These, however, were works of the imagination. Baldwin's maps were the first aerial maps made from actual observation. And here, the maps say more than a thousand words could. Lunardi, when he observed London from above, had to admit: "I can find no simile to convey an idea of it."

A balloon prospect from above the clouds, showing cities, rivers, fields, and coastline.Credit: Internet Archive / Public domain.

Baldwin included three maps, two of which were colored, in Airopaidia:

• A circular view of Chester, as observed from the balloon's greatest elevation.
• A "Specimen of Balloon Geography," showing the area between Chester and Warrington from above the clouds.
• The balloon over Helsby-Hill in Cheshire.

Baldwin even gave his readers specific instructions on how to enjoy his maps to the fullest: roll up a piece of paper and peer over them as if through a telescope. For Baldwin and his fellow balloonists, flight among the clouds represented the height — quite literally — of the "Sublime," a Romantic notion that married the esthetic to the ecstatic.

As he related on pp. 37-38 of Airopaidia:

But what Scenes of Grandeur and Beauty!

A Tear of pure Delight flaſhed in his Eye! Of pure and exquiſite Delight and Rapture; to look down on the unexpected Change already wrought in the Works of Art and Nature, contracted to a Span by the NEW PERSPECTIVE, diminiſhed almoſt beyond the Bounds of Credibility.

Yet ſo far were the Objects from loſing their Beauty, that EACH WAS BROUGHT UP in a new Manner to the Eye, and diſtinguiſhed by a Strength of Colouring, a Neatneſs and Elegance of Boundary, above Descriptions charming!

The endleſs Variety of Objects, minute, distinct and ſeparate, tho' apparently on the ſame Plain or Level, at once ſtriking the Eye without a Change of its Position, aſtoniſhed and enchanted. Their Beauty was unparalleled. The Imagination itſelf was more than gratified; it was overwhelmed.

The gay Scene was Fairy-Land, and Cheſter Lilliput.

He tried his Voice and ſhouted for Joy. His Voice was unknown to himſelf, ſhrill and feeble. There was no Echo.

A popped balloon

Toward the end of the decade, the ballooning craze died down. Following a deadly accident involving an onlooker in 1786, Lunardi left Britain for Italy, Spain, and Portugal. At the mercy of the winds, balloons lacked any obvious practical application, military or otherwise. And with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Europe had enough to occupy its attention for the next quarter century. According to one compiler, by 1836, no more than 313 people had taken to the skies in England.

By then, the flying circuses were things of the past. Baldwin died in 1804, never having flown again. But the excitement of those days still gushes from his Airopaidia, and the maps it contains remain a unique milestone in the history of ballooning — and cartography.

A map showing the route of Baldwin's flight, from Chester Castle (circled, bottom) to Rixton Moss (circled, top).Credit: Internet Archive / Public domain.

View the entire Airopaidia on the Internet Archive.

Strange Maps #1088

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• Manhattan's street grid is famously regular and predictable. What if you extended it across the globe?
• This web tool does exactly that, and in the process, turning New York into the world's first, last, and only "planetary city."
• But grids are square, and the world is not. Somewhere in Uzbekistan, global Manhattan goes haywire.

Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Add a few zeroes to the address, and it could be yours. Credit: Jeremy Keith, CC BY-SA 2.0

Can't afford to live in New York? Yes, you can, and it won't even cost you a penny. In fact, you don't even have to move there. The Manhattan gridiron will come to you instead!

New York, but from the comfort of your own home

A nifty website called ExtendNY has rolled out the iconic street grid across the entire planet. You can now enjoy a real New York address at the corner of Such-and-such Street and This-and-that Avenue from the comfort of your own home.

New York may no longer be the biggest city in the world – Tokyo snatched that title somewhere in the second half of the 20th century – but the Big Apple still has a better claim than most other cities to be the Capital of the World.

It's a city built by immigrants, home to people of every persuasion and complexion, speaking languages from all across the globe. Countless screens reflect the city's skyline, cityscape, and frenetic energy back to the rest of the world.

Even first-time visitors feel oddly at home between the familiar bridges, yellow cabs, and skyscrapers of Manhattan. Plenty of locally-set movies and series – in turn glitzy or gritty – have seen to that.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson – born in New York, by the way – hasn't really left the city: Number 10 Downing Street also has a Manhattan-style address.Credit: ExtendNY

So it feels weirdly appropriate that ExtendNY, devised in 2011 by Harold Cooper, should allow New York to cover the entire planet and become not just the capital of the world, but a synonym for the world itself. New York is the first, last, and only planetary city the planet needs.

Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel, New York socialites

As a result, a lot of famous addresses the world over get an equally iconic New York one as well. The British Prime Minister, currently Boris Johnson, famously works out of Number 10 Downing Street in London. Ah yes, but that's also on the corner of 63,708th Street and E 10,894th Avenue in New York.

His opposite number in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel, resides in the Bundeskanzleramt, overlooking the river Spree in Berlin. Or, when she daydreams of a slightly different life: the corner of 75,490th Street and E 11,126 Avenue in New York.

A new meaning to the Upper East Side

Can't get away from New York. Even the top of Mount Everest is a street corner in the Big Apple. Credit: ExtendNY

Even natural features don't escape global New York. The top of Mount Everest, on the border of China and Nepal? The corner of 96,104th Street and 67,128th Avenue. The actual North Pole? The map looks a bit funny, but the address is credible enough: the corner of 58,725th Street and 12,993 Avenue.

Similarly, the Eiffel Tower, the Ka'aba in Mecca, or your own place – all are now distant suburbs of NYC.

Uzbekistan: the nexus of the universe

The weirdest bit of global New York is a place in Uzbekistan, where a street reduced to a single point intersects with all the avenues. Credit: ExtendNY

Because the grid is rectangular and the earth is not, there are a few points where Global New York runs into bizarro territory. In remotest Uzbekistan, ExtendNY's gridiron arrives at a strange point, where the succession of streets have condensed into one that consists only of a single point – 127,001st Street – which intersects with all of Global New York's Avenues. That mind-bending street corner is mirrored by a similar opposite in the South Pacific. As Kramer suggested, this could be the nexus of the universe — in Global New York, anyway.

Although Manhattan's grid may strike us as thoroughly modern, gridded cities are by no means a recent invention. In French, a grid plan is called a plan hippodamien, after the ancient Greek architect Hippodamus of Miletus (5th century BC), a.k.a. the 'father of European urban planning'.

The loneliness of Stuyvesant Street

However, like most cities in the Old World, the oldest ones in the New World grew up unplanned. In New Amsterdam, which occupied the southern tip of Manhattan, the streets followed old native trails, cow paths, and property lines, and generally the lay of the land.

Stuyvesant Street is a poignant and lonely relic of one of several attempts to impose order on that chaos. Sitting awkwardly between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, it is one of the very few streets in Manhattan to be aligned almost perfectly east to west.

In the late 18th century, the City commissioned Casimir Goerck to subdivide its Common Lands, in the middle of Manhattan, into sellable lots. Goerck's name is now largely forgotten, quite literally. The small street in the Lower East Side that once carried his name was rebranded Baruch Place in 1933. But his plan, in the words of historian Gerard Koeppel, is "modern Manhattan's Rosetta Stone."

Goerck oriented streets 29 degrees east of due north, in order to align with the shape of the island itself, and devised a standard of five-acre blocks, two features which would come back in the famous Commissioners' Plan of 1811. Goerck's East, Middle and West Roads would become 4th, 5th, and 6th Avenues. In fact, the Commissioners' Plan is essentially an expansion of Goerck's grid laid out over the Common Lands.

An 1807 map of the Commissioners' Plan, clearly showing the planned city blocks extending from North Street (circled, left) to 155th Street (circled, right). Credit: Harper's New Monthly Magazine (June 1893), public domain.

The Plan proposed a city grid north of Lower Manhattan, from Houston Street (pronounced "house-ton" and not "hyoos-ton", by the way; then appropriately called "North Street") up to 155th Street – with two exceptions:

• Greenwich Village, then independent from New York City, was excluded – hence the visibly different orientation of the streets in "the Village."
• 10th Avenue went well beyond 155th Street, all the way up to the northern tip of Manhattan.

The Commission adopted Goerck's gridiron as the most practical layout for the city, as "straight-sided and right-angled houses are the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in." In its predictability and repetition, the gridiron was a reflection of "republican" values such as plainness and uniformity, order, and equity.

In all, the Plan created about 2,000 city blocks. It took about 60 years for that grid to be filled in – but alterations were made, the biggest of which was the establishment of Central Park. Created in 1857 and completed in 1876, it runs from 59th up to 110th street, and from Fifth to Eight Avenues. It takes up 843 acres or just over 6 percent of the entire island of Manhattan.

From the 1860s onward, the grid was essentially extended northward, despite the fact that the difficult terrain necessitated some alterations.

Manhattan, Sartre's "Great American Desert"

Broadway, which originally only went up to 10th Street, was eventually joined up with other roads north, until it reached Spuyten Duyvil at the top of Manhattan in 1899. Its angled intersections with the grid helped create some of New York's most emblematic open spaces, including Times Square, Madison Square, and Union Square.

Walt Whitman (pictured here around 1870, about 50 years old) could wax lyrical about New York (see Strange Maps #842: Whitman Poem Transformed into a Map of Brooklyn), but wasn't a fan of the grid. Credit: From Henry Bryan Binns: A Life of Walt Whitman (1902), public domain.

