June 2010
- California Coffee Table
- Via Make, this coffee table in the shape of California, 56 inches (142 cm) from tip to tip and made from salvaged wood, is being sold on Etsy for the low, low price of $2,500….
- MapQuest Reinvents Itself a Little
- MapQuest has announced a major new redesign of its website, which now includes a single search box (rather than multiple address fields), other interface and feature enhancements, and hooks to social networking sites and other AOL properties. There’s also…
- Making a Map in 1906
- Neat post from the Bartholomew Archive on the steps to print a colour map, circa 1906….
- Interferograms Measure Earthquake Deformities
- Interferograms released by NASA reveal how much the earth was deformed by the magnitude-7.2 earthquake that struck Baja California and the U.S. Southwest on April 4, 2010. The data, collected by the JPL-developed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar…
- More on ‘Magnificent Maps’
- More on the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition: The BBC’s Ed Davey looks at three maps of London. Writing for the Huffington Post, Eric Lurio looks at the maps’ propaganda value. The Guardian features five maps from the exhibition….
- Why Share Your Location?
- Not everyone is comfortable sharing their precise location, even with their friends; if you’re not, you may well wonder why people actually use location-based social networks like Foursquare or Google Latitude, or enable location sharing on Twitter or (soon) Facebook….
- Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past
- Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past is a temporary exhibition running from July 2 to October 17, 2010 at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s Mary Rose Museum. Mapping Portsmouth’s Tudor Past brings together, for the first time, several important maps from The British…
- Russian Mapmaking and the Legacy of Soviet Secrecy
- Paul Goble: “The Russian government has ended its cartographic monopoly, thus opening the way for dozens of private firms to enter the three-billion-U.S.-dollar annual market in Russian maps, but the longstanding Soviet tradition of secrecy about geography continues to cast…
- TanDEM-X Satellite to Create New Digital Elevation Model
- BBC News reports on the launch of (and first images returned by) the German TanDEM-X satellite, which, along with the TerraSAR-X satellite launched in 2007, will generate a digital elevation model of the earth to a resolution of two metres….
- D.C. Water Supply Map Is ‘Sensitive Information’
- A map of the Washington, D.C., water supply was deemed too sensitive to be shared online; having said that, the blogger who posted the map and the authorities who asked him to take it down were able to arrive at…
- North Carolina Maps Update
- An update on North Carolina Maps, which I first told you about in August 2008: according to this University of North Carolina Libraries item, the site’s collection now exceeds 3,200 maps: “Visitors to the North Carolina Maps site can…
- Global Temperature Anomalies
- A map based on temperature records assembled by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies “shows global surface temperature anomalies for May 2010 compared to average temperatures for the same time of year from 1951 to 1980. Above-normal temperatures appear…
- The Ordnance Survey’s Official Blog
- I think I’ve been aware of the Ordnance Survey’s official blog for some time, but it doesn’t look like I’ve actually mentioned it here. Not sure how that happened….
- The Look of Maps: Back in Print
- ESRI Press is reprinting Arthur Robinson’s first book, The Look of Maps (1952), which was based on his doctoral research. (Robinson, you may recall, went on to co-author a widely used textbook, Elements of Cartography, create his own map projection,…
- More Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Maps
- Above, a MODIS image from NASA’s Terra satellite, taken last Saturday, showing the spread of the Deepwater Horizon slick in the Gulf of Mexico. NOAA has released an interactive map that “integrates the latest data the federal responders have…
- Real-Time London Tube Map
- Via many sources (for example, Ed Parsons and Google Maps Mania), this live train map of the London Underground, showing the real-time position of each train. It’s a mashup of Transport for London data with the Google Maps API, but…
- More Map Tumblelogs
- More map tumblelogs: cartophile and fuckyesmaps (previously)….
- The L.A. Times on Volunteer Mapping
- Another article about OpenStreetMap, this time in the Los Angeles Times, which counterpoints it with Google’s crowdsourcing efforts (via OpenGeoData). Articles like these make the point — correctly, I think — that engaged local users can produce a map that…
- The Times Atlas of Britain
- The Collins Maps blog announces the forthcoming release of The Times Atlas of Britain, which, they say, “includes fully up-to-date reference maps, statistics, geographical information, images and historical mapping to give an exceptionally detailed view of every county in…
- Google Earth Updates
- Google Earth 5.2 was announced yesterday; the update adds enhanced GPS track support (viewing the track’s elevation, speed, etc.), an integrated web browser, and improvements to the pro version (CNet, Ogle Earth). On a related note, Stefan reports that version…
- The New York Times Maps the Upcoming 2010 Elections
- The New York Times has published interactive maps of the upcoming U.S. House of Representatives, Senate and gubernatorial elections, marking seats as safe, leaning or tossup. They’re what you would expect from the Times’s interactive maps: they’re really well done,…
- Ankh-Morpork Subway Map
- Daniel Drucker has imagined a subway map for Ankh-Morpork, the main city in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series of fantasy novels. Since, as far as I am aware, Ankh-Morpork doesn’t have a subway in the Discworld novels, he’s imagined that…
- F-Bomb
- If you’re familiar with the phenomenon of the so-called “fuck-yeah” tumblelog (see also Slate), you will not be surprised to know of the existence of Fuck Yeah Cartography (via)….
