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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Be glad they don’t have coffee-tables in the Tube, métro, subway and U-Bahn, otherwise you wouldn’t have any excuse not to take this book with you on your subterranean peripatations. […]
This map beautifully captures the changeable course of the Big River
Hilarious. Found in the Flickr group From Memory (Was: Maps From Memory).
n It’s said that dogs end up looking like their masters. A similar alchemy seems at work between the shape of a country and its results on an economic graph […]
n Gone are the days when just carving three holes in a hollowed-out pumpkin and having a candle project its flickering light from inside would scare the bejeezus out of all […]
n n The Mighty Barrister alerted me to a post on the blog of the Book Design Review by Joseph Sullivan of Chicago, listing his favourite book covers of 2007. […]
“The koality of muh-cy is not strined”: I forget who once pondered the impossibility of believing Shakespeare spoken in an Australian accent. Maybe it’s the implied anachronism, for in Shakespeare’s […]
North America must have the lowest nation/surface ratio in the world. The huge subcontinent is made up of only two sovereign states: Canada and the US (*). This is not […]
If the principle of frontage would be universally applied, so could the U.S., Nigeria, Bangladesh – and even Greenland
Big nations or small ones: each gets a same-sized square on this map
“This work uses real statistics on Austria to create an image of Austria,” Babak Fakhamzadeh here on his website about this work, ‘Numbers’, that he created for Paraflows in Vienna, demonstrating […]
n British-born sculptor Tony Cragg (°1949, Liverpool) left his native land in 1977 to work on the Continent. He now resides in Wuppertal, Germany. This work, entitled ‘Britain Seen From […]
n In Great Britain as in the US, two cultural sub-nations identify themselves (and the other) as North and South. The US’s North and South are quite clearly delineated, by […]
For a brief window of time after the fall of communism, it really seemed that the world was at the ‘end of history‘. That phrase was coined by Francis Fukuyama, […]
n “Looks tasty, doesn’t it”, says one of the submitters of this map made out of Spam. Well, that’s a matter of opinion (but I think he was being ironic, […]
I have to agree with Brandon Keim, who reviewed this map for Wired Magazine (here): it most definitely is one of “the coolest planetary maps ever”. This map is of […]
The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies from Chicago published this strange map of UFO reports per 100,000 people by county in the continental US.
“This map is basically what would happen if you got a bunch of Japanese guys in a room, got them drunk, and then asked them to draw what they could […]
n Christa Dichgans (°1940 in Berlin) is a German painter who has shown a proclivity towards cartography in her work. Generally, her map paintings consist of a monochrome background surmounted […]
The world can be sliced and diced in many ways, and one of them is by dividing it into the 245 ccTLDs that cover every country and territory in the […]
An amazing feat of engineering, but at the cost of much blood and treasure
Scientists predict the Earth will end 5 billion years from now, when the Sun becomes a red giant. Certain religious people are more alarmist, claiming the Apocalypse is just around the corner.
One of the mainstays of speculative history (together with “What if the South had won the US Civil War?”) is: What would the world have looked like if the Nazis […]
Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio.
Europe shocked as leaked map reveals secret plan for Belgian domination
n It’s more than three months now since Belgium held a general election, and the federal kingdom by the North Sea is still without a national government. The impasse following […]
n A gallant piper, stuggling through the bogs,nHis wind bag broken, wearing his clay clogs;nYet, strong of heart, a fitting emblem makesnFor Scotland – land of heroes and of cakes. […]