From the start, the plan had come in for harsh criticism. In more recent times, it's been praised as visionary. Here are some put-downs by famous voices:

• Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher famous for his observations of the newly independent U.S., criticized the Plan's "relentless monotony."
• Poet and journalist Walt Whitman wrote that "our perpetual dead flat and streets cutting each other at right angles, are certainly the last thing in the world consistent with beauty of situation."
• And architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who would go on to design Central Park, lamented that "no city is more unfortunately planned with reference to metropolitan attractiveness."
• "Rectangular New York," in the words of writer Edith Wharton, is "this cramped horizontal gridiron of a town without towers, porticoes, fountains or perspectives, hide-bound in its deadly uniformity of mean ugliness."
• Lamenting its "deadly monotony", architect Frank Lloyd Wright called the grid a "man trap of gigantic dimensions."
• In his essay on New York called "Manhattan: The Great American Desert," French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that "amid the numerical anonymity of streets and avenues, I am simply anyone, anywhere, since one place is so like another. I am never astray, but always lost."

Piet Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) is "an optical vibration that jumps from intersection to intersection like traffic on the streets of New York."Credit: public domain; the picture is part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

• In his 1987 book Delirious New York, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas called it "the most courageous act of prediction on Western civilization."
• Earlier, his fellow Dutchman, the artist Piet Mondrian, had transferred his admiration for the vibrancy of the grid to canvas, as Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43).
• The Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly called it "the best manifestation of American pragmatism in the creation of urban form."
• Hilary Ballon, curator of "The Greatest Grid" on the occasion of its bicentennial in 2011, said that "New York's street system creates such transparency and accessibility that the grid serves as metaphor for the openness of New York itself."
• "It may not be every urban planner's beau ideal, but as a machine for urban living, the grid is pretty perfect," said economist Edward Glaeser.
• Not all French philosophers hated Manhattan. "This is the purpose of New York's geometry," wrote Roland Barthes: "that each individual should be poetically the owner of the capital of the world."

Welcome to / Bienvenue à Haussmanhattan

It's doubtful whether it was Barthes' words that spurred Mr. Cooper to devise his web tool; but thanks to ExtendNY, every place on earth is now a poetic extension of the capital of the world.

For another example of Manhattan's global appeal, check out Haussmanhattan, a visual project by architect/photographer Luis Fernandes that mashes up the early 20th-century architectures of New York and Paris, after the latter's renovation by Georges-Eugène Haussmann.

Manhattan's Flatiron Building fits in well at the pointier end of the Île de la Cité at the center of Paris. Credit: Haussmanhattan, by Luis Fernandes.

Check out ExtendNY here. For a slightly less ambitious plan to extend New York, check out Strange Maps #486: The Failed Plan to Build a "Really Greater New York".

Strange Maps #1087

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• Long a delicacy in China and East Asia, sea cucumbers are now also becoming a rarity worldwide.
• India has outlawed the trade, inaugurated a marine reserve, and put together a law enforcement task force.
• But the trade remains legal in Sri Lanka, which has become the hub for widespread "seafood laundering."

Adam's (or Rama's) Bridge between India (left) and Sri Lanka, as captured from the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1994.Credit: NASA, public domain.

The string of limestone islands slung between India and Sri Lanka was once a bridge built by Rama to retrieve his wife held hostage on the island; or, it was crossed by Adam on his flight from Eden — depending on which epic you prefer.

To the north, the shallows of the Palk Bay eventually become the Bay of Bengal. To the south, the Gulf of Mannar is the antechamber of the Indian Ocean. Formerly fertile fishing grounds, both bodies of water are now hotbeds of a relatively recent kind of marine-based misdeed: sea cucumber crime.

Crimes against sea cucumbers

As this map indicates, the number of criminal incidents in both India and Sri Lanka involving sea cucumbers has increased from no more than eight in 2015 to no less than 58 in 2020. In other words: it's a crime spree!

While most cases are concentrated on either side of Rama's (or Adam's) Bridge, the most recent wave has also touched Lakshadweep, the cluster of small islands that constitutes one of the union territories of India to the west of its mainland (and on the left on this map).

Like their terrestrial namesakes, sea cucumbers are tubular creatures. But that's where the comparison ends. Sea cucumbers are animal, not vegetal. Some grow up to six feet long. And while you can get a land cucumber for under a dollar at the supermarket, a kilo of sea cucumbers will easily set you back hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars.

Also known as sea slugs or sea leeches, sea cucumbers are a family of about 1,450 different species worldwide and are cousins to sea stars, sand dollars, and other echinoderms. Eyeless and limbless, they do have a mouth and an anus, and these they put to good use: by recycling waste into nutrients, they excrete key ingredients (to the tune of five Eiffel Towers' worth per reef per year) for coral reefs and help slow the acidification of the oceans.

For centuries, sea cucumbers have also been a sought-after delicacy and used as a dubious medicinal ingredient in China and Southeast Asia. Sea cucumbers are eaten dried, fried, pickled, or raw; as an accompaniment to Chinese cabbage or shiitake mushrooms; spiced and mixed with meat or other seafood; and used in soups, stews, and stir-fries. In traditional medicine, they're believed to help against arthritis, impotence, cancer, and frequent urination. They're also used in oils, creams, tinctures, and cosmetics.

Eye-wateringly expensive: the dragon-like Japanese sea cucumber (Stichopus japonica).Credit: harum.koh and licensed under cc by-sa 2.0

An exploding sea cucumber market

In the past, sea cucumbers were the preserve of the very rich, who presented each other with ornate boxes of the luxury product in dried form. However, the burgeoning of China's middle classes since the 1980s has led to an exponential increase in demand, with ripple effects all over the world.

In the 1980s, a kilo of sea cucumbers (or bêche-de-mer or trepang, if you're into the whole culinary nomenclature thing) would set you back about $70. Now, it's closer to $300 and up to $3,500 for the rarer species — for example the Japanese sea cucumber, whose spikes make it look like a dragon.

Since then, global populations of the most expensive species have dropped by as much as 60 percent. As the net gets emptier, it is cast wider. From 1996 to 2011, the number of countries exporting sea cucumbers rose from 35 to 83. But the sea cucumber populations simply can't handle that much strain. In the sea cucumber fields off Yucatan, for example, yields dropped by 95 percent from 2012 to 2014. And between 2000 and 2016, standing stocks of various sea cucumber species near the Egyptian Red Sea port of Abu Ghosoun fell by 87 percent due to overfishing.

The sea cucumber crime wave has increased, both in numbers and area, now also reaching Lakshadweep (in the west).Credit: Phelps Bondaroff/Katapult Magazin, reproduced with kind permission.

The seafood mafia

As sea cucumbers get rarer, they get more valuable, which in turn encourages more illegal fishing. The average global price went up by 17 percent from 2011 to 2016. That drives the competition for the remaining specimens to dangerous heights — or rather, depths. According to the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute in Kochi (Kerala, India), the species dwelling in shallow waters have been depleted to such an extent that divers are now targeting those in deeper waters. Without proper gear and training, that is potentially deadly. And not just in Indian waters. Back in Yucatan, at least 40 divers have lost their lives harvesting sea cucumbers, most from decompression sickness.

The situation in the waters off India and Sri Lanka is complicated by both countries' different legal approaches to sea cucumber scarcity. In 2001, India banned the trade and export of sea cucumbers. As per Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act, they now enjoy the same level of protection as India's lions and tigers.

Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, which has seen its sea cucumber grounds to the south and east collapse and shrink to just the northern side of the island, fishing for sea cucumbers remains legal but is subject to licenses to try to prevent overexploitation.

Having a legal market for sea cucumbers right next to an illegal one offers the "seafood mafia" two lucrative courses of action. First, harvest the dwindling stock of sea cucumbers right from under the noses of the Sri Lankan divers and fishermen. Second, smuggle the illegally caught ones from India into Sri Lanka, where they can be sold as if they were caught legally — a form of "seafood laundering," if you will.

Braised shark"s fin, sea cucumber and shiitake mushroomCredit: avixyz and licensed under cc by-sa 2.0

As the map shows, both countries are stepping up their efforts against sea cucumber crime. Moreover, in 2020, Lakshadweep inaugurated the Dr. K.K. Mohammed Koya Sea Cucumber Conservation Reserve. Centered on the Cheripanyi Reef, an uninhabited atoll, the 239-km2 (149-mi2) reserve is the first of its kind in the world.

The union territory also set up a Sea Cucumber Protection Task Force, which has seized considerable amounts of illegally harvested sea cucumbers, including a haul of 1,716 creatures weighing a total of 882 kg (almost a ton), which could have netted as much as 42.6 million rupees ($854,000) on the market.

Save the sea cucumbers!

While conservation efforts are commendable, the increasing scarcity and rising prices of sea cucumbers will continue to prove irresistible to the seafood mafia. There is some hope in aquaculture, with projects underway in China and elsewhere. However, only a small share of sea cucumber larvae make it into adulthood, a process that can last up to six years.

Sea cucumbers recently also have appeared on the radar of multinational pharmaceutical companies. It may yet turn out that some of their reputed medicinal qualities are more than just folk tales, and some chemicals they contain could help treat cancer and joint pain. It remains to be seen whether this additional source of attention will be a lifeline for the sea cucumbers or the kiss of death.

The world's first sea cucumber reserve in Lakshadweep, off India.Credit: Government of India, Union Territory of Lakshadweep, Department of Environment & Forest.

For more great maps, and to improve your German, check out Katapult Magazin (partially available in English).

Original data for the Katapult map from a paper by Dr. Teale Phelps Bondaroff, titled Sea cucumber crime in India and Sri Lanka during the period 2015–2020.

Strange Maps #1086

Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• The Swiss are not known for their sense of humor, but perhaps we've not been looking hard enough.
• Over the decades, Swiss cartographers have sprinkled plenty of "Easter eggs" across otherwise serious maps.
• The oldest one, a naked lady, has been removed — but the marmot, the haunted monk, and others are still there.

