Sacramento Terminal

This is from the Sacramento California airport. I'm confident that if I ever found myself in this airport terminal I would definitely miss my flight.

Theban Mapping Project

Today's Animated Map Thursday takes you to the Theban Mapping Project, which is a site full of interactive maps, videos, 3D layouts and so forth of the archaeological sites in Thebes, Egypt.  It's a fascinating collection and be a great place to get lost in an archaeological geek-out.  Have fun!

Free-range kids

In this episode of Over the Hedge from last Fall, the artists Michael Fry & T. Lewis comment on the "Free-range Kids" movement.  Other cartoonists have made similar commentaries about too much adult supervision:

• GPS monitoring of children in Wales
• GPS supervision of children driving
• And then there's the recent news that iPhones might have been sending users' locations back to some corporate home base. 

There's even an instructional book.

Sheldon two-fer (three-fer)

Last week's two-fer was from Dave Kellet's Drive webcomic.  This week's is from his Sheldon webcomic.  I've only posted a couple items from Sheldon in the past, but it's truly great stuff that y'all will love.  And the super swell thing is that this is the debut of Nebraska in our ongoing states-that-have-been-referenced-in-map-related-comics series, bringing our total to 19!  Please submit comics about your state so we can get all 50. (and I'll gladly accept submissions of non-state U.S. territories too).

Dragons

So this installment of Subnormality by Winston Rowntree is thoroughly map-u-licious... and, as per usual, very wordy.  Worth the read though.  Click on it to see a larger, legible version.

Earth Day origami

Today we have links to to two Earth Day origami projects courtesy of NOAA.  One is a traditional origami model while the other is a dodecahedron cut-out-and-glue project.  Either one can be printed on a standard inkjet printer and folded.  Have fun!

Animated Asia

For this week's Animated Maps Thursday we have a link to Time Map out of Australia which has produced a healthy collection of open source animated map visualizations of changing borders and boundaries, largely in the Asian region of the world:

Unfortunately these aren't embeddable.  They'll need to be downloaded and viewed from the Time Map site.

Coastal Weather

Here's a comic suggested by reader Heather from Adrian Raeside's The Other Coast strip. It's got the weather theme as well as the map theme.

This, of course, isn't Mr. Raeside's first use of a map gag in a comic.  Here's one from 2008 when GPS technology in phones was beginning to become mainstream:

Two-fer Drive

Today's' Two-fer is two installments from Dave Kellett's Drive webcomic.  You'.ll probably have to click on these to make them more legible.  This is a rather ambitious once-a-week sci-fi comic that was added to Kellet's main Sheldon webcomic which has attained much-deserved success in the fledgling webcomic industry.  These two installments are the beginning and end of the part of the story where every ship in the interstellar Earth-based empire have come back to Earth for a Imperial meeting of the ruling family which guards the secret of their power: "The ring" which drives all the starships.  The sory is intricate and hilarious and well worth following.

Dueling banjos lost

This is from the webcomic Abstruse Goose. Cue the Dueling Banjos music. I'm not clear who the artist is.

Streotypical win

Here's a map that went viral recently that presents the United States as a word-graphic depicting state/regional stereotypes. 

Declining empire bubbles

This one is a bit more abstract.  It's an animation that shows the comparative sizes of several major naval powers over time as their empires declined:


Visualizing empires decline from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

This was done by Pedro Cruz and is pretty fun.  We'll visit more of his work later... unless you want to have a look at his site and see if he's done other map animations worth posting here.

Atlas bugs

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis has a fairly large number of violent characters in the cast.  The duck is excessively militaristic.  The cat is a psychopath.  The crocodiles are constantly failing to eat their neighbor the zebra and accidentally killing each other.  And one of the two central characters, the rat, is sociopath.  This particular strip, of course, deliberately mixes up the myth of Atlas with the Oracle at Delphi to comic effect .

Just the address ma'am Two-fer Tuesday

From Randall Munroe's XKCD.  Usually the only time this happens to me is with older people. The only other time this sort of thing happens is in situations where the basemaps for the GPS unit are wrong:

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

Yes, I understand that the turn is half a mile past the big field, but my GPS knows that, too. This would be easier if you weren't about to ask me to repeat it all back to you.

Buckets story arc

These are from a story arc last summer from The Buckets by Greg Cravens.  The story arc actually ran for a couple weeks.  These three are the ones that were map related:

I can't count how many road trip both in my youth and as an adult that have gone this way.... but only when children were involved.  

Fortunately it's not too far to go to the end of this story arc, at least the map-related parts.

"You just missed your turn" is a common enough gag in comics.

Civil War GPS help

This is Jef Mallet again with another brilliant map-related Frazz strip.  Want Civil War GPS data? here's some: http://www.poi-factory.com/node/1883

650 million years of Plate Tectonics

This is one of my most favorite animated maps ever:

650 Million Years In 1:20 Min.
Uploaded by xchristox. - Videos of the latest science discoveries and tech.

650 million years of Earth history, which includes a projection into the future of what the Earth will look like in 250 million years (another Pangea, this time in a doughnut shape surrounding the remnants of the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific Ocean gets HUGE!  I'd love for this to have an interactive scroll bar where the user could zoom back and forth through time at will and zoom in to specific areas.  Combine that with a comprehensive historical map of the human parts of history like the animated maps I've already posted.  And then add even more speculation showing the Earth's formation and eventual demise... and even the formation/destruction of the entire solar system and/or universe. I found a timeline of Star Trek history for other planets that could be added in as an option.  There could even be a Creationist version that blacks out at about 4000 BC.   

Remember, if you have any suggestions for Animated Maps Thursdays let me know.

GPS Person

Here's a strip from Betty (by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen).  It's not that new of a joke, but it's got a very modern angle.

Prince Valiant Two-fer Tuesday

Today's Two-fer Tuesday has a Prince Valiant theme.  To make them large enough to be legible click on each image. One of these is a recently ran honest-to-goodness Prince Valiant Sunday strip by Gianni and Schultz (originally by Hal Foster, starting back in 1937...sheesh! talk about a zombie strip)   The other is a hilarious spoof by Frank Cho's Liberty Meadows from several years ago (Liberty Meadows quit running new strips a few years back and, instead, has been running the entire run on a loop for a while now.  It recently started over again, frustratingly leaving the readers on the edge of its spectacular cliff hanger once again.  FINISH THE PLOT FRANK!!!). If there's one word to describe Liberty Meadows and Frank Cho's work its buxom.   There's maps in both of these strips.  Cho's Liberty Meadows spoof also references the classic "Run Away" scene in Monty Python's holy Grail:

You are mall test

Mall directories are one of the commonest "you are here" type gags. This is another example from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller.

Friday Fail

I could do a Friday Fail feature, but I don't know that I want to be that onomatopoeic.  This is from the Fail Blog site and is an example of bad geography on local news.