- ‘The Whole Southern Half of the Globe’
- You know, xkcd does have a point there … Previous xkcd entries: xkcd on Google Latitude; East Is West; xkcd on Driving Directions; Upcoming Hurricanes; D&D Map of Online Communities….
- Strategic Telemetry Election Maps
- Speaking of election maps, campaign firm Strategic Telemetry has produced a number of choropleth maps of recent U.S. election results (in particular, some high-profile 2010 senatorial and gubernatorial primaries). Via Mark Ambinder….
- The Value-by-Alpha Map: An Alternative to the Cartogram
- Andy Woodruff discusses the value-by-alpha map, an alternative to the cartogram that he, Robert Roth and Zachary Johnson have developed (and have written a paper about in The Cartographic Journal): “[V]alue-by-alpha is essentially a bivariate choropleth technique that ‘equalizes’…
- Review: GeoMaps for iPad
- GeoMaps is a free mapping application for the iPad that differentiates itself from the included Google Maps application by providing maps from both OpenStreetMap and Microsoft Bing Maps (including several OSM layers and Bing’s satellite imagery). It also allows…
- Martian Mapping Project Discovers Evidence of Ancient Shores
- A project mapping the geology of Mars has discovered what has been interpreted as sedimentary deposits on the eastern rim of Hellas Planitia, suggesting that large bodies of water once existed on the Martian surface: Planetary Science Institute press…
- Eric Fischer: Locals vs. Tourists
- Eric Fischer won’t stop. Following up on his Geotaggers’ World Atlas (previously), he’s separated out the geodata generated by locals from that generated by tourists — locals being defined as people taking pictures of the same city over a…
- The Bizarre Map Challenge
- I’m horrifically overdue (as usual) in mentioning the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition for high school, college and university students in the United States, with prize money and everything. According to the competition’s rules, “bizarre” “refers to…
- More on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill
- An image of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico taken on Monday by the MODIS instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite: Via multiple sources, this animation is a computer model of how the oil spill might spread…
- Late 19th- and Early 20th-Century Urban Rail Transit Maps
- A collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban rail transit maps from the University of Chicago Library’s map collection. Zoomify format; Flash required. Via MAPS-L….
- Google Maps Navigation for Android Comes to Canada and Continental Europe
- After the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland, Google Maps Navigation — providing free turn-by-turn navigation on Android phones — has arrived in Canada and 10 continental European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Switzerland)….
- Gadling Reviews the Garminfone
- No sooner do I post a roundup of GPS reviews than I discover that Gadling has reviewed the Garmin-Asus Garminfone, a smartphone available from T-Mobile in the U.S. next month tomorrow. Truth be told, I have a bone to…
- Lining Up Data in ArcGIS Reviewed
- Vector One reviews Lining Up Data in ArcGIS by Margaret M. Maher: “This book is very helpful. It explains how to identify geographic coordinate systems as compared to projected coordinate systems. If you are using ArcMap, then this book…
- Atlas of the Baltic Sea
- The Collins Maps blog reports the publication of the Helsinki Commission’s Atlas of the Baltic Sea (for which Collins produced the major maps). From the Commission’s press release: Collected in a single publication, here is a wealth of interesting…
- TomTom Not Worried by GPS-Equipped Smartphones
- TomTom’s senior vice president of market development, Tom Murray, doesn’t think GPS-equipped smartphones will replace dedicated navigation devices any time soon. “There’s been no market impact on the demand for stand-alone GPS devices,” TomTom Tom says in an interview; he…
- Mapping Crime as Elevation in San Francisco
- Here’s something a little different from a heat map: Doug McCune has plotted crime in San Francisco as though it were elevation, creating these and other interesting three-dimensional maps in which high elevation means high incidence of a given…
- A GPS Review Roundup
- Garmin’s GPSMAP 60CSx has long been considered the gold standard for accuracy among its units, so this tracklog comparison with an Oregon 400t is interesting. Via GPS Review. (Note that a successor to the GPSMAP 60 series, the GPSMAP 62…
- Street View in South Africa
- With the World Cup as its backdrop, Google has launched Street View in South Africa….
- More Fun with Google Maps Errors
- What’s fun about errors in Google Maps is that, thanks to the fact that Google is using its own map data assembled from diverse sources by divers hands, is that their errors are unique; errors in NAVTEQ’s or Tele…
- Three More Blogs
- Thierry Gregorius’s Georeferenced and Teresa Baldwin’s map-maker.ca have just gotten started; it’ll be interesting to see where these two new blogs go from here. The unofficial Bing Maps Watch has been around for a few months….
- Ars Technica on OpenStreetMap
- OpenStreetMap gets a writeup on Ars Technica that serves as a pretty good summary for the project. Via OpenGeoData. Previously: Washington Post on OpenStreetMap….
- Woman Sues Google for Walking Directions After Being Hit by a Car
- It’s one thing to read stories about people who blithely follow their navigation systems and end up driving into a river or off a cliff; the driver feels stupid, the rest of us have a good laugh and mutter something…
- The Great Atlas of the Sky
- The Astronomy blog makes mention of The Great Atlas of the Sky, “the world’s largest printed atlas of the entire sky,” by Polish astronomer Piotr Brych. “The 296 foldout maps, each measuring 17 inches by 24 inches, depict the…