Switzerland? Pretty, yes. Funny? No. Or is it?Credit: Sam Ferrara / public domain

Swiss humor. Now there's two words you don't often see together. In fact, Google Trends lists zero occurrences of the phrase between 2004 and now. Even "German humor" produces a graph (albeit a rather flat one). But not only is there some evidence that Swiss comedy does exist, it might just be that being well-hidden is kind of its thing. Find it and laugh. Or don't, and the joke's on you!

That evidence, as it turns out, is cartographic. The Swiss Federal Office of National Topography, Swisstopo for short, is a decidedly serious institution. Many serious things — time and money, for starters — depend on the accuracy of its maps. In the case of its mountain maps, actual lives hang in the balance. Yet in decades past, the austere institute's maps have served as the canvas for a series of in-jokes among its more fun-loving cartographers.

These mapmakers played a game of wits against their superiors, the ones whose duties included checking the maps before publication. Over the years, the cartographers managed to slip in — on maps that were supposed to contain only dry topographic facts — drawings of an airplane, a fish, a marmot, a mountaineer, a face, a spider, even of a naked lady. Once discovered, these humorous additions were removed without pardon. At least, that's how it used to be.

Either way, it doesn't matter. Swisstopo is defeated by its own thoroughness. Its map page allows you not just to zoom in and out of the most recent maps but also to browse historical maps and thus revisit these "Easter eggs" that prove, however obliquely, the existence of a sense of humor among the mountains of Switzerland.

The plane that disappeared — twice

The craft's first appearance on the 1994 map (circled, left), and its absence on the most recent map (2018).Credit: Swisstopo

In 1994, an anonymous cartographer at Swisstopo included an airplane in this map of Kloten, the international airport of Zürich. While it may seem only natural for airplanes to show up at airports, that is normally not the case on topographic maps.

The error remained undetected until a revision of the map in 2000, when the offending craft was erased. However, the plane reappeared on the 2007 map at exactly the same spot – the tarmac before Gate A – only to vanish again in 2013.

The Naked Lady of Künten

The abstract figure appeared in 1954 (circled, left), but she was clearly inspired by the area's actual topography (2018, right).Credit: Swisstopo

Possibly the oldest topographical Easter egg, and the current record holder for the longest-lasting one, is the Naked Lady of Künten. First appearing on the topographical map of 1954, the reclining figure wasn't discovered until 2012. Admittedly, without head, arms and feet, she is hard to spot. Her odalisque-like forms are suggested by the curvature of a stream and an elongated green patch indicating vegetation.

The world — or at least that bit between Eggenrain and Sunnenberg — was put to right again in the 2013 edition of the local map. But it's still easy to see how that particular distribution of topographic features could have inspired a lonely 1950s cartographer to pencil in something that wasn't there.

A Swiss fish in a French lake

In 1980, a giant fish appeared at the southern end of a French lake (left). By 1986, it had been caught (right, the 2018 map).Credit: Swisstopo

It was never discovered who reshaped the aforementioned landscape feature into a female form. But the younger generation of Easter-eggers is known by name.

In 1980, Werner Leuenberger even went international. He drew a fish at the southern end of the Lac de Remoray, a small lake just across the Franco-Swiss border. The fish felt right at home among the lines marking out the area as swampy. However, it was caught five years later, and has been left off the map since 1986.

Attack of the giant Eiger spider

This giant spider (left, 1981 map) survived for half a dozen years near the top of the Eiger (spider-free, 2018 map).Credit: Swisstopo

In 1981, Othmar Wyss inserted a spider near the top of the Eiger, one of Switzerland's most iconic Alpine summits, at a location actually known by mountaineers as quite dangerous.

The giant spider survived for six years in the freezing cold. The snowfield that made up the spider's body — and made the northern approach of the Eiger so hard — has apparently also disappeared in the intervening years.

Haunted monk trapped in a map

The 1979 map (left), a year before the addition of the eerie face (right).Credit: Swisstopo

A rock formation on a slope of the Harder Kulm, a mountain near Interlaken, looks like a face. This is the Hardermandli, or "little Harder man." Legend has it that he was a lecherous monk, condemned to look down on the place where he chased a girl to her death.

Cartographer Friedrich Siegfried extended the curse to cartography, for since 1980 and until this day, the Hardermandli also lives on the map.

Beats waiting for the Italians

Another case of a map gag surviving to this day. Left, the unadorned mountain flank on a 1996 map; right, the mountaineer as he can be seen climbing toward Switzerland now. Credit: Swisstopo

For the 1997 map update, Mr. Siegfried etched the likeness of a mountaineer on the Italian side of a mountain slope near Val Müstair. Reportedly, he got tired of waiting on the data for the area, which his Italian counterparts were slow to provide, so he found a creative way to plug the gap. Topography, like nature, also abhors a vacuum, apparently.

Swisstopo seems to have taken to heart the cartographer's slight against his Italian colleagues, because the mountaineer still appears on the contemporary map, in 1:100,000 scale at least.

The marmot of the Aletsch glacier

What the area of the Aletsch glacier looked like until 2010 (left), and how it's changed since (right, 2018 map). Both maps 1:25,000.Credit: Swisstopo

Swisstopo's most famous map gag — or at least the most recent one to be revealed, in 2014 — is the marmot, which has been hiding in a rock near the Aletsch glacier since it was put there by cartographer Paul Ehrlich in 2011, shortly before his retirement. The marmot is still there, and perhaps it and its fellow map oddities may be allowed to survive.

On its website, Swisstopo says that "these hidden drawings do not affect the accuracy and level of detail of our maps, nor on the safety and security of their users. They merely add a note of mystery to our nation's maps."

Are there any other gags hidden in the official maps of Switzerland? Swisstopo itself claims it has no knowledge of any other cartographic oddities. But knowing and not telling, that's exactly the kind of thing they would find funny, isn't it?

Strange Maps #1085

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• In 1882, Josias R. King made a mess of mapping Coddington Lake, making it larger than it actually is.
• For decades, Minnesota loggers left the local trees alone, thinking they were under water.
• Today, the area is one of the last remaining patches of old-growth forest in the state.

Vanishingly rare, but it exists: a patch of Minnesota forest untouched by the logger's axe.Credit: Dan Alosso on Substack and licensed under CC-BY-SA

The trees here tower a hundred feet above the forest floor — a ceiling as high as in prehistory and vanishingly rare today. That's because no logger's axe has ever touched these woods.

Pillars of the green cathedral

As you walk among the giant pillars of this green cathedral, you might think you're among the redwood trees of California. But those are 1,500 miles (2,500 km) away. No, these are the red and white pines of the "Lost Forty" in Minnesota. This is the largest single surviving patch of old-growth forest in the state and a fair stretch beyond. And it's all thanks to a surveying error.

Despite its name, the Lost Forty Scientific and Natural Area (SNA) is actually 144 acres (0.58 km2) in total. Still, it's an easily overlooked part of the Chippewa National Forest, which sprawls across 666,000 acres (2,700 km2) of north-central Minnesota. And that – being easily overlooked – is kind of this area's superpower.

In the 1820s, when European-Americans arrived in what is now Minnesota, they found about 20 million acres (80,000 km2) of prairie and 30 million acres (120,000 km2) of forest. Two centuries on, both ecosystems largely have been depleted. Fewer than 100,000 acres (400 km2) of natural prairie remain, and fewer than 18 million acres (73,000 km2) of forest.

And today's woods are different. They're not just younger; the original pine stands have been harvested and largely replaced with aspen and birch.

Can a place really be "lost" if it has a sign pointing toward it? Credit: Tony Webster via Flickr and licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

To the moon and back

White pine especially was in heavy demand during the lumbering boom that had Minnesota in its grip by the 1840s — a boom driven by an insatiable demand for building materials and supercharged by the steam that powered the saws and the rails that transported the goods to market.

The two decades flanking the turn of the 20th century were the golden age of lumbering in Minnesota. At any given time, 20,000 lumberjacks were at work in the woods, a further 20,000 in the sawmills, and another 20,000 in other lumber-related industries.

Production peaked in the year 1900, with over 2.3 billion board-feet (5.4 million m3) of lumber harvested from the state's forests. That was enough to build 600,000 two-story houses or a boardwalk nine feet (2.7 m) wide, circling Earth along the equator. From then on, yields declined, albeit slightly at first. By 1910, however, the first lumber operations started packing up and moving on to the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere.

Minnesota's era of Big Timber symbolically came to an end with the closure of the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company in 1929. At that time, a century's worth of lumbering in Minnesota had produced 68 billion board-feet (160 million m3) of pine — enough to fill a line of boxcars all the way to the moon and halfway back again.

Now spool back a few decades. It's 1882, and the Public Land Survey is measuring, mapping, and quantifying the wilderness of northern Minnesota — and its as yet unharvested north woods. Setting out from the small settlement of Grand Rapids, Josias Redgate King leads a three-man survey team 40 miles north, into the backwoods.

Mapping error becomes cartographic fact

Their job, specifically, is to chart the area between Moose and Coddington Lakes. And they mess up. Perhaps it's the lousy November weather, the desolate swampy terrain, or both. But they make a serious mistake: their survey stretches Coddington Lake half a mile further northwest than it actually exists. As happens surprisingly often with mapping mistakes, the error becomes cartographic fact, undisputed for decades.

The area is marked on all maps as being under water and is therefore excluded from the considerations of logging companies. Only in 1960 is the area re-surveyed and the error corrected. But by then, as we have seen, Big Timber has moved on from the Gopher State.

