ALL THE HURRICANES!

Isaac has ravaged New Orleans and so to commemorate, here's a poster of all known hurricanes and tropical storms since 1851 from IDVsolutions:

And an article at "New Scientist" about it.

Permagrin uses a globe

Here's a short clip from a video entitled "Dream Music: Part 2" from the guys at Permagrin Films. This clipped bit features a spinning globe.  The entire 8+ minute stop-motion video took over 6 months to shoot.  It's pretty impressive and fun to watch.

Mitt's event

I'm posting this, from Tom Toles, a few weeks late for the Olympic theme it's based on, but just in time for the GOP Convention.

Disney ride maps two-fer

I know this one was featured recently over at Strange Maps, but it's still excellent work and the artisit who did it has done other work like it. Meet Jonah Adkins and his tumblr site.  By day he's a professional cartographer. All other times he appears to be devoted to his kids and keenly interested in most things Disney.  

Jonah recently completed a map of the world as it appears in the "It's a Small World" ride at Disney amusement parks.  It's quite an impressive feat, I gotta say... and the Goode Homolosine projection under the title is hardly the nifty-est touch.   

Last spring he finished this map of The Jungle Cruise ride.  It's not quite as ambitious as the Small World map, but it's still very fun:

Finally there's the map of the island in the TV show "Lost".  Not exactly Disney-related... unless one counts that the show aired on ABC which is owned by Disney.

Next week I'll post a couple more things I found on Jonah's site.

Endless wings

Recently from Randall Munroe's XKCD we have this depiction of "endless wings"

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

Try our bottomless drinks and fall forever!

Game of Game of Thrones

This is a board game based on Risk that uses the map from Game of Thrones. It was crafted by artist Fay Helfer who has more images of this wonderful uber-geek creation on her site.

USA - Boing!

 

 Over at Mike Bostock's blog there's a lot of neat visualizations and infographics.  The one called "Force-Directed States" applies a physics programming model to the United States and lets the user drag states around and watch them elastically interact with each other. Go try it out, then visit Mr. Bostock's blog for lots of other neato do-dads, many of them cartographically oriented.

Olympics round-up?

Given that this episode of the Sheldon webcomic by Dave Kellet went up just a few days after the closing Olympic ceremonies I'm assuming it's a loose reference to the Olympics.

Beetle & the "GPS Lady"

These two strips from Mort Walker's Beetle Bailey ran several years apart, the first in 2010, and the second ran yesterday.  Yet the references to the "GPS Lady" seems like they could be part of the same story arc, where the GPS has achieved sentience and isn't terribly thrilled with the strip's main characters.. 

Is she attempting murder/suicide here?

Gargoyle Positioning System

Superhero-themed Book of Biff comic by Chris Hallbeck

Attack!

Another Godzilla-themed post here.

21st Century ghost town

Pegasus Global Holdings is going to build a "Science Enrichment Center", or in other words a full scale model of a "typical American town of 35,000" with no residents so they can experiment on a town without hurting people. Link to article about it.

Continiental drip

Frank & Ernest by Bob Thaves doing a typical pun on a geologic and cartographic theme.

If you liked this one, here's some more for additional chuckles:

• Are they pointing down or up?
• More on plate tectonics

Introducing: Chainsawsuit (two-fer)

OK, so let's see. We've got a new webcomic here that I'd like to introduce: Chainsawsuit by Kris Straub who, I discovered, recently completed his comedic sci-fi epic Starslip, which I posted an example of some time ago. So here's the new webcomic, published in strip form:

This is probably the first and only time the term "geolocate" has been used in a comics format... and it appears to me that he's using it wrong. But it's still funny.

Sadly, I haven't been following the Olympics very closely so I'm not actually getting the context for this joke, though I can guess at it. 

BTW, a while ago I saw a version of the London 2012 Olympics logo that had the "0" and "2" symbols on the right colored to make it look like Lisa Simpson in a half-kneeling position... doing something untoward.  While the full NSFW effect of that image alteration was, fortunately, not entirely convincing, I can't un-see the silhouette of Lisa Simpson in the 2012 Olympic logo.

Last week I was made aware that this is, in fact, the 30th (modern) Olympic Games. And I just now while writing this began wondering why they didