December 2009
- Mark Ovenden’s New Blog
- Mark Ovenden, author of Transit Maps of the World (reviewed here) and Paris Underground (reviewed here), has a new blog….
- The Map Room’s Top 10 Books of 2009
- Here are The Map Room’s top 10 bestselling map books in 2009, based on Amazon orders made through this website that were tracked by my Amazon Associates account. Of course this list is heavily influenced by the amount of attention…
- Mike Siegel, Rutgers Mapmaker
- Rutgers University cartographer Mike Siegel (he prefers “mapmaker”) gets a profile in the Star-Ledger’s online “I Am NJ” series. Siegel creates maps for two dozen scholarly books each year, but he also produced the maps for a new atlas that…
- GPS Gets Couple Lost, Rescues Them
- Another one of these stories: following their SUV’s navigation system, a couple got stuck in the snow on a remote forest road in eastern Oregon for three days (fortunately, they had warm clothes), until the atmospherics cleared up enough for…
- The Map Room’s Top 2009 Entries
- Here are The Map Room’s top ten entries for 2009, based on unique page views: Review: Nikon GP-1 GPS Unit (March 30, 2009) Italian Earthquake (April 6, 2009) Google Earth: Live Mars Imagery and More (March 18, 2009) “Dead Pixel…
- Baby It’s Cold Outside
- It’s been awfully cold in Europe this month, and this map shows just how much colder than normal it’s been, based on measurements taken by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite between December 11 and…
- Defunct Names on Online Maps
- A Chicago Tribune article notes the appearance on Google Maps of obsolete Chicago neighbourhood, street and building names — names that haven’t been used for decades — and landmarks that have long since disappeared. Map designer Dennis McClendon, who was…
- Mapping U.S. Bank Failures
- Another one of those maps-with-timelines that have become de rigueur when mapping the current recession, this time from the Wall Street Journal, which maps bank failures in the U.S. since January 2008. Larger circles indicate asset value at the time…
- ‘Impossible Black Tulip’ Coming to the University of Minnesota
- Few copies exist of Matteo Ricci’s “Impossible Black Tulip” of 1602, the first map of the world in Chinese to show the Americas (no, stop right there), but the James Ford Bell Trust has acquired one for the University of…
- Mapping New York
- The Electoral Map reviews Mapping New York, a new book that looks at the cartographic history of New York City: “I expected a glossy table book, but what I got was a richly illustrated history of New York City…
- A New Map of Mercury
- Three flybys by the MESSENGER probe have revealed much more of Mercury’s surface, and the MESSENGER team and the U.S. Geological Survey have taken the images from those passes (plus earlier Mariner 10 data) to produce a global mosaic…
- Bing, Google and MapQuest Add Each Other’s Features
- A new beta version of Bing Maps was announced last week; it uses Silverlight, which requires an additional download, but, unlike ActiveX, at least it’s cross-platform. One notable new feature is street-level imagery, which they’re branding as Streetside. Meanwhile, if…
- The Environmental Atlas of Europe
- The Environmental Atlas of Europe was announced at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen today (via EuroSpaceAgency). The Atlas provides multimedia stories about climate change based on a Bing Maps interface (Silverlight required); as an artifact of cartography, there’s…
- Climate Change Changes Maps
- Still on climate change, this Aftonbladet article (in Swedish) looks at how the changing climate has forced maps to change — mostly in terms of shifting coastlines and new (and disappearing) islands. Also via the Collins Map Blog (they were…
- A Giant Globe at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference
- Also at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, a 20-metre globe onto which climate-related information is being projected. Here’s a photo. Via Collins Maps Blog….
- David Rumsey Website Updated, Blog Added
- The website of the David Rumsey Map Collection has been given its first redesign in its 10-year history. That redesign, by the way, includes a new blog. Via Maps-L; thanks also to peacay for the tip….