Map of the "Lost Forty" SNA (top right). Bordering it on the south is the Chippewa National Forest Unique Biological Area. Credit: Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

Incidentally, Josias R. King was more than the mismapper of Coddington Lake. He has another, and rather better, claim to fame. When the Civil War broke out, Minnesota was the first state to offer volunteers to fight for the Union. At Fort Snelling, Mr. King rushed to the front of a line of men waiting to sign up.

So it was said, with some justification, that he was the first volunteer for the Union in all of the country. During the war, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel. After, he returned to his civilian job, surveying. Because of his credentials as the Union's first volunteer, he was asked to pose for the face of the bronze soldier on the Civil War monument which was unveiled at St. Paul's Summit Park in 1903.

The loggers' loss is nature's gain

But back to the Lost Forty. The loggers' loss — hence the name — is actually nature's gain. The SNA's crowning glory, literally, is nearly 32 acres of designated old-growth red pine and white pine forest, in two stands, partially extending into the Chippewa National Forest proper. (In fact, much of the mismapped area seems to fall within the Chippewa National Forest Unique Biological Area adjacent to the Lost Forty.) Old-growth forests represent less than 2 percent — and designated old-growth forests less than 0.25 percent — of all of Minnesota's forests.

The oldest pine trees in the Lost Forty are between 300 and 400 years old, close to their maximum natural life span, which is up to 500 years. Similar pines in other parts of the National Forest are harvested at between 80 and 150 years for pulp and lumber. As a result, the pines in the Lost Forty are not only higher than most of the surrounding woods but also bigger with a diameter of between 22 and 48 inches (55 to 122 cm). One of the biggest has a circumference of 115 inches (2.9 m).

With their craggy bark, massive trunks, and dizzying height, these trees look like the ancient beings they are. And they exist in a cluster the size of which is unique for the Midwest. There's nothing lost about these trees; in fact, it's rather the reverse. Perhaps the area should more precisely be called the "Last Forty."

At 52 feet, only half as high as an old-growth white pine: Josias R. King's likeness atop the Soldier's Monument in Summit Park, St. Paul.Credit: Library of Congress

Get a good look at the Lost Forty in this video of the local hiking trail.

Strange Maps #1084

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• People have been digging up limestone and gypsum from below Paris since Roman times.
• They left behind a vast network of corridors and galleries, since reused for many purposes — most famously, the Catacombs.
• Soon, the ancient labyrinth may find a new lease of life, providing a sustainable form of air conditioning.

Ancient mining areas below Paris for limestone (red) and gypsum (green).Credit: Émile Gérards (1859–1920) / Public domain

"If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless."

China Miéville's fantasy novel Un Lun Dun is set in an eerie mirror version of London. In it, he hints that other cities have similar doubles. On the list that he offhandedly rattles off, Paris stands out. Because the City of Light really does have a twisted sister. Below Paris Overground is Paris Underground, the City of Darkness.

Most people will have heard of the Catacombs of Paris: subterranean charnel houses for the bones of around six million dead Parisians. They are one of the French capital's most famous tourist attractions – and undoubtedly its grisliest.

But they constitute only a small fragment of what the locals themselves call les carrières de Paris ("the mines of Paris"), a collection of tunnels and galleries up to 300 km (185 miles) long, most of which are off-limits to the public, yet eagerly explored by so-called cataphiles.

The Grand Réseau Sud ("Great Southern Network") takes up around 200 km beneath the 5th, 6th, 14th, and 15th arrondissements (administrative districts), all south of the river Seine. Smaller networks run beneath the 12th, 13th, and 16th arrondissements. How did they get there?

Paris stone and plaster of Paris

It all starts with geology. Sediments left behind by ancient seas created large deposits of limestone in the south of the city, mostly south of the Seine; and gypsum in the north, particularly in the hills of Montmartre and Ménilmontant. Highly sought after as building materials, both have been mined since Roman times.

The limestone is also known as Lutetian limestone (Lutetia is the Latin name for ancient Paris) or simply "Paris stone." It has been used for many famous Paris landmarks, including the Louvre and the grand buildings erected during Georges-Eugène Haussmann's large-scale remodelling of the city in the mid-19th century. The stone's warm, yellowish color provides visual unity and a bright elegance to the city.

The fine-powdered gypsum of northern Paris, used for making quick-setting plaster, was so famed for its quality that "plaster of Paris" is still used as a term of distinction. However, as gypsum is very soluble in water, the underground cavities left by its extraction were extremely vulnerable to collapse.

Like living on top of a rotting tooth: subsidence starts far below the surface, but it can destroy your house.Credit : Delavanne Avocats

In previous centuries, a road would occasionally open up to swallow a chariot, or even a whole house would disappear down a sinkhole. In 1778, a catastrophic subsidence in Ménilmontant killed seven. That's why the Montmartre gypsum quarries were dynamited rather than just left as they were. The remaining gypsum caves were to be filled up with concrete.

The official body governing Paris down below is the Inspection Générale des Carrières (IGC), founded in the late 1770s by King Louis XVI. The IGC was tasked with mapping and, where needed, propping up the current and ancient (and sometimes forgotten) mining corridors and galleries hiding beneath Paris.

A delightful hiding place

Also around that time, the dead of Paris were getting in the way of the living. At the end of the 18th century, their final destination consisted of about 200 small cemeteries, scattered throughout the city — all bursting at the seams, so to speak. There was no room to bury the newly dead, and the previously departed were fouling up both the water and air around their respective churchyards.

Something radical had to happen. And it did. From 1785 until 1814, the smaller cemeteries were emptied of their bones, which were transported with full funerary pomp to their final resting place in the ancient limestone quarries at Tombe-Issoire. Three large and modern cemeteries were opened to receive the remains of subsequent generations of Parisians: Montparnasse, Père-Lachaise, and Passy.

Who says stacking skulls and bones can't be fun?Credit: Rijin via Wikimedia and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The six million dead Parisians in the Catacombs, from all corners of the capital and across many centuries, together form the world's largest necropolis — their now anonymized skulls and bones methodically stacked, occasionally into whimsical patterns. The Catacombs are fashioned into a memorial to the brevity of life. The message above the entrance reads: Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort. ("Halt! This is the empire of Death.")

That has not stopped the Catacombs, accessible via a side door to a classicist building on the Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, making just about every Top 20 list of things to see in Paris.

An underground economy

However, while the Catacombs certainly are the most famous part of the centuries-old network beneath Paris, and in non-pandemic times draw thousands of tourists each day, they constitute just 1.7 km (1 mile) of the 300-km (185-mile) tunneling total.

Subterranean Paris wasn't just used for mining and storing dead people. In the 17th century, Carthusian monks converted the ancient quarries under their monastery into distilleries for the green or yellow liqueur that still carries their name, chartreuse.

Because the mines generally keep a constant cool temperature of around 15° C (60° F), they were also ideal for brewing beer, as happened on a large scale from the end of the 17th century until well into the 20th century. Several caves were dug especially for establishing breweries, and not just because of the ambient temperature: going underground allowed brewers to remain close to their customers without having to pay a premium for real estate up top.

Overview of the Paris Catacombs.Credit: Inspection Générale des Carrières, 1857 / Public domain.

At the end of the 19th century, the underground breweries of the 14th arrondissement alone produced more than a million hectoliters (22 million gallons) per year. One of the most famous of Paris' underground breweries, Dumesnil, stayed in operation until the late 1960s.

In that decade, the network of corridors and galleries south of the Seine, long since abandoned by miners, became the unofficial playground for the young people of Paris. They explored the fantastical world beneath their feet, in some cases via entry points located in their very schools. Fascinated, these cataphiles ("catacomb lovers") read up on old books, explored the subterranean labyrinth, and drew up schematics that were passed around among fellow initiates as reverently as treasure maps.

As Robert Macfarlane writes in Underland, Paris-beneath-their-feet became "a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface."

Some larger caves turned into notorious party zones: a 7-meter-tall gallery below the Val-de-Grâce hospital is widely known as "Salle Z." Over the last few decades, various other locations in subterranean Paris have hosted jazz and rock concerts and rave parties — like no other city, Paris really has an "underground music scene."

Hokusai's Great Wave as the backdrop to the "beach" under Paris.Credit: Reddit

Cataphiles vs. cataphobes

With popularity came increased reports of nuisance and crime — the tunnels provided easy access to telephone cables, which were stolen for the resale value of their copper.

The general public's "discovery" of the underground network led the city of Paris to officially interdict all access by non-authorized persons. That decree dates back to 1955, but the "underground police" have an understanding with seasoned cataphiles. Their main targets are so-called tourists, who by their lack of knowledge expose themselves to risk of injuries or worse, and degrade their surroundings, often leaving loads of litter in their wake.

The understanding does not extend to the IGC. Unlike in the 19th century, when weak cavities were shored up by purpose-built pillars, the policy now is to inject concrete to fill up endangered spaces — thus progressively blocking off parts of the network. That procedure has also been used to separate the Catacombs to prevent "infiltration" of the site by cataphiles.

Many subterranean streets have their own names, signs and all. This is the Rue des Bourguignons (Street of the Burgundians) below the Champs des Capucins (Capuchin Field), neither of which exists on the surface.Credit: Jean-François Gornet via Wikimedia and licensed under

The cataphiles, however, are fighting back. In a game of cat and mouse with the authorities, they are reopening blocked passages and creating chatières ("cat flaps") through which they can squeeze into chambers no longer accessible via other underground corridors.

Catacomb climate control

Alone against the unstoppable tide of concrete, the amateurs of Underground Paris would be helpless. But the fight against climate change may turn the subterranean labyrinths from a liability into an asset — and the City of Paris into an ally.

The UN's 2015 Climate Plan — concluded in Paris, by the way — requires the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent by 2050. And Paris itself wants to be Europe's greenest city by 2030. More sustainable climate control of our living spaces would be a great help toward both targets. A lot of energy is spent heating houses in winter and cooling them in summer.

