July 2009
- ‘A Rough Guide of Our Surroundings on a Scrap of Paper’
- Writing for the Courier-Mail, Kathleen Noonan conflates map literacy with the ability to draw your own map. Responding to the tendency to go to an online map and print something out instead of sketching a quick map on a napkin…
- Three Thousand
- Possibly worth mentioning: this is the 3,000th post I’ve made to The Map Room — six years and four months since the first entry went up at the beginning. It’s funny: the longer I do this, the less I have…
- Declassified Satellite Images Show Loss of Arctic Sea Ice
- Earlier this month, previously classified images showing the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice were released by the U.S. government. The one-metre-resolution images were taken by spy satellites on behalf of scientists studying climate change who were looking for…
- Reactions to Google Latitude on the iPhone
- There’s a lot of web commentary trying to figure out why Apple rejected Google’s Latitude as a standalone application (which might have allowed for background processes and real-time updating), restricting it to a web application accessed via the browser (see…
- Cartastrophe, a Blog About Bad Maps
- Cartastrophe is a blog by Daniel Huffman that critiques bad maps: There are a lot of bad maps out there. They lurk in brochures, on company websites, and in magazines. They confuse, they miscommunicate, and they make it hard to…
- Ohio Is a Piano
- I don’t think I’ve encountered Andy Woodruff’s Cartogrammar blog before, but his latest entry, about his latest project, is a beaut: “Last month, as I was driving through Ohio,” he writes, “it dawned on me: There are 88 counties…
- 3D Perspective Maps, Camera Trajectories Come to the Google Maps Flash API
- Speaking of Google Maps APIs, the Google Maps API for Flash now has three-dimensional perspective maps. “We’ve taken the regular API, added pitch and yaw, borrowed the look-around control from Google Earth, and thrown in some nifty camera trajectory support,”…
- Guides to Adding Google Maps to a Website
- Google has produced two guides on how to add Google Maps to a website: the quick version, which shows you how to embed a simple map, search results or My Maps; and the advanced version, which links to the documentation…
- Cartography as a Career
- The Independent has a piece on careers in cartography….
- Northern Strategy Map Omits Northern Communities
- A map illustrating the Canadian government’s northern strategy is drawing fire for leaving out Inuit communities in northern Quebec and Labrador, the Vancouver Sun reports: “while dozens of communities are identified in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut, the…
- Note: GPS Units Don’t Correct Typos
- Note to GPS users: if you make a typo putting in your destination — say, typing in “Carpi” when you mean “Capri” — you’re on your own. Just ask the Swedish tourists who went 650 km in the wrong direction…
- Treehugger’s Impressive Subway Maps
- Treehugger has a gallery of what they consider to be the world’s most impressive subway maps. (These are the official maps, rather than some third-party iteration.) Via Teresa. Previously: Review: Transit Maps of the World. Buy Transit Maps of the…
- Fox News Maps the Middle East
- You’d think that Fox News would know the difference between Iraq and Egypt, but apparently not….
- Macsense Geomet’r GNC-35 GPS Receiver
- Jon Bauer’s review of the Macsense Geomet’r GNC-35 GPS Receiver first appeared a year ago and has been reposted in several locations, but I only stumbled across it now on the Flickr Geotagging group. The GNC-35 connects to higher-end…
- The Shape of the World
- First broadcast in 1991, the six-part PBS documentary series The Shape of the World has apparently not been available on DVD since, but it looks like a DVD set is being released next month. Buy The Shape of the…
- Rethinking Maps
- Via MAPS-L, news of a new book of essays on cartography: Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory, edited by Martin Dodge, Rob Kitchin and Chris Perkins. “This book,” says the publisher, presents a diverse set of approaches to…
- Latitude Comes to the iPhone, Work Stops on Whereyougonnabe
- Two items from the world of location services: Google Latitude is now available for the iPhone, via the onboard web browser (which supports location services) rather than the maps application; it doesn’t run in the background, so it won’t update…
- The Passing of the Navigator
- The National Post’s Peter Kenter bemoans the passing of the skilled road navigator, from an era when “a driver or a passenger who was particularly skilled at reading maps was an important asset on any road trip. Born with an…
- GPS Review on Navigon MobileNavigator for iPhone
- Hot on the heels of their review of AT&T Navigator for iPhone (see previous entry), GPS Review has a review of the North American version of Navigon MobileNavigator for iPhone. The notable difference between the two: Navigon’s app stores maps…
- A Map of a Balkanized Western Europe in 2020
- Coming Anarchy speculates about a balkanized western Europe in 2020 — with a map, of course. “It is purely speculative and in no way a firm prediction, but rather a sketch of the possibilities and list of the most…
- GPS Review on AT&T Navigator for iPhone
