In a 15-minute video posted to YouTube, Adam Savage ruminates on the advantages of paper maps, the Los Angeles institution that was the Thomas Guide, and navigating by paper map in general (with digressions on the Knowledge and trap streets and such).

Previously: The Rise and Fall of the Thomas Guide.

The Road Trees project has produced animated isochrone maps showing road networks erupting fractally from a single departure point.

An isochrone in a map shows with the same color all points from which it takes the same time to arrive to a specific location.

We chose 10 locations around the world and for each of them constructed the isochrones on top of the road network of the corresponding country. Consequently, we plot these isochrones using a dynamic color palette representing the diffusion from the location of interest to any other point of the road network.

Unexpectedly, we found that the isochrones follow beautiful fractal patterns, very similar to networks shaped in the Nature by rivers, veins, or lightnings.

[Stephen Smith]

This striking high-resolution map of Canada’s roads and highways, produced by EarthArtAustralia, is a work of GIS: it’s assembled from Canadian GIS road data, with roads coloured and weighted by importance (freeways are bright yellow, back roads are blue). This map is also inarguably a work of art: I could easily have one on my wall. It’s certainly being sold as such, with high-resolution digital downloads and prints available. (EarthArtAustralia has a number of downloadable and frameable maps based on road and waterway data: they’ve been coming at a furious clip lately.)

New Jersey’s interchanges look particularly complicated:

Prints are also available. More at Slate and Fast Company. [Leventhal Map Center]