Tom created the Topologist’s Map of the World to show how countries connect to each other. Deliberately emulating the style of a T-O map, Tom started with a Voronoi diagram and finished the map in Inkscape. Exclaves are ignored (too complicated), and islands encircle the rest of the map. Among Tom’s observations: “Some countries get really distorted—mostly when they find themselves near the centre of a continent. I’d often thought of Germany as the centre of Europe, but here, Austria and Hungary get really stretched out because they end up bordering countries on opposite sides of the continent.” [r/MapPorn]

Our friend Alejandro Polanco Masa is updating Maptorian for 2020, and outlines some of the changes to the political map that have taken place since 2014 that he needs to incorporate into his vector map product.

The print edition of today’s Washington Post maps the fences and walls along the U.S.-Mexico border. The online version, which I seem to have missed when it was posted in October, offers a much more detailed look: it’s an interactive, scrollable map that offers a flyover view of the border, fenced and unfenced, as it passes through farms, ranches, towns and impossibly rugged terrain between the Pacific and the Gulf of Mexico.