Woodcut Maps

Find a place on Google maps, select the desired woods, and a woodcut laser map will be created and delivered to you from Woodcutmaps.com.

Illusory globe

How to make an optical illusion that looks like a globe. Neato!


"Vous êtes ailleurs" ou à l'Hôtel de Ville ? by mairiedeparis

Spider learnin'

Jim Davis' Garfield hates spiders... although these spiders have a school with a globe in it.

River Transit Maps two-fer

What if river systems were displayed in the form of subway transit maps?  Behold the work of Daniel Hoffman at his Somthingaboutmaps blog (He's also the creator of the Cartastrophe blog).  Here's a few more.  The rest are at the river maps installment of the blog:

Tracking the sea-doggies

If we can count tracking as a kind of mapping (a bit of a stretch maybe) then here's a funny take on that concept underwater from Sherman's Lagoon strip by Jim Toomey

What I do

This is on is from my friend and colleague Rob and it's an example of the What People Think I Do / What I Really Do meme which has spread like wildfire across the internet over just the last couple months.  Enjoy:

Mapping Everyday Heroes

Heroes Chronicles is an interactive site in Mexico dedicated to mapping the locations of regular people doing heroic things... though they've expanded now to include Kazakhstan for some reason.  Check it out and map your own:

Emperor of the Universe

The always overwhelming Subnormality by Winston Rowntree gives us this peek into a difficult multiverse.  There's a map or two in it, most notably the palace map about half way through.  Click to make it larger/legible:

Rhode Island two-fer

For no particular reason, let's do some Rhode Island-themed cartoons for today's two-fer... And by the way, that leaves only 16 states left to be specifically mentioned in this blog:

Rhode Island dreamin' big (Rhode Island the colony actually was a LOT bigger than Rhode Island the state):

Rhode Island red, of course:

Click on this one to make it larger. There's a LOT of detail in it:

Sponsored GPS

From Betty by Gary Delainey and Gerry Rasmussen. This has got to have already happened to one of you, yes?

It very much reminds me of a time a few years ago when I was driving in the car with my son and the conversation maneuvered itself into a place where he was explaining to me the directions of how to get to some place we had been talking about.  All of his directions were in reference to restaurants..  Things like "2 blocks past the Burger King" and "Turn left at the McDonald's"... only he wasn't only referencing fast food joints, he was also mentioning the smaller local joints... places I never noticed and often I had no idea which places he was even describing.  What's more, we had never, ever been to any of them.  We'd been to Taco Bell... a local burrito chain... and a food cart.... and that's it. We don't watch TV either, so he couldn't have learned of those places that way. But he was giving me all these directions using all these restaurants as if we knew all these establishments intimately.  I was a little spooked, and very amused.

The Song Map

This is The Song Map available at the Dorothy site:

As one can see, all the street names, parks, and other features are taken from lyrics of songs.  Want to hear the songs featured on the map?  Here's a Spotify playlist of at least 353 of them: http://spoti.fi/wzBFnp

Virtual world

Here is a video of a planet-sized virtual world. This was built using fractal algorithms based on actual Earth data. The first game being built using this engine, Anteworld, presents an Earth long abandoned by humanity and tasks players with rebuilding civilization. Here's an article about it at the Makezine site.

Restraining map of the stars

We haven't done a "Map of the Stars" gag in a while.  Here's one from Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller.  Are there "Apps of the Stars"? Yes, of course there are (not to be confused with apps for stargazing).  Have "Apps of the Stars" put the "Maps of the Stars" vendors out of business?  I dunno.  Economics thesis anyone?

Super later primary two-fer Tuesday

While we're still in Primary season I figured we should do at least one more election primary two-fer. I have no idea how many more of these we'll have an opportunity to present, but as always, if you see any map-related comics during this primary season let me know.

The first is from Gingrich's Super Tuesday win in Georgia drawn by Mark Streeter. Anthropomorphizing a state can be difficult. Doing so in a way that makes it identifiable as a particular personality doubly so:

Chris Weyant gives us this take on the earlier primary in Michigan. The Mitt Romney - mitten-shaped state of Michigan relationship was an easy gimme. The trick is making it funnier than the simple sight gag:

Bill Day does a similar take on the same sight gag:

... but Day simply copy-pastes a gag he's done before during this primary season:

Fire break

Back in the summer of 2007 there were massive wildfires raging across the west.  Pat Bagley created a map-related editorial comic on the subject.

Mapping March Madness

While I'm not much of a sports fan, I can certainly appreciate a convergence of geography and multi-billion dollar sports industries.  For example,  here is a map showing both the number of shots taken from various places on the court during NBA games from 2006-2011, and also the success rate of those shots:

And the same kind of map for an individual player,

Now, as the article I found these in suggests, imagine overlaying all of these plots for all the players on a team and make a team that knows how to distribute its players to most effectively shoot from any position on the court. This is the work of Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State (and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard).

Mapping WiFi with light

Here's a beautiful way to do some mapping: This is effectively a time-lapse photo of a guy holding a LED-loaded staff that lights up according to WiFi signal strength.  Very fun!  I think this counts as an instance of wardialing (or wardriving or warchalking)

This is from a research project by some guys in Norway.

Nagging GPS

A GPS option that you may not have heard about yet from Andy Singer's "No Exit" :

9/11 Commission: The Graphic Novel

Remember the 9/11 Commission Report? If you never actually got around to reading it, here's the graphic novel version by Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón serialized in Slate Magazine. It's an easier read... and uses quite a few maps (although I would guess that the original does too).

Ice cream tracking

In the news lately has been stories about consumers being tracked by marketers through mobile devices, online activity, etc., etc., etc. In this episode of Bleeker: The Rechargeable Dog by Jonathan Mahood we have a similar kind of concept going on.

Google Earh pie chart

In case you don't already know about it, this is from GraphJam, a site with and endless supply of graph/chart-related visual humor.

Sesame Street: Map Maker

This is a screengrab from a Sesame Street clip on how maps are made.  A bit old school in the technology, but it's still essentially the same.  Here's the page with the actual video.