Rube Goldberg Animated Maps Thursday (Two-fer)

I'm going to count this recent email from my mom as a submission for this blog.  She just recently discovered the OK Go music video which has been making the rounds on the Internet because of it's thoroughly complex and fun Rube Goldberg machine theme. This one qualifies for this blog because they use not one, but two world globes as part of the machine starting at about the 2:40 minute mark.


Of course this video reminds me of another one that was advertising the Google Online Science Fair (there's still 4 days left to enter so hurry!). The earth shows up at the 0:40 minute mark (along with the rest of the planets) and at the 1:19 mark there's a world map:

Popular Science This Week in the Future

Popular Science does a weekly summary of its daily articles on neato stuff.  Last week their "This Week in the Future..." post was accompanied by this illustration by Baarbarian who regularly does such illustrations for the weekly Popular Science feature.  Of course it borrows from the iconinc 19th Century Japanese Block print The Great Wave Off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai and many, many illustrations which have followed the Japanese tsunami in the last few weeks have referenced that block print.  I've seen that block print used to illustrate everything from fractals to japanese food.  It has become graphic art shorthand for Japan.

Storyline map Two-fer

For this Tuesday Two-fer these are both going to be items that need to be clicked on in order to make them large enough to read.  These aren't traditional geographic maps, but rather literary maps.  From Randall Munroe's XKCD there is this astounding map of a few different movie narratives:

 At the actual webcomic, hovering over the image reveals this additional message in the "title-text":

In the LotR map, up and down correspond LOOSELY to northwest and southeast respectively.

That, at least, makes this illustration vaguely geographic in nature.

The other illustration/map is even more exhaustive, this time mapping the entire history of science fiction.  It is a work by artist Ward Shelley, and it's truly breath-taking in its scope:

Trenta mundo

This is Brian Basset's Adam@Home from last Spring during the run up to the soccer World Cup. I'll guess that mug is about the correct size for the new Starbuck's larger "trenta" size cup, yes?

Titanic recalculation

"Recalculating" is what many brands of consumer-grade GPS devices say when the user doesn't follow its directions... or when it gets lost and needs to re-compute the route.  Dan Piraro's Bizarro here re-imagines an implementation of that technology.

Frankly I like trying to out-smart my Garmin GPS unit's directions.  The bridge I travel across regularly empties on to a busy road which is certainly the shortest route home, but because of congestion and numerous traffic signals, isn't the fastest way home. If I've got the GPS unit on it expresses its disapproval of my rebellion by passively but aggressively announcing that it's "Recalculating" the route.

Mushroom cloud

This is an animation showing all of the nuclear detonations that have occurred between 1945 and 1998:


That means it misses the one in North Korea in 2006... though there's some debate as to whather that was a successful test.  I'm not sure whether India or Pakistan conducted any more tests after 1998.  I don't think they did but I'm not entirely sure.  Anybody out there know for sure?

It's impressive how many detonations there were... and especially the 500-or-so above-ground nuclear detonations there were before the above ground nuclear testing ban went into effect in 1963.  There's a level of insanity there that bears some meditation.

If you have any (more peaceful) suggestions for the Animated Map Thursdays please let me know.

Welcome to Mississippi y'all

Dan Piraro's Bizarro making fun of that most useful of contracted pronouns: y'all. I use it all the time and have less than no connection to regions of the country that use it.  It's a perfectly reasonable word to use.  It's been part of Spanish and other romantic languages for centuries.  I wholeheartedly support it's comprehensive adoption into standard English and common use.

And hey, there's Mississippi featured right there on the cover.  That brings the total number of state featured in this blog to 19 (although the Mississippi River has already shown up).

Carmen Sandiego found at two-fer (three-fer) Tuesday

For today's Tuesday Two-fer we have Carmen Sandiego. What child of the '90's (and late '80's) who had any awareness and/or interest in geography could have escaped the ubiquitous Carmen in the multi-media of the day, making it all the more strange that she was so hard to find.   In case you're wondering, this was, in fact, inspired by the recent release of the Carmen Sandiego game for Facebook. But then I don't spend much time on Facebook and I actually never got into Carmen Sandiego.