- GPS Review has a huge, in-depth review of AT&T Navigator for iPhone, which costs $10/month and downloads its maps over a network connection. The latter point has some positive and negative implications: [T]his means that the application relies on network…
- Paul Morstad
- Painter and illustrator Paul Morstad “looks to the details to see the bigger picture, turning his obsessions with maps, zoology and our ever-changing environment into art that would have even the least cartography-minded moving in for closer inspection,” Montreal’s…
- Douglas Rushkoff and Renaissance Cartography
- Liberate the Mind has an excerpt from Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, Life Inc., a history of corporatism, which has the following relevant passage (which opens by declaring that Prince Henry the Navigator was no navigator). Royals went map crazy. Cartography…
- The Moon in Google Earth
- As anticipated, a 3D model of the Moon has been added to Google Earth on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. (See also Google Earth Blog.) Features include all kinds of content for the…
- A Look at Fantasy Maps
- On Tor.com, a series of posts by Jason Denzel that examine maps in fantasy novels, fantasy computer games and other fantasy media (with a digression to geocaching). Update, July 23: Add to that a fourth post on maps for Robert…
- Nearest Subway Augmented Reality App for iPhone
- “Augmented reality” superimposes computer graphics on real-world imagery; here’s a demo of a forthcoming application for the iPhone called New York Nearest Subway, which superimposes directions to nearby subway stops on top of imagery taken with the iPhone’s camera. It…
- Fernando Vicente
- The art of Fernando Vicente includes his Atlas series — paintings on maps. I can’t say anything more about this: everything’s in Spanish. But I can still be impressed. Via La Cartoteca….
- New Infrared Map of Venus Suggests Past Tectonic Activity
- A new infrared map of Venus’s southern hemisphere suggests that Venus may have been tectonically active at one point — oceans, volcanic activity and continents included. The map was compiled from more than a thousand images from an instrument…
- Vinland Map Not a Forgery: Researchers
- The controversial Vinland Map has usually been dismissed as a modern forgery, but a Danish team led by Rene Larsen argues that tests on the map conducted over the past five years “do not show any signs of forgery.” The…
- More Outline Maps
- About.com Geography and Catholicgauze point to another resource for blank and outline maps: Daniel Dalet’s d-maps.com, which has, at this particular moment, 3,860 maps in six different formats. Previously: Outline Maps; National Atlas Outline Maps….
- iPhone/iPod Touch Application Roundup
- Some reviews of mapping applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Peter reviews OffMaps, a $2 app (for the moment) that not only uses OpenStreetMap data, but also allows you to download the map data locally (handy if you’re…
- Smartphones vs. Standalone GPS Units
- The New York Times’s Jenna Wortham raises the question: if you have a GPS-equipped smartphone, do you need a standalone GPS unit? And what will the near-ubiquity of GPS on smartphones do to the standalone GPS market? Wortham looks at…
- Emily Yoffe on Her GPS: ‘A Cross Between Lady Macbeth and HAL 9000’
- Everyone is pointing to the last paragraph of Emily Yoffe’s piece in The Washington Post about the perils of using a GPS, but there’s plenty of cringeworthy detail before that about the impact of being led astray by your dashboard…
- Imperial Japanese Army Maps of the Asia-Pacific Region
- A collection of maps from the Imperial Japanese Army archives is now online. Dating from the 1880s onward, the maps cover the Asia-Pacific region, and represent the IJA’s interest in mapping the entire region. “Until the end of World War…
- Al Franken, Cartographer
- Al Franken, now the junior senator from Minnesota, has a hell of a party trick: he can draw, freehand and from memory, a map of the contiguous 48 states of the U.S. He’s been doing it for decades: Talking…
- Another Look at the Moon’s South Pole
- This false-colour map of the Moon’s south polar region is based on imagery collected using the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar in California; see previous entry. Via NASA’s Twitter feed….
- Butterflies Made of Maps
- Image Surgery takes maps and charts and shapes them into butterflies, then arranges them like butterflies on pins in a case. They’re for sale, for several hundred pounds and up. Via Cartophilia….
- BLM Maps Potential Solar Energy Areas
- The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is looking into using federal lands for solar energy development, and has issued maps of six states showing the locations of so-called Solar Energy Study Areas where solar energy generation may be a…
- The Web Goes Local
- Clive Thompson’s piece on location services makes a point I was planning on making in a future piece, damn him, as he looks at how location services may transform the Web: The whole reason the Web revolutionized the world was…
- New Digital Elevation Model Covers 99 Percent of the Earth
- A new digital terrain map for the planet is now available. Based on imagery from the Japanese ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite, the new global digital elevation model covers 99 percent of the Earth’s landmass to a resolution…
