Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Monty pair

Here's a pair of comics from Jim Meddick's Monty that are loosely related to each other via a "navigation" theme:


Aerial navigation. It has been windy here lately and my son recently got a stunt kite. 

 Tracking is kinda like navigation, right?  


Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Chart with Heart

Peter Steiner gives us this selection of charts from the early '90s in the New Yorker magazine.
More Charts with Heart - New Yorker Cartoon Premium Giclee Print


Monday, May 20, 2013

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Hard bargain

And that's how we got most of the United States of America.

A Genius Idea

Saturday, May 18, 2013

From above

A few weeks back there was a post from a Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner that included a from-underneath shot of Antarctica. This time he used a from-above view of the north pole (panels 9 & 10).  Still ends in disaster.  Here's a link to a larger version of it.



Friday, May 17, 2013

Thursday, May 16, 2013

College tour

Dan Wasserman's commentary on student debt and for-profit colleges (although the non-profit colleges aren't much better debt-wise, are they?)


Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Map of all music

This is the link to Every Noise at Once, an interactive map of all genres of music. 

Click on a genre to hear an example. Click the ">>" on any genre to see artists in that genre... and then click on any artist to hear an example of their work: Click "Scan" to let it play random samplings of everything on the page. I wonder how long it will take before this gets monetized by iTunes, Spotify, Pandora, Songza, etc.?

It worked for me in Chrome, but not in Firefox.


Monday, May 13, 2013

Pair of Uncle Sams

Here's a pair of Uncle Sam themed maps in comics from Amanda.  The first is from Aislin (alias Terry Mosher) from about 2002.  The second is from John Collins from about 1953.






Sunday, May 12, 2013

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Super Mario Bros tube map

Somebody named Chris Evans made this Super Mario Bros map in the style of the London Underground tube map. It's like these others:

Friday, May 10, 2013

Very, very large dog

How about we actually do a map in a comic in this Maps in Comics themed blog: That second panel in this "Birchard, The Very, Very Large Dog" spoof comic from Ruben Bolling's "Tom the Dancing Bug" has that globe with those Americas-looking land masses.


Thursday, May 9, 2013

Mess with Google

There has never been a shortage of people ready and willing to mess with Google's StreetView cars:

Which isn't to say that Google Maps also doesn't have plenty of quirks. For those of you who may not understand why this cemetery in Wisconsin might be funny, in modern parlance YOLO = You Only Live Once:

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

2 Berlins

One artifact of the division between East & West Berlin can be seen from space in the lighting of the different halves of the city:

Even more stark, of course, is the divide between North and South Korea:





But none of this should be a surprise because there are artifacts of human divisions from hundreds of years ago that still express themselves in various ways today.  Take this map of Poland that shows the electoral map of Poland in 2007 and the borders of the late 1800s - early 1900s German empire:

Or this map that shows areas of intense cotton production in 1860 and counties voting for Obama in 2008:


And there's more, always more, of this kind of thing.


Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Ingrid Dabringer's maps

This is the artwork of Ingrid Dabringer.  She has made a series of pictures by anthropomorphizing maps.  Here are just a few.  There's more on her site and here:



Monday, May 6, 2013

Emperor Pierre Bourque

Here's another submission from Amanda: Mayor of Montreal Pierre Bourque depicted by cartoonist Garnotte (aka Michel Garneau) as emperor Napoleon:
 

Sunday, May 5, 2013

Harry Potter's iPhone

Here we have a Photoshopped conceptualization of Harry Potter's iPhone, complete with the Marauder's Map app:

Friday, May 3, 2013

Bizarre

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic by Zach Weiner.The from-underneath shot of Antarctica is novel.  This could be a HHGTTG reference.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Stratographic two-fer

Here's a pair with a comic and humorous images on the theme of geology and plate tectonics.  First xkcd by Randall Munroe:
The "title-text" at the actual webcomic says:
All we have are these stupid tantalizing zircons and the scars on the face of the Moon.
 Next we have plate tectonics as illustrated by an Oreo cookie:

Monday, April 29, 2013

Montreal bull

I'm pretty sure these are connected and relate to political issues surrounding attempts to get Montreal to operate with more unity, right?  Our friend Amanda contributed these and possibly could explain.  I'm liking the anthromorphification of Montreal as a bull... or would that be faunamorphifocation?:



Sunday, April 28, 2013

Google Earth resolution

xkcd by Randall Munroe. The "title-text" at the actual webcomic has an additional GPS-related joke in it:

2031: Google defends the swiveling roof-mounted scanning electron microscopes on its Street View cars, saying the 'don't reveal anything that couldn't be seen by any pedestrian scanning your house with an electron microscope.'.

I think the flaw here is that humans can't actually look at the Earth at Plank Length resolution.  We are actually at least a dozen orders of magnitude away from being able to detect things that small in any way as this wonderful interactive tool shows.  So we're probably much closer tot hat intersection than this graph indicates.  Professionally I've already worked with 2-inch resolution imagery and that was at least 5 years ago.



Saturday, April 27, 2013

No more themed schedule

I think I may be archiving too much stuff with plans for posting it later to fit into the schedule that has evolved of Two-fer Tuesday and animated map Thursday and image Friday and so forth. It's feeling too restrictive and I keep missing posts and getting behind in the arbitrary schedule as the archive/queue keeps getting ridiculously bigger and bigger. I have far more than enough in the archive so I think I'm going to give up on the schedule and theme thing and just post stuff as I find it or as it's submitted.  I'll still reserve Mondays for Amanda's submissions and of course viewer submissions get priority over everything else. But the themed schedule thing isn't doing me any favors anymore.

On that note, here's something from The Doghouse Diaries (by William Samari, Ray Yamartino, and Rafaan Anvari):

The mouseover at the original comic says: "You basically just use the Forekast phone to call some guy that knows everything that's going on"







Friday, April 26, 2013

Musically gifted UK

This is a map of where various UK artists originated.  It can be found on the JamesSHOPMAN Esty site... where there is also a similarly styled map of US TV show locations (see below).

And in an act of shameless self-promotion, I'll take this opportunity to point out that my Geologic Timescale Watches are now available on Etsy too. 


Thursday, April 25, 2013

Earth disk

Remember the "Sounds of Earth" 3D globe record from last Fall? Here's another video in a similar vein:  It's a record made with elevation data from earth... with A and B sides for the northern and southern hemispheres:


FLAT EARTH SOCIETY from art of failure on Vimeo.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Amanda's submissions 1: 1967 World's Fair

Look, I know I said I'd start with the comics submitted by Amanda yesterday, but I already had some Earth Day items queue'd up and today's a good day for a two-fer so here it is: 3 comics about Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau managing the 1967 Montreal World's Fair. 



Monday, April 22, 2013

Fried up for Earth Day two-fer

Here's a one-day-early "Earth-in-a-frying-pan" themed two-fer for Earth Day.  And, yes, I realize that first one is Earth-on-a-hibachi, not a frying pan... but that's just respect for multiculinaryism. The stamp? That's an actual bona fide official stamp in Israel.