This is where the constant temperature of the Parisian tunnels comes in. It's not just good for brewing beer; it's a source of geothermal energy, says Fieldwork, an architectural firm based in Paris. It can be used to temper temperatures, helping to cool houses in summer and warming them in winter.

One catch for the cataphiles: it also works when the underground cavities are filled up with concrete. So perhaps one day, Paris Underground, fully filled up with concrete, will completely fall off the map, reducing the city's formerly real doppelgänger into an air conditioning unit.

Cool in summer, warm in winter: Paris Underground could become Paris A/C.Credit: Fieldwork

Strange Maps #1083

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• Many of the world's 23,000 lighthouses feature a distinct combination of color, frequency, and range.
• These unique light signatures help ships verify their positions and safeguard maritime traffic.
• But they also translate into this map, visualizing the ingenuity and courage of lighthouse builders and keepers.

Land and sea are both shaded dark, so it's a bit hard at first to make out that this collection of merrily blinking lights is actually a map. Once the coastal contours pop, though, all becomes clear: these are lighthouses!

At night, the Eastern Mediterranean is awash with lighthouse signals. Credit: Geodienst – Lights at Sea

The Age of Big Data

The map not only shows where they are, but how they are: static or blinking in various colors with the size of the circles corresponding to the range of their lights.

Up until the 20th century, a map of lighthouses would have been a subdued affair: just a string of dots strung along lines of coast. But this is the 21st century! We're in the Age of Big Data, ruled by the clever boffins who know how to stitch one dataset to another. Zap it with electricity and presto: it's alive!

That's what the folks did over at Geodienst, the spatial expertise center of the University of Groningen (Netherlands). Back in 2018, student/assistant Jelmer van der Linde (currently with the University of Edinburgh) came across OpenSeaMap, an open-source resource for nautical information similar to its more famous landlubber cousin, OpenStreetMap.

OpenSeaMap contained a database with detailed information on nautical beacons and lighthouses, which included not just their location, but also the frequency, range, and even the color of their signals. Would it be possible to visualize all those data points on a map? Yes, it would!

Norway's craggy coastline requires lots of light. Not that much blinking going on, though. Credit: Geodienst – Lights at Sea

The result is this riot of a map. It's important that ships don't mistake one lighthouse for another. That's why they come in various colors and their lights flicker with a distinct frequency. Norway in particular is lit up with beacons and lighthouses, as its fjord-indented coast warrants. And the rest of Europe is well provided with nautical warning lights.

However, while the map is reminiscent of other global traffic trackers for flights (like Flightradar24 or FlightAware) or shipping (such as VesselFinder or MarineTraffic), it is neither live nor global. The flickering lights aren't a real-time report; they merely repeat the code in the original database. And that database is incomplete.

Zoom out, and the map gets a bit too dark. According to the Lighthouse Directory, there are at least 23,000 lighthouses in the world. And even though the United States has more lighthouses than any other nation – 700 by some counts – the map only shows a handful of lights in North America.

Like its parent, the lighthouse map is open source too, so if anyone out there is capable of filling in the gaps, they can. Lighthouse enthusiasts, get to it!

Not one yet yourself? Below are 10 lighthouse facts to help you come over to the light side.

Now you see them, now you don't. Credit: Geodienst – Lights at Sea

Trapped in a giant phallus and other true facts about lighthouses

1. The world's smallest lighthouse is the North Queensferry Light Tower, near the Forth Bridge in Scotland. A mere 16 feet (5 m) tall, it was built in 1817 by Robert Stevenson, famous builder of lighthouses, as was his son Thomas, who was the father of the famous novelist Robert Louis Stevenson.
2. Reaching a height of 436 ft (133 m), Jeddah Light in Saudi Arabia is the world's tallest lighthouse.
3. The 2019 movie The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, was based on a true incident, known as the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy. In 1801, a storm trapped two Welsh lighthouse keepers, both named Thomas, in their lighthouse. One died, the other went mad. Asked to summarize his film, writer/director Robert Eggers said, "Nothing good can happen when two men are trapped alone in a giant phallus."
4. From its inauguration in 1886 until 1901, the Statue of Liberty also served as a lighthouse. Its nine electric arc lamps, located in the torch, could be seen 24 miles out to sea.
5. All U.S. lighthouses are now automated – save for Boston Light, the oldest continually used lighthouse in the country. For historical reasons, Congress has decided it shall remain staffed year-round.
6. Hook Lighthouse, on Hook Head in Ireland's County Wexford, claims to be the world's oldest lighthouse still in use. It was first built by a medieval lord in the early decades of the 13th century.
7. The Tower of Hercules in La Coruña, Spain has a slightly better claim. It was built by the Romans in the 1st century AD and still functions as a lighthouse.
8. Stannard Rock Lighthouse is also known as "the loneliest place in the world." It is located in Lake Superior, Michigan. At 24 miles (39 km) from shore, it is the most remote lighthouse in the U.S. and one of the most remote in the world. It opened in 1883 and was staffed for parts of the year until 1962.
9. A lighthouse on Märket is the reason for the weird border on the island, divided between Sweden and Finland. In 1885, the Finns built a lighthouse on the highest part of the island – on the Swedish half. Thanks to a complicated land swap, the lighthouse is back on the Finnish side.
10. In the United States, August 7 is National Lighthouse Day.

Robert Pattinson (left) and Willem Dafoe in The Lighthouse.Credit: © 2019 A24 Films, via IMDB

Strange Maps #1082

Many thanks to Toon Wassenberg for sending in this map. Got a strange map? Let me know at strangemaps@gmail.com.

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• The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is not just the holiest site in Christianity; it is also emblematic of the religion's deep divisions.
• As the map below shows, six denominations each control part of the church, with only some parts held in common.
• Each "territory" is jealously guarded and sometimes fought over. The church's keys are held by… two Muslim families.

The most infamous ladder in all Christendom has been standing above the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher for about three centuries. Credit: Matthew Delaney, CC BY-SA 3.0

On a ledge over a church door in Jerusalem stands a simple cedarwood ladder. It's been there for perhaps three centuries. Since nobody remembers who put it there, nobody knows who is authorized to remove it. If anyone would try, there'd be immediate trouble with whomever would feel slighted — and there are plenty of candidates. This is the Immovable Ladder, and it is a fitting symbol for the deeply-entrenched divisions within Christianity, and within that church building itself.

The most sacred place on Earth

Those religious divides matter here more than anywhere else because this is the most significant church in the world. For Christians of any denomination this is the most sacred place on Earth. This is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and according to tradition, it contains both Golgotha (or Calvary in Latin; both mean "skull"), the place where Jesus died on the cross. Just a few feet further is the tomb (a.k.a. sepulcher) where his body was laid to rest and where according to the faithful he was resurrected three days later.

Yet despite its supreme religious importance, there is no single authority managing this holiest of church buildings. The care over the sprawling, multi-level complex is divided between various denominations.

The church's history goes back to the fourth century, when Roman emperor Constantine, newly converted to Christianity, sent his mother Helena to Jerusalem to locate places and things associated with the life and death of Jesus. This is the spot where she found the True Cross, a sign that this must have been Golgotha. The place of Jesus' burial was identified nearby. Constantine razed the pagan temple built here by his predecessor Hadrian, and a church on this spot, the first commissioned by a Roman emperor, was consecrated in the year 335.

In continuous use for 1700 years

The church has survived earthquakes, fires, invasions, and demolition by decree. It has been in continuous use for nearly 1700 years, even if the building standing there today is mostly a renovation and reconstruction dating to Crusader times. Over the centuries, various Christian traditions latched on to the church. Ownership became a constant source of dispute.

In 1852, the Ottoman Sultan decreed that the church was to be managed by the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Apostolic churches and apportioned parts of the building to each denomination. Over time, smaller parts of the building came under the authority of three smaller Orthodox denominations: the Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian churches.

Six churches sharing one church. The result: a bit of a mosaic.Credit: British Cartographic Society

• Most of the building is under control of the Greek Orthodox church (in blue on the map). They manage the Katholikon (which is slightly ironic), the North Transept, the Seven Arches of the Virgin, a small Orthodox monastery, and various chapels, among other bits.
• The Latins (a.k.a. Roman Catholics, in purple) manage the Franciscan Monastery on the north side (which includes the Chapel of the Apparition and the Chapel of Mary Magdalene), the Grotto of the Invention of the Cross, a small area north of the Parvis, and a tiny space between the Katholikon and the Rotunda.
• The Armenians (in yellow) manage the Chapel of St. Helena, the Chapel of St. James, and the Armenian Gallery next to the Rotunda.
• The Copts (in red) have the care of various chapels near the Rotunda, including a small annex to the Edicule (i.e., the Holy Sepulcher) itself.
• The Ethiopian monastery is spread out on the roof, and the Ethiopians also manage an area called Deir al-Sultan, the Chapel of the Four Living Creatures, and the Chapel of St. Michael (all in orange).
• The Syriac church has the smallest part (in green): the Chapel of St. Nicodemus. But at least it's very close to the Sepulcher.

The Ottoman edict is the basis for the status quo, which is scrupulously maintained. A complex set of rules determines how the church is managed — such as who is allowed where and when, who cleans and repairs which parts of the building, and which areas are held in common (by the Greeks, Latins, and Armenians but not by the other three).

• The Rotunda is common territory, as is a chapel to the north.
• The Parvis (i.e. the courtyard at the entrance) is also common, as is an adjacent part of the church that contains the Stone of Unction (where according to tradition, Jesus' body was prepared for burial).

