Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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All Stories
No prizes for guessing that English is the world’s lingua franca. But how good are the world’s other languages at spreading information?
Instead of choosing sides, this map shows all versions of the cartographic argument.
The threat of territorial annihilation as a perverse incentive for the home front – on both sides
You’ve probably never heard of Ahwaz. But the Emirate in waiting already has a flag – and, of course, a map…
What if the Black Plague had killed off almost all Europeans? Then this is what Africa might have looked like.
The World was supposed to be finished years ago. But the financial crisis of 2008 slowed construction. Work now has resumed on the artificial archipelago off Dubai. However, changing plans […]
Edinburgh is the “grey metropolis in the North.” It has been for centuries, and thanks to Unesco, the capital of Scotland will keep its dour exterior for the foreseeable future. […]
On a recent flight over the Netherlands, I found the landscape stare back at me
On 18 September, Scotland voted to stay in the UK by 55% to 45%: a wider margin than most expected, but still close enough to warrant the constitutional re-think promised […]
Ayn Rand fell for the popular misconception of the ancient myth
Kick out the French, send over colonists, break the three ‘doors’ to the outside world
As Scots go to the polls to determine their future, one oracle has already decreed that independence is inevitable: Englishman Terry O’Neil discovered this piece of chicken in his KFC meal, and was struck by its resemblance to the contours of Britain — minus Scotland.
Yes, there is a map for that.
Vice was just around the corner – but this map refused to show you where exactly.
Probably the most recognisable map from the latter half of the 20th century – if you like tv westerns.
Wyoming and Colorado are not the only cartographic twins
We do not set out to cause offence. But we go where strange maps lead us.
No, this is not an illustrated guide to basket weaving. This is indeed a map. Or to be precise, a cartogram: statistical data presented in a geographic context. Even if […]
Ian Fleming picked James Bond for the name of his hero because it was “brief, unromantic and yet very masculine”; he later became friends with the original James Bond, author of one of his favourite ornithology guides.
In 1923, a British survey team doodled an elephant on a map of a remote part of the Gold Coast – now Ghana.
The emergence of email catapulted the @ from typographical obscurity onto everybody’s keyboard. Now the thing had to have a name fit for the digital age. Despite an early proliferation […]
New word of the day: equipopulous. Country A is equipopulous to country B if it has the same number of inhabitants. This map shows what a European Union with 28 […]
Here are two maps that are also cartograms, using the same method to present each country’s population size: one square represents one million people.
As any Bible reader, numerologist or Iron Maiden fan worth their salt knows, 666 is the Number of the Beast. It says so in Revelation 13:17-18, in wording enigmatic enough […]
Brazil v. Germany: 1-7. After the shock elimination of the Football World Cup’s host country Tuesday evening – by a historical and humiliating margin – one kind of expects as […]
Ah, if only Napoleon had never met his Waterloo, surely the world wouldn’t look like this! This being a map of foreign news as shown on France’s 6 terrestrial channels […]