“Of all the globes in the Geography & Map Division’s collections, there is one that has always caught my eye: an impossibly heavy, large silver globe tucked away in our stacks, that stands without any depiction of the earth’s physical features at all. The large silver orb instead displays only a coordinate system grid composed of unlabeled latitude and longitude lines.” Meagan Snow writes about the unlikeliest of globes in the Library of Congress’s collection: a precisely machined 34-inch blank metal globe. What on earth it was it used for? Answer unclear: “The intended use of the globe is described as ‘for earth study.’”
Category: Unusual Maps
xkcd: ‘Exterior Kansas’
In the latest iteration of xkcd’s series of bad map projections, Randall puts Kansas—the putative centre of the contiguous 48 states—at the edge of the map.
The Geochron, and How One Was Restored
The Geochron has been around since the mid-sixties and I only just learned about it this week. It’s an analog, electromechanical world clock and map. The backlit, translucent map is motorized: it scrolls from left to right to indicate the rotation of the earth. Noon is at the centre of the map. The terminators actually change to reflect the change in seasons, as does the position of the overhead sun, which moves in an analemma: these are physical objects behind the map that block the light and are geared to run on an annual cycle. Again: this thing is electromechanical.
The mind boggles, and not just at the (current) mid-four-figures price tag—which is to say that they’re still making these things. (They also have a digital version you can plug into a 4K TV [Amazon] which at $500 seems expensive for what it is. But then the Geochron itself always was. These things have never been anything other than executive- or installation-grade luxury goods.)
Anyway, Matthew Dockrey of Attoparsec managed to lay hands on a used one from the eighties and went through the process of restoring it—replacing worn parts, updating the maps and so forth—and documented it in this 21-minute video. [MetaFilter]
Why Oh Why Does an Alphabetical Cartogram Have to Be a Thing?
More proof that Randall hates us and wants to hurt our eyes comes from last Wednesday’s xkcd, which does what I’m pretty sure no cartogram has ever done: size by alphabetical order.
xkcd’s Geography Challenge
Stare at this map for a while until you figure out what Randall Munroe has done in last Friday’s xkcd. Then scream. (Kottke says: “This is evil.”) It’s not the first time that xkcd has committed mischief and violence on an outline map of the contiguous United States: see, for example this one, or this one. I worry it may not be the last.
Previously: xkcd’s United States Map; The Contiguous 41 States—Wait, What?
The Michigan Mitten, Orthorectified
The lower peninsula of the U.S. state of Michigan is often called the mitten, for its resemblance to a human hand, and apparently Michiganders indicate where they’re from by using their hands as a rudimentary map of the state. The upper peninsula too. See Strange Maps. Now John Nelson has taken this entirely too far: he’s made the Michigan hand map geographically accurate.
The Lake District in Lego
BBC News has the story of Jon Tordoff’s 100-square-foot scale model of the Lake District, which he built during lockdown out of LEGO pieces.
More on Tactile Maps
The Bodleian Map Room Blog (no relation) has a nice look at some tactile maps for the visually impaired, with some interesting 20th-century examples of the form, such as 3D relief maps, a globe, and braille maps.
Previously: Tactile Maps, Modern and Historical; A 19th-Century Tactile Map.
Strange Maps on Perception Maps
Over on Strange Maps, which like this here site is still a going concern, Frank Jacobs has a nice writeup of the history of perception maps. These are maps that provide a skewed or exaggerated view, usually of the United States, that favours their preferred part of it. The best known is Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker cover (“View of the World from 9th Avenue”) but there were antecedents. Frank covers the examples I mentioned in these previous entries: McCutcheon’s View; McCutcheon’s 1908 Cartoon. Plus a few others.
The Challenger Map Re-Emerges; Fundraising Campaign Under Way
The iconic Challenger map—a 26×24-metre exaggerated relief map of British Columbia made of nearly a million pieces of jigsaw-cut plywood, is now on display at the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame as part of an exhibition on the early days of the Pacific National Exhibition, where the map was on display between 1954 and 1997. This is only for a few months; its appearance part of a fundraising campaign to restore the map.
Previously: Challenger Map Gets Reprieve; Challenger Map Update; Another Challenger Map Update; Challenger Map Back on Display, Sort Of.
States of Confusion
Richard Peter Johnson has been posting quizzes on Reddit where the shapes of countries and U.S. states are flipped, rotated and/or inverted and you’re challenged to identify them. It’s actually harder than you might think—especially when they’re inverted or mirror-flipped—and messes with your perception in the way that, say, upside-down world maps do.
xkcd: The Greenland Special
At some point, xkcd cartoonist Randall Munroe is going to put out a book focusing on his map-related cartoons, isn’t he. The latest in his “Bad Map Projection” series (previously: All South Americas, Time Zones, Liquid Resize) is The Greenland Special, an equal-area projection except for Greenland, which uses Mercator. And I thought he was messing with us before.
Bharat Mata Mandir Marble Map of India
I was unaware of Bharat Mata Mandir temple’s map of an undivided India until Mappery pointed to it. It’s another one of those giant relief map installations, only this one is made of marble; it sits in the temple in lieu of an idol. India is shown undivided—i.e., it doesn’t show the post-partition boundaries—because the temple was built in 1936.
The Contiguous 41 States—Wait, What?
The thing about this xkcd cartoon is that at first glance it’s entirely plausible: Randall has done violence to state boundaries while maintaining the rough overall shape of the lower 48. He’s snipped out seven states without anyone noticing if they don’t look too closely.
Previously: xkcd’s United States Map; ‘They Just Wanted to Fix Some Things About the State Borders’.
These Globes Are Uncanny
Twice now I’ve encountered globes that I find more than a bit unsettling, in that they wrap a map of a portion of the Earth around an entire globe.
The first one I ran across was the Globus Polski or Poland Globe, an inexpensive 12-inch globe which comes in two versions, administrative and physical, and depicts the country of Poland as if it were Pangaea. According to a comment on the Reddit post where I think I first saw it, there are apparently other single-country globes like this out there.
The second is the polar opposite of the Poland Globe: it’s large, expensive and one of a kind: a bespoke, illustrated globe of the Silk Route that took Bellerby more than a year to complete to the customer’s exact specifications. The main map on the globe covers the Silk Route itself, from the Mediterranean to Japan; the back of the globe—this globe has a back side
I have to confess that I’m weirded out by this sort of globe: they fall into a cartographic uncanny valley in which the thing mapped is ostensibly correct but in a form that somehow feels deeply wrong.