But some of the rules are disputed, and conflicts occasionally erupt. Two examples:

• The Copts have a long-standing claim over part of the roof, which is occupied by Ethiopian monks. To maintain their claim, Coptic monks take turns to sit on a chair on the roof. But on a particularly hot day in 2002, when a Coptic monk moved the chair a few inches into the shade, the Ethiopians interpreted that move as a violation of the status quo. The ensuing fight sent 11 monks to the hospital.
• And in 2008, Greek and Armenian monks got into a violent argument over the procedure of a religious procession. The brawl was caught on camera and pasted all over the news.

Can't we all just get along?

In recent years, however, the churches seem to be getting along a little bit better, although partly out of necessity. Significant parts of the building are in extreme need of repair. In 2017, the three main denominations (Catholic, Greek, and Armenian) agreed to fix the Edicule, which was in danger of collapsing. And in 2019, the three churches signed an agreement to renovate parts of the church's infrastructure (floor, foundations, and sewage pipes) and even to share ownership of any archaeological artifacts that might turn up during the work. However, the agreement excludes the three other denominations, which under the status quo have no say in the management of shared spaces.

Which brings us back to the Immovable Ladder. Despite its nickname, it has proven to be very movable indeed. It was stolen twice in the 20th century. Both times, it was soon recovered by the police and returned to its original position. In 2009, it was moved again, this time with the agreement of all relevant denominations, in order to accommodate scaffolding for renovations.

Upon completion of the works, it was again put back. And there it will remain until, as Pope Paul VI suggested in 1964, the divisions between the various Christian denominations are resolved. Or until Christ returns — whichever happens first.

Meanwhile, the keys to the church building itself will remain where they have been for centuries: in the possession of the Joudeh and Nuseibeh families, who by virtue of their Muslim faith are accepted by all Christian denominations as neutral guardians of the entrance to the church.

Strange Maps #1081

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• China produces 80 percent of electric vehicle batteries.
• To achieve battery independence, Europe is ramping up production.
• And the U.S.? Action is needed, and quick.

Tesla's Gigafactory near Berlin, still under construction in October last year.Credit: Michael Wolf, CC BY-SA 3.0

This is a map of the future — the future of battery cell production in Europe. If and when all projects on this map are up and running, Europe will have a battery cell production capacity of around 700 gigawatt hours (GWh). That's crucial for two reasons: (1) those battery cells will power the electric vehicles (EVs) that will soon replace our fossil-fuel cars; and (2) a production capacity of that magnitude would break China's current near-monopoly.

Say what you will about state-run economies, but they're great at concentrating effort on a particular target. About a decade ago, Beijing directed huge resources towards its photovoltaic industry. Today, nine of the world's 10 largest solar panel manufacturers are at least partly Chinese. China is similarly resolved to become the global leader in EVs, including EV battery production.

And so far, it's working. At present, about 80% of the world's lithium-ion battery cells are made in China. Lithium-ion batteries are the ones used in EVs. In sufficient numbers, lithium-ion batteries can also be used for large-scale energy storage, which would help even out power supply fluctuations from sources like solar and wind.

China's dominance in this area is making many outside China nervous. In previous decades, OPEC had a similar stranglehold on producing the oil that makes cars run and factories hum. Then the organization had a political point to make and turned off the tap. During the oil crisis of the 1970s, oil prices skyrocketed and economies crashed.

Battery wars

Avoiding a 21st-century version of that scenario requires a strategy for EV battery self-sufficiency, and Europe has one. In 2018, the EU launched its Battery Action Plan, a concerted effort to increase its battery production capacity. Realizing they couldn't beat China on price, the Europeans resolved that their batteries would be greener and more efficient.

Easier said than done. Setting up battery production is complex, expensive, and slow. And as the EU's woefully slow vaccine rollout demonstrates, the organization's strength-in-numbers argument doesn't always work in its favor. Indeed, by 2020, only four of the dots on this map were up and running:

• a facility by Envision AESC in Sunderland (UK - now ex EU)
• a Samsung factory in Göd (Hungary)
• an LG Energy Solution plant in Wroclaw (Poland)
• a factory by Leclanché in Willstätt (Germany)

But in this case, slow and steady may win the race. At least two dozen battery plants are in the works across Europe (i.e. EU and its near abroad), and four of those should come online in 2021 alone, including Tesla's plant near Berlin. Tesla, incidentally, coined the term "gigafactory" for its facility in Sparks, Nevada. As the title of this map suggests, it's becoming the generic description for any large battery cell production facility.

By the end of the decade, Europe will have around 30 gigafactories.Credit: CIC energiGUNE

Despite the fact that Tesla's Nevada plant is on its way to becoming the world's largest building, battery production capacity is growing fastest in Europe. Predictions vary, but all observers agree that Europe is on the verge of a Great Leap Forward. Here's why:

• Europe's current production capacity is about 30 GWh.
• One forecast puts that figure at 300 GWh by 2029, another even at 400 GWh by 2025.
• Adding up the maximum capacity of all facilities on this map comes close to 700 GWh by 2028.
• In terms of global capacity, BloombergNEF predicts Europe's share could increase from 7% now to 31% in 2030.
• According to Eurobat — disappointingly, not the Gauloises-smoking, Nietzsche-quoting counterpart to Batman — the value of the battery industry will increase from €15 ($18) billion in Europe and €75 ($90) billion worldwide in 2019 to €35 ($42) billion in Europe and €130 ($156) billion worldwide by 2030.

So, who will be Europe's answer to CATL (short for Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd.), China's main battery manufacturer? There are several pretenders to the crown. Here are some:

• Britishvolt, set to go online with Britain's first and largest gigafactory in Northumberland (UK) in 2023, with a maximum capacity of 35 GWh per annum.
• Northvolt, led by former Tesla execs, supported by the Swedish government and the European Investment Bank. Also funded by Volkswagen and Goldman Sachs. Aims to be green and big. One plant coming online in Sweden this year, another in Germany in 2024. Combined maximum capacity is 64 GWh.
• Tesla. Not content with its one gigafactory (40 GWh) opening this year, the company has already announced that it will build a second plant in Europe.

That second plant is not yet on the map. Also missing are the half dozen gigafactories that Volkswagen aims to open in the coming years. If Europe is to become self-sufficient in EV batteries, even more will be needed.

Europe's path to battery supremacy

In 2020, 1.3 million EVs were sold in Europe, edging past China to become the world's largest EV market. In 2021, Europe looks set to maintain that lead. By 2025 at the latest, EVs will have achieved price parity with fossil-fuel vehicles, not just in terms of total cost of operation but also in upfront cost.

Add to that the increasingly hostile environment — namely, higher taxes and stricter regulations — to fossil-fuel cars in Europe, and the pace of electrification will increase dramatically by mid-decade. Going by EU requirements for CO2 emissions alone, the EV share of the total vehicle market would need to be between 60% and 70% pretty soon.

While that may seem an impossibly high target today, things could start looking different very soon. Volkswagen aims to have full-electric cars make up more than 70 percent of its European sales by 2030. Volvo and Ford even aim to present entirely electric lineups by 2030 at the latest. And that year is also when the UK government intends to ban the sale of new fossil-fuel cars.

All of which could translate into base demand for EV batteries in Europe as high as 1,200 GWh by 2040. Even with all planned factories on the map running at maximum capacity, that still leaves a production capacity gap of about 40%.

To avoid batteries becoming a bottleneck for electrification, the EU likely will pour even more money into the industry via the European Green Deal and Europe's post-COVID recovery plan. Battery production is not just strategically sound; it also boosts employment.

A study by Fraunhofer ISI says for each GWh added in battery production capacity, count on 40 jobs added directly and 200 in upstream industries. The study forecasts battery manufacturing could generate up to 155,000 jobs across Europe by 2033 (although it doesn't mention how many would be lost due to reduced production of fossil-fuel cars).

Coming to America

And how fares America? Electrification is coming to the U.S. as well. By one estimate, EVs will have a market penetration of about 15% by 2025. Deloitte predicts EVs will take up 27% of new car sales in the US by 2030. The Biden administration is keen to make up for past inaction in terms of switching to post-fossil energy. But it has its work cut out.

Apart from Tesla's Gigafactory, the U.S. has only two other battery production facilities. If current trends continue, there would be just ten by 2030. At that time, China will have 140 battery factories and Europe, according to this map, close to 30. If U.S. production can't keep up with demand, electrification will suffer from the dreaded battery bottleneck. Unless America is content to import its batteries from Europe or China.

This map was produced by CIC energiGUNE, a research center for electrochemical and thermal energy storage, set up by the government of the Basque Country. Image found here on their Twitter.

Strange Maps #1080

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• Few people today are familiar with the Yazoo Land Scandal, which broke in the mid-1790s.
• Yet it sent shockwaves through American public life, influencing politics, law, and even geography.
• Without it, Georgia could have been a "super state" — and the Trail of Tears might not have happened.

Seven of the original 13 states had extensive territorial claims, mainly toward the west.Credit: Library of Congress via public domain

There are no good old days.

Travel back, say, to the presidency of George Washington himself. Yes, the father of the nation, he who could tell no lie. Even under POTUS #1, there was corruption so venal and egregious that it changed the very map of America. In other words, without the Yazoo Land Scandal, the political geography of the United States might have looked quite different. Yet despite its catchy name and far-reaching consequences, few now remember the affair.

The scandal centered on Georgia, the last holdout in the process of state cessions. Of the original 13 colonies-turned-states, seven had entered into the Union with vague, contested, and often overlapping land claims, mainly in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River.

The six states without claims did not want to be overshadowed by their expanding neighbors. And the federal government did not want them to get into fights where their claims overlapped. So the U.S. government spent its first few years convincing and cajoling those seven states to abandon their claims. When New York relinquished its claim to Vermont in 1790 (for a mere $30,000), that process was complete. With one exception.

