xkcd is back with another bad map projection: in this one, it’s all South Americas. The alt-text: “The projection does a good job preserving both distance and azimuth, at the cost of really exaggerating how many South Americas there are.”
Previously: xkcd’s Time Zone Map; xkcd’s Liquid Resize Map Projection; xkcd’s United States Map.
Christopher Tolkien, the third son of J. R. R. Tolkien and the executor of his literary estate and editor of his posthumous works, died yesterday at the age of 95. But one of his legacies is likely to be overlooked: he drew the map of Middle-earth that appeared in the first edition of The Lord of the Rings. That map proved hugely influential. It helped set the norm for subsequent epic fantasy novels: they would come with maps, and those maps would look rather a lot like the one drawn by Christopher Tolkien.
Christopher Tolkien himself was self-deprecating about the execution of his map, and about the design choices he made. Regarding a new version of the map he drew for Unfinished Tales, he took pains to emphasize that
the exact preservation of the style and detail (other than nomenclature and lettering) of the map that I made in haste twenty-five years ago does not argue any belief in the excellence of its conception or execution. I have long regretted that my father never replaced it by one of his own making. However, as things turned out it became, for all its defects and oddities, “the Map,” and my father himself always used it as a basis afterwards (while frequently noticing its inadequacies).
However hastily it was drawn, it was pivotal all the same.
There have been a lot of Beck-style maps—maps done in the style of the London underground map. This one’s a bit meta. Arturs D., a student living in London, has created a map of the present-day London underground using Harry Beck’s original style. The current TfL network map (PDF) is, of course, a Beck-type diagram, but there have been a lot of changes to the official map since 1933. It’s also a lot more complicated. Arturs’s map, which limits itself to the Tube proper, reminds us just how many changes there have been. [Mapping London]
Between 1992 and 2017, more than 300 rare books, maps and other items were stolen from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library. News of the thefts broke in April 2018, and in July of that year former Carnegie Library archivist Gregory Priore and rare book seller John Schulman were arrested and charged.
Yesterday Priore and Schulman pled guilty: Priore to one count of theft by unlawful taking and receiving stolen property, Schulman to a charge of forgery and another of theft by deception and receiving stolen property. (They were facing a total of 10 and 20 charges respectively, but the remaining charges were dismissed as part of a plea agreement.)
Sentencing is scheduled to take place on April 17; each man faces up to 20 years in prison (the plea deal does not include sentencing).
News coverage: Associated Press, CNN, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Washington Post.
Previously: 314 Rare Books and Maps Stolen from Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; New Details Emerging in Pittsburgh Rare Book and Map Thefts; Arrests Made in Pittsburgh Rare Book and Map Thefts; Pittsburgh Rare Book and Map Theft Update.
Whenever there’s a major news event, there will be an outbreak of fake, misattributed or misleading images that purport to be about that event. That goes for maps as well.
Take the serious situation with Australia’s bushfires at the moment. Social media is jammed with maps showing practically the whole damn continent on fire, or superimposed on another continent to let people there know just how big Australia is (and also on fire). It’s a profoundly serious situation, and as NASA’s Joshua Stevens points out, it’s possible to present an accurate map that shows its seriousness without resorting to hyperbole.
The trouble is, social media thrives on hyperbole, because it thrives on “engagement”—which means outrage and anger and, as Joshua Emmons notes, as we get inured to a certain level of outrage, even more outrage is needed just to get noticed.
Which brings me to this thing, which is showing up all over the social web:
Continue reading “Australia’s Bushfires and Misleading Maps”
GoPro’s Karma drone, released in October 2016 and discontinued in January 2018 (when GoPro announced it was getting out of the drone business), has apparently fallen prey to the GPS rollover bug: they’ve been grounded since the new year. See coverage at DP Review, Engadget and The Verge, as well as discussions at GoPro’s support website.
GoPro says they’re “actively troubleshooting” the issue; I have to say I’m surprised that a relatively new gadget—between two to three years old—could be hit by a once-every-19.7-year bug.
Previously: Happy GPS Week Rollover!
The U.S. National Library of Medicine’s TOXNET, an interactive map that tracked pollution, chemical exposure, toxicology and other data, was shut down last month. The move has been criticized in the context of the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental protections, but the NLM insists that the decision was theirs. The data mapped by TOXNET is available from other sources, but, and this is the point, not as easily or centrally accessible. [The Hill, Newsweek]
A 1970 article about a 1912 expedition to Maine’s Mount Katahdin that mentioned “a diagram that Thoreau had made in the middle of the last century when he paid Katahdin what was to become a famous visit” has set off a modern-day search for that map of Thoreau’s. Only, as the Lewiston Sun-Journal’s Steve Collins reports, no one seems to has a copy of, or even heard of, said map. [WMS]
China’s Beidou satellite navigation system—a competitor to GPS like Russia’s GLONASS and Europe’s Galileo—will be complete by June 2020, when the constellation’s final two satellites are launched, the Associated Press reports. Twenty-four satellites have already been orbited. Whereas the first two iterations of Beidou offered regional coverage, this third iteration will cover the globe when complete. [Engadget, TechCrunch]