- Mars Imagery Updates in Google Earth
- New imagery from the High Resolution Stereo Camera on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter has been added to Mars in Google Earth. “With these updates, nearly half of the martian surface is covered by imagery having a nominal resolution of…
- Cool Globes
- Cool Globes: Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet is a travelling public art exhibit about global warming that for some reason is in Copenhagen right now. The exhibit “will feature over 25 super-sized Cool Globes, each conveying a different…
- Map Books of 2009
- If you’re thinking about giving someone a map-related gift this season, I’ve put together a list of nine books about maps that have gotten a certain amount of attention over the past year. I’ve deliberately picked books whose appeal extends…
- Circulation Map Wins Advocacy Group Poster Contest
- Health-care advocacy group Public Option Please chose Amy Martin’s map of the United States showing blood vessels coursing across the country as the winner of their poster contest. Via Cartophilia….
- Review: The Fourth Part of the World
- The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America Its Name by Toby Lester Free Press, 2009. Hardcover, 480 pp. ISBN 978-1-4165-3531-7 We’ve heard a…
- Grootens Wins Design Award for Four Atlases
- Via webmapper, news that Dutch designer Jost Grootens has won the 2009 Rotterdam Design Prize for the design of four books: The Big KAN Atlas, the Limes Atlas, the Metropolitan World Atlas, and the Vinex Atlas. Alice Rawsthorn, who…
- Global Temperature Projections
- A short animation from the Met Office Hadley Centre that shows “the changes in temperature across the globe, relative to pre-industrial levels, under two different emissions scenarios. The first is with emissions continuing to increase through the century. The…
- Mapping SAT Scores
- The New York Times’ Economix blog looks at SAT scores and the percentage of high school graduates who take the SAT by state, and finds that while few students take the SAT in the Midwestern states, those who do…
- Eight Million Times in One Year
- A little reality check for those worried about Google Latitude and the like: in the U.S., your mobile phone location data is already available to law enforcement. At ISS World, it was revealed that Sprint Nextel, with 50 million customers,…
- For Sale: Ordnance Survey?
- The hell? Mapperz points to the following item, tucked away in this Grauniad article about the British government’s efforts to reduce its budget deficit: “A total of £16bn will be saved by pressing ahead with the sale of public assets…
- How Google Deals with Disputed Borders and Place Names
- Google explains “the principles we follow in designing our mapping products, particularly as they apply to disputed regions” — e.g., when two countries disagree about what a body of water is named or where a boundary is disputed. “That can…
- Colorbrewer
- Colorbrewer is a web-based tool that provides colour advice for your maps. Looks quite useful, especially for people creating choropleth maps and the like: it has colour schemes for sequential, divergent and qualitative data, with options for colour-blindness and photocopy-suitability….
- More on Two Map Books
- Two more brief book items. Slate has a slideshow by Frank Jacobs excerpting material from his book and blog, Strange Maps, starting with Çatalhüyük and ending with a geological map of the Moon. And Katharine Harmon continues to get…
- The Onion: Fritolaysia Cuts Off Chiplomatic Relations with Snakistan
- The Onion reports that Fritolaysia has cut off chiplomatic relations with Snakistan, in another one of those Onion riffs on geography: “The dispute over increased prices and decreased serving sizes escalated when Snakistan, swayed by the influence of the…
- Mapping Wikipedia
- Mark Graham has mapped the half-million or so geotagged Wikipedia articles to show how many have been written about each country. Not surprisingly, the U.S. leads with 90,000 articles; Anguilla, on the other hand, has four. Almost all of…
- CQ Politics Looks at Upcoming Redistricting
- CQ Politics looks ahead to the next round of congressional redistricting in the U.S., and includes the interesting story of how the GOP’s attempt to rejig the congressional districts in Pennsylvania in their favour ended up producing the opposite effect….
- Street View Updates: Canada, Singapore, South Africa
- This morning I notice, thanks to a tip by mapperz, that a number of additional Canadian cities have been added to Street View: Edmonton, Hamilton, London (Ontario), Saskatoon, St. John’s, Sudbury, Winnipeg, Victoria. The cities surrounding Toronto are also in…