Yazoo Land Fraud

Georgia continued to claim territory all the way to the Mississippi River. For various reasons, the state was loath to give up its interest in these so-called Yazoo Lands, corresponding to the larger part of the present-day states of Mississippi and Alabama. Not least because of money. Land developers were eager to acquire large chunks of the country, their guiding principle being: bribe high, pay low.

In 1794, four companies, set up especially for the purpose, paid half a million dollars for about 40 million acres of land. Even taking into account all the bribes — another half a million — that was a ridiculously low amount: four acres to a dollar.

Following the Rescinding Act, Georgia's governor and legislators burn all copies of the Yazoo Act (except one).Credit: New Georgia Encyclopedia via public domain

Infuriated by the deal, Georgians booted out the legislators who had their palms greased to approve the Yazoo Act, by which Georgia had sold all that land on the cheap. In 1795, a new state legislature voted a Rescinding Act, overturning the sale. All extant copies of the original Act were collected and burned at high noon on the grounds of the state capitol under construction, then in Louisville. (One copy escaped destruction — the one sent to President Washington).

The Yazoo hits the fan

But that was far from the end of the unpleasantries. In fact, this is where the actual scandal started. For the land companies did not admit defeat. They continued printing bonds that were being traded and sold on the financial markets of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, raking in tidy profits.

Thousands of bond buyers acquired a stake in the Yazoo Lands. Eventually, though, the market smelled a rat. Investors started to worry: had they thrown away their money on a fraudulent land scheme?

Georgia paid back some of the duped buyers, but unable to handle the escalating scale of the scandal, the state eventually did surrender its claims to the Yazoo Lands to the federal government. Under the so-called Compact of 1802, the U.S. paid Georgia $1.25 million, took over any remaining liability for the Yazoo Lands, and promised to rid Georgia of any remaining Native American land claims.

So, the duped investors could now sue the federal government instead of Georgia. The land companies, for their part, wanted the U.S. to uphold their claims, which they continued to consider legal and valid. Who was right?

In 1810, the case reached the highest court in the land. Pronouncing on Fletcher v. Peck, the Supreme Court ruled that the Rescinding Act was unconstitutional and the original land deals remained legal. For although those deals were corrupt and not in the best interest of Georgians, the contracts were made by the Georgia legislature, which had the authority to do so. The Supreme Court ordered the U.S. government to pay out $4.5 million in compensation to the claimants.

Overview of the four separate Yazoo Act land deals that together constitute 40 million acres of land, sold for just $1 million (including bribes).Credit: New Georgia Encyclopedia via public domain

Yazoo changed the course of American history

Fletcher v. Peck was a landmark case in more ways than one. For the first time ever, the Supreme Court had ruled against a state law, that is, Georgia's Rescinding Act. This established the principle that federal laws were supreme over state laws. The case also firmly established that a legal contract could not be nullified by a later law, which became an important principle in contract law.

The Yazoo Land Scandal had two further, major consequences for the United States. Without the scandal, Georgia might conceivably have managed to hold on to its western lands. This hypothetical Greater Georgia, running from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, would have comprised most or all of the current states of Mississippi and Alabama. That would make it one of America's most populous states, its 20 million inhabitants on par with Florida and New York and surpassed only by Texas (30 million) and California (40 million).

Georgia could also have avoided one of the most ignominious events in its history. In 1830, the federal government fulfilled its promise in the Compact of 1802 to rid Georgia of all extant Native American land claims by the Indian Removal Act. Signed into law by President Andrew Jackson, the Act led to the "Trail of Tears," the forcible removal of the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Seminole, and Chickasaw tribes — about 100,000 people in all — to reservations west of the Mississippi, in what would later become Oklahoma.

Although now largely forgotten, the Yazoo Land Scandal helped shape the territory, laws, and institutions of the early United States. But the affair has another lesson for our times. If there are no good old days, then our current ones perhaps aren't so bad either.

Strange Maps #1079

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• The streets on a classic Monopoly board were lifted from Atlantic City.
• Here's what it looks like if we transport those places back onto a map.
• Monopoly started out as its opposite: a game explaining the evil of monopolies.

Atlantic City's crowded Boardwalk, in front of hotels Schlitz and Dunlop, ca. 1913.Credit: Geo. A. McKeague Co., Atlantic City, New Jersey – public domain.

There have been several attempts to turn Monopoly the game into a Hollywood movie, one with Ridley Scott directing, another starring Kevin Hart. If none have succeeded so far, it's not for lack of an exciting backstory.

Dig deep, and you'll find racial segregation, economic inequality, intellectual property theft, and outlandish political theories. But let's start with the board—a map of sorts and a story in itself.

There's a customized Monopoly board not just for virtually any country in the world but also for movie and TV franchises (Avengers, Game of Thrones), brand experiences (Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson) and just about anything else (bass fishing, chocolate, the Grateful Dead).

To aficionados of the game, however, the names of the streets on the "classic" board have that special quality of authenticity, from lowly Baltic Avenue to fancy Park Place. Those places sound familiar not just if you like Monopoly, but also if you drive around Atlantic City, New Jersey's slightly run-down seaside casino town.

In fact, all the street names were taken from (or near) the city once nicknamed "America's Playground." Going about town, it's almost like you're traveling on the board itself. No wonder its other nickname is "Monopoly City."

This map transposes the streets on the board back onto the map, maintaining the color scheme that groups them from cheap (dark purple) to expensive (dark blue). Here's how they run.

The Monopoly board takes its street names from Atlantic City and a few neighboring places.Credit: Courtesy of Davis DeBard.

Dark purple

Mediterranean Avenue and Baltic Avenue are parallel streets in the middle of town, running southwest to northeast. They are perpendicular to most other streets on the board, and as such, cross or touch five other colors.

Light blue

Three avenues in the east of town. Oriental runs southwest to northeast and crosses Vermont and Connecticut, which run parallel to each other.

Light purple

Three streets branching off Pacific Avenue: Virginia Avenue, a long street towards the northwest; and St. Charles Place and States Avenue, two short spurs towards the southeast. St. Charles Place is no more; it made way for a hotel-casino called the Showboat Atlantic City.

Orange

New York and Tennessee Avenues run parallel and next to each other, northwest to southeast, the former all the way to the Boardwalk. St. James Place is in between both, south of Pacific Avenue.

Red

Indiana, Kentucky, and Illinois Avenues are the furthest west of the five street groups running northwest to southeast. In the 1980s, Illinois Avenue was renamed Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.

Yellow

Past O'Donnell Memorial Park—featuring a rotunda dedicated to Atlantic City's World War I soldiers—Atlantic Avenue continues west to Ventnor City as Ventnor Avenue. It is pictured as an inset (left) on this map, which also features Marvin Gardens. That place, in Margate City, is actually spelled Marven Gardens—an error for which Parker Brothers apologized to the local residents only in 1995.

Green

These opulent streets are well-connected in more than one sense. Green is the only color to touch every other color.

Dark blue

The Boardwalk is as huge as Park Place is diminutive. Both are close to the beachfront, the most desirable location in any seaside resort.

The darker history of Monopoly

These names weren't picked at random. In the early 1930s, various informal versions of Monopoly were played throughout the northeastern United States, with local street names inserted for each city. The game's appearance and rules were perfected as it was being played. Around that time, an Atlantic City realtor named Jesse Railford hit upon an innovation: to put not just names but also prices on the properties on the board. Since he knew the lay of the land in his home city, those prices reflected the hierarchy of real estate values at that time.

That hierarchy and those prices were informed by the segregation that was rife in 1930s America. As one of the gateways of the Great Migration in the early 20th century, Atlantic City was a waystation for countless African-Americans leaving behind the stifling oppression of the South for better economic opportunities in the North. However, what they encountered on the way and upon arrival was the same racism, in slightly different form.

Railford played the game with the Harveys, who lived on Pennsylvania Avenue. They had previously lived on Ventnor Avenue and had friends on Park Place—all of which fall into the pricier color categories on the board.

In 1930s Atlantic City, these were wealthy and exclusive areas, and "exclusive" also meant no Black residents. They lived in low-cost areas like Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues; the latter street is actually where the Harveys' maid called home. In many local hotels at the time, African-Americans were only welcome as workers, not as guests. Atlantic City schools and beaches were segregated.

Belying both the binary prejudices of the time and the sliding price scale of the Monopoly board, Atlantic City back then was in fact a place of opportunity where a diverse range of communities flourished. Black businesses thrived on Kentucky Avenue. Count Basie played the Paradise Club on Illinois Avenue. There was a Black beach at the end of Indiana Avenue. For Chinese restaurants and Jewish delis, people headed to Oriental Avenue. New York Avenue had some of the first gay bars in the U.S.

Lizzie Magie (née Phillips), the anti-monopolist who invented… Monopoly.Credit: public domain

It should have been called "Anti-Monopoly"

An Atlantic City-based board was sold to Parker Brothers by Charles Darrow, who claimed to have invented the game in his basement. Parker Brothers marketed the game as Monopoly from 1935. The rights to the game transferred to Hasbro when it acquired Parker Brothers in 1991.

But Darrow didn't invent Monopoly. The original idea, as became widely known only decades after its "official" launch, came from Lizzie Magie (1866-1948), née Elizabeth J. Phillips.

Magie was a woman of many talents and trades. She worked as a stenographer, a typist, and a news reporter; she wrote poems and short stories; she was a comedian, an actress, and a feminist (she once published an ad to auction herself off as a "young woman American slave," to make the point that only white men were truly free); and she patented an invention that made typewriting easier.