So let's get to it.  We'll start , slightly anti-climatically, with simply finding Carmen Sandiego.  I gotta say, Carmen has totally let herself go if she's this easy to find:

My guess is that she's headed for her secret hide out here:

That's got to be photoshopped, right?  Nope.  That's Juan de Nova Island off the coast of Madagascar.  It's rotated about 180 degrees and there's some clouds obscuring an inconvenient bump on the "hat".  But other than that, it is an actual photo of the island.

But let's stop picking on Carmen.  After being on the run for so long she deserves a break, and maybe a chance at true love... with none other than....

Waldo (of course).

The first two images are from the Cheezburger Network's Win! page.  And the last is from Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grimm strip. 

Winter explained

Welcome to Spring 2011!  For some of y'all it's been a long time coming.  Here's an explanation for what happens from The Buckets by Greg Cravens.  I do like the dad's explanation better.

I'd like to teach the world to sing

This is one of creepiest images you may see all day: A coca-cola logo force-feeding a maniacally happy and very high planet Earth a bottle of Coke.  This is from an article entitled The 5 Greatest Things Ever Accomplished While High at the Cracked.com website (formerly the Mad Magazine clone).

Animated earthquake in Japan

It's kind of inevitable that I'd post an animation of the Japanese quake for this week's Animated Map Thursday.  So, without further ado, the NOAA video of the shock waves propagating across the Pacific:


I found that at an article on Popular Science.  There is, of course, a lot more map animations about the Japan quake available on the interwebs.  There's a site at PBS that's mapping the aftershocks live.  And this interactive tool at the New Scientist that lets the user look at 110 years worth of large quakes in Japan. 

Powered by Tableau

And if that's not enough, there's this audio interpretation of the shockwaves by Micah Frank, who has quite a number of these audio interpretations of the different aftershocks happening in Japan:
Earthquakes off the east coast of Honshu, Japan - Friday March 11, 2011 by Micah Frank

Taking a Wikileak

As promised, this is the second part of the Wikileaks two-fer, with this excerpt from a recent Wikileaks-themed story arc in Mike Peters' Mother Goose & Grim strip.

If I'm going to do Tuesday Two-fers I should probably put them both on Tuesday.  But I think I'll let this one slide and claim that yesterday's Anonymous logo fits the Tuesday Two-fer bill.

Wikileaks Anonymous two-fer

Today and tomorrow we'll do a couple more comics on Wikileaks.  This first one, from Randall Munroe's XKCD, is on this blog simply because of the map in the Wikileaks logo. At this actual webcomic, hovering over the image reveals this additional message in the "title-text" (and it is supposed to be in all-caps):

STUDENTS ARE CALLING PRESIDENT JOHNSON EN MASSE TO PROTEST THE BOMBING AND IT'S JAMMED THE WHITE HOUSE SWITCHBOARD. COULD THEY COLLAPSE OUR CRITICAL PHONE SYSTEMS? HAS THE FIRST TELEPHONE WAR BEGUN? STAY TUNED FOR MORE ON THIS DANGEROUS NEW TECHNOLOGY.

This comic references the amorphous group Anonymous... and that brings us to to today's two-fer:  At least one of the logos associated with Anonymous is that headless guy there in front of a vaguely U.N.-esque globe-with-olive-branches (and that's gotta drive the conspiracy loons completely bonkers... which is, of course, redundant):

An "Anonymous" logo

United Nations logo

Tuesday two-fer....hmmm... maybe I should do that along with animated map Thursday?  I've got the backlog... Hey why not!

And, as always, if you have any map-related comics, whether it's connected to Wikileaks, Anonymous, or whatever, feel free to contribute. 

School prayer

This one seems perfectly topical given the events in Wisconsin, right?  Turns out this was published about a year ago in Florida when the new GOP governor there was going after teacher pensions.

Comic map

This graphic could not possibly be more perfect for this blog: a map showing prominent comedians from each of the 50 United States.  This is from an article in the Huffington Post.  You can go see who's who there, or I'll post the list here:

• Alabama - Vic Henley
• Alaska - Haley Boyle
• Arizona - Greg Proops
• Arkansas - Bill Hicks
• California - Will Ferrell
• Colorado - Kristen Schaal
• Connecticut - Lisa Lampanelli
• Delaware - Aubrey Plaza
• Florida - Daniel Tosh
• Georgia - Jeff Foxworthy
• Hawaii - Jonah Ray
• Idaho - Ryan Hamilton
• Illinois - Richard Pryor
• Indiana - David Letterman
• Iowa - Johnny Carson
• Kansas - Jason Sudeikis
• Kentucky - Chris Hardwick
• Louisiana - Ellen DeGeneres
• Maine - Bob Marley
• Maryland - Lewis Black
• Massachusetts - Conan O'Brien
• Michigan - Mary-Lynn Rajskub
• Minnesota - Mitch Hedberg
• Mississippi - Tig Notaro
• Missouri - Cedric the Entertainer
• Montana - Dana Carvey
• Nebraska - Dick Cavett
• Nevada - Jimmy Kimmel
• New Hampshire - Sarah Silverman
• New Jersey - Jon Stewart
• New Mexico - Marc Maron
• New York - George Carlin
• North Carolina - Zach Galifianakis
• North Dakota - Ryan Karels
• Ohio - Drew Carey
• Oklahoma - Bill Hader
• Oregon - Matt Braunger
• Pennsylvania - Tina Fey
• Rhode Island - Charlie Day
• South Carolina - Aziz Ansari
• South Dakota - Timmy Williams
• Tennessee - Ralphie May
• Texas - Steve Martin
• Utah - Roseanne Barr
• Vermont - Luis Guzman
• Virginia - Patton Oswalt
• Washington - Joel McHale
• West Virginia - Steve Harvey
• Wisconsin - Chris Farley
• Wyoming - Jim J. Bullock

1000 years of history animated

Assuming the embedded video link still works, this should be an animation showing 1000 years of history of borders in the Middle East and Europe:


In case the video above doesn't work there's a shorter version on Centennia Software, creators of this animation map product.

Again, if you have any submissions for Animated Map Thursdays, please let me know.

Formerly blue marble

In July of last year Lee Lorenz gave us this in The New Yorker. So are these aliens know anything about these aliens which appeared in The New Yorker 15 years earlier?

Psychic GPS or just abusive?

Is this a fortune-telling GPS unit depicted here by artist Grizelda, or just another abusive one (BTW, British call GPS devices "Sat-Nav")

Same old map problem

The titular character in Brian Basset's Adam@Home is still not using a GPS device, despite having spent a week discovering Google Earth and being impressed by a neighbor's GPS-enabled stroller.  This road trip story arc from the summer of 2010 isn't the same road trip this family undertook earlier. But it does still have the family on old folding maps instead of new electronic devices.

Lots of swimming

Here we have another strip from Jim Toomey's Sherman's Lagoon from last July. In this one we have another potential clue as to the whereabouts of Sherman's Lagoon.  It is apparently 8,681 miles away from The Gulf of Mexico.  The fastest route from Sherman's Lagoon to the Gulf of Mexico would be a "straight line" Great Circle route... unfortunately there aren't any 8,681-mile-long "straight line" Great Circle routes to the Gulf of Mexico that originate in any oceans.  If they don't take a straight-line route then Sherman's Lagoon is still unlikely to be in the Atlantic Ocean since the Gulf of Mexico can be reached from almost any part of the Atlantic Ocean in less than 8,681 miles. Most geographical candidates for being 8,681 miles away from The Gulf of Mexico lie in the West Pacific or the Indian Ocean side of South Africa.  However, the very next day in this story arc the team arrives at the "West Entrance" of the Panama Canal in order to arrive at the Gulf of Mexico via the Caribbean Sea (even though the entrances to the Panama Canal are actually mostly north and south of each other):

So that means that the environs around New Zealand are actually a prime candidate for the location of Sherman's Lagoon.

There have been clues like this before as to the location of Sherman's Lagoon, but they've all come to naught.

Musical subway

Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

Welcome to this week's edition of Animated Map Thursday.  This is an astoundingly beautiful art project by Alexander Chen.  He used the style of Massimo Vignelli's iconic 1972 diagram-map of New York's subway system and animated it, making the intersections of subway lines play like a plucked string instrument when the trains crossed paths. This is just genius.

Remember, if you have any submissions for Animated Map Thursdays please let me know. 

Guilt trip

Mike Peters provides this guilt trip in his Mother Goose & Grim strip.

Too bad for Norfolk

I'm not sure what's so bad about Norfolk but cartoonist Clive Goddard is obviously thoroughly unimpressed.  This, by the way, is referencing the county in England, not the Norfolk in Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Connecticut, or Nebraska, or New York, or Canada, or  New Zealand, or Australia... not that any of them is particularly more interesting than the others... at least I wouldn't know, having not visited any of them myself..