Despite that impressive resume, she is now remembered mainly—and barely so—as the inventor of Monopoly. Except that the board game she developed was called The Landlord's Game. She patented it in 1904 and re-patented a revised version in 1924. The game was innovative because of its circular pattern—most board games at the time were linear. But its real point was economic, political, and ultimately, fiscal. The Landlord's Game illustrated Magie's belief in what was later called Georgism.

Known as the "single tax movement" and popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its concepts were formulated by the economist Henry George. He suggested that rather than taxing labor, trade, or sales, governments should derive their funding only from taxing land and the natural resources that derive from it.

As already observed by earlier thinkers such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, a land tax is economically more efficient than other taxes, since it places no burden on economic activity. It would also reduce property speculation, eliminate boom and bust cycles, and even out economic inequality.

Although Georgist ideas were influential for a while and continue to be discussed—among others by Ralph Nader during his 2004 presidential candidacy—they are no longer a vital political force, except in the related field of emissions trading. One popular counterargument to modern Georgism, now also (but not entirely interchangeably) known as "geoism," "geolibertarianism," and "earth-sharing," is that government expenditure has increased by so much since George's day that it can no longer be covered by a land tax alone.

Back around the turn of the 20th century, Magie devised The Landlord's Game to educate its players about the evils of real estate monopolies and, implicitly, about the benefits of a single tax on land.

The Landlord's Game, Lizzie Magie's forgotten precursor to Monopoly.Credit: Thomas Forsyth, owner of The Landord's Game® / public domain

She created two sets of rules: an anti-monopolist one, called Prosperity, in which all were rewarded for any wealth created; and a monopolist one, called Monopoly, in which the aim was to crush one's opponents by creating monopolies. In the latter version, when a player owns all the streets of one color, they can charge double rent and erect houses and hotels on the properties.

Taken together, these two versions were meant to illustrate the evil of monopolies and the benefit of a more cooperative approach to wealth creation. It's very telling of human nature that it's the opponent-crushing version that came out the winner. But, in the light of what happened to Magie, perhaps not entirely surprising.

When Darrow claimed Monopoly as his own, Magie protested. In the end, her patent was bought out by Parker Brothers for a mere $500, without any residual earnings. Parker Brothers continued to acknowledge Darrow as the inventor of the game. Magie's role was not recognised until decades later.

For more on the intersection of Monopoly, Atlantic City geography and 1930s segregation, read this article in The Atlantic by Mary Pilon. She is also the author of a book on the subject, called The Monopolists.

Many thanks to Robert Capiot for alerting me to the article. And many thanks to mapmaker Davis DeBard for permitting the use of his work. Follow him here.

Strange Maps #1078

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• In 1991, Denmark constructed the world's first offshore wind farm.
• Now they're building an entire 'Energy Island' in the North Sea.
• As the U.S. catches up, Danish know-how could soon come to America.

Giant wind farms

​On Monday, President Biden designated a 'Wind Energy Area' in the waters between Long Island and New Jersey. It's part of an ambitious plan to build giant wind farms along the East Coast. There's currently only one offshore wind farm in the Eastern U.S., off Rhode Island (1).

When those wind farms get built, you can bet there'll be Danish companies involved. In 1991, Denmark built Vindeby, the world's first offshore wind farm. In the years since, Danish companies have maintained their global lead.

In February, the Danish government announced it would build the world's first 'Energy Island'. Everybody else in the world, take note: if the Danes pull this off, similar islands could soon pop up off your shores – perhaps also in the New York Bight.

So, what's an Energy Island, and why does Denmark want one? For the answer, we spool back to June 2020, when a broad coalition of Danish parties, left and right, in government and opposition, concluded a Climate Agreement. This is Denmark's plan not only to make a radical break with fossil fuels but also to show the rest of the world how it's done.

On the rise again

Due in large part to its pioneering work with wind energy, Denmark has a green image. But that hasn't always reflected reality. Yes, in 2019 the country generated 30 percent of its energy from renewable sources – earning it 9th place worldwide (2). But in 2018, Denmark also was the EU's leading oil producer (3).

Under the Climate Agreement, that will stop. Denmark will no longer explore and develop new oil and gas fields in its section of the North Sea. Extraction will be gradually reduced to zero. In exchange, Denmark will dramatically scale up the production of sustainable energy via offshore wind farms. The ultimate goal: nationwide carbon neutrality by 2050.

Offshore wind farms produce the bulk of Europe's sustainable energy. And after a dip in the first decade of the century, offshore wind farms are on the rise again (4). One reason for the increased popularity: taller turbines, which means larger blades, which means greater capacity.

• In 2016, the tallest turbines were 540 ft (164 m) and had a capacity of 8 megawatts (MW).
• In 2021, turbines can be up to 720 ft (220 m) tall, generating up to 12 MW.
• Soon, the turbines will reach 820 ft (250 m) – not that much shorter than the Eiffel Tower (1,030 ft or 314 m, street to flagpole). These will have a capacity of up to 20 MW.

Centralised management

As the shallow parts of the North Sea (<66 ft; <20 m) fill up with wind farms, the issue of managing the energy flow produced by these farms becomes acute. The obvious solution would be to build a central point where the energy is collected, converted from AC to DC and transmitted to one or more points onshore. Centralised management of the wind farms would mitigate the fluctuations in energy production and make it easier for supply to meet demand.

If supply is greater than demand, these collection points can also serve as storage units. Excess energy could be stored in batteries or transformed into hydrogen via electrolysis. If and when necessary, the hydrogen can then be transported onto land and reconverted into electricity.

The Dutch are thinking about it, and some have suggested the Dogger Bank as an ideal location: shallow and central within the North Sea, ideally placed to distribute energy to the various countries bordering the sea. But the Danes are doing it. The Climate Agreement envisaged not one, but two energy islands.

One would be Bornholm, Denmark's Baltic island, halfway between Sweden and Poland, which would serve as the hub for local offshore wind farms. But the other would be an entirely new, entirely artificial island in the North Sea, to be built about 50 miles (80 km) off Thorsminde, on the western coast of Jutland.

10 million households

In February, the Danish government revealed how much this Energi-Ø would cost, how long it would take to build – and what it might look like.

• Energy Island will be built via the caisson method – essentially, sinking a watertight box to the bottom of the sea. The island will be protected from storms by high seawalls on three sides. The fourth side will feature a dock for ships.
• Construction could start in 2026 and is expected to take three years. Building the wind farms and transmission network will take a few years more. By 2033, it could be churning out its sustainable GWs.
• In its initial phase, the island will have an area of about 12 hectares (30 acres, or about 18 soccer fields). It will centralize the production of about 200 offshore wind turbines, with a joint capacity of 3 GW. That's about the equivalent of 3 million households – slightly more than the total for Denmark.
• When fully completed, the island will have an area of around 46 hectares (114 acres, just under 70 soccer fields), collect the energy of 600 turbines, for a total capacity of 10 GW (5). That covers 10 million households.
• 10 GW is equivalent to about 150 percent of Denmark's entire electricity needs (households, industry, infrastructure, etc.) That leaves plenty of scope for supplying neighbouring countries. Agreements have already been reached with Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium.

The plan also foresees a plant for hydrogen production on the island, either to be piped onshore, or stored and transported in large batteries.

Yet untested aspects

In all, the island would cost DKK 210 billion (US$33 billion) to build – by far Denmark's largest construction project (6).

The project will be undertaken in a public-private partnership between the Danish state and commercial interests. Because it is 'critical infrastructure', the state will retain a stake of at least 50.1 percent in the project. There are two scenarios for co-ownership:

• The island will be owned in its entirety by a company, in which the Danish state retains at least that smallest of majorities;
• Private companies will be able to own up to 49.9 percent of the island itself.

The Danish government needs private-sector input to overcome unknown and as yet untested aspects of the project, not just in terms of design and building an entire island from scratch, but also on how to operate and maintain it, and even when it comes to financing and risk management.

But where there's risk, there is potential. If the project is successful, it will become the blueprint for similar energy islands the world over – and the companies that helped build the first one, will be in high demand to build the other ones too, perhaps soon in Biden's 'Wind Energy Area'.

Green, as the Danes have discovered, is not just the color of nature. It's also the color of money.

Strange Maps #1077

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(1) Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind, a two-turbine pilot project 23 miles (43 km) off Virginia Beach, was completed last year.

(2) The Top 10 (2019) are Iceland (79%), Norway (66%), Brazil (45%), Sweden (42%), New Zealand (35%), Austria (38%), Switzerland (31%), Ecuador (30%), Denmark (30%) and Canada (28%).

(3) With 5.8 megatons of oil equivalent (Mtoe), Denmark beat Italy (4.7 Mtoe) and Romania (3.4 Mtoe). Oil production in the EU is on the way down. It peaked in 2004 (42.5 Mtoe) and has since halved (to 21.4 Mtoe in 2018). A similar trend has occurred in the two key non-EU oil producers in Europe. a. Norway's oil production peaked in 2001 (159.2 Mtoe) and has since more than halved (to 74.5 Mtoe in 2018). b. The UK's oil production peaked in 1999 (133.3 Mtoe) and has since been reduced by almost two thirds (to 49.3 Mtoe in 2018).

(4) The Global Wind Energy Council estimates that in 2020, a record 82.3 gigawatt (GW) of new wind power capacity was added, a 36% increase over 2019.

(5) The Bornholm energy hub is projected to top out at 2 GW.

(6) Inaugurated in 2000, the famous Øresund Bridge (Øresundsbroen), connecting Sweden to Denmark, cost about DKK 25 billion (US$4 billion) in today's money. When it's finished (by 2029, if work continues apace), the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link (18 km) between the Danish island of Lolland and the German island of Fehmarn, will be the world's longest road/rail tunnel. It will have cost about DKK 55 billion (US$ 8.7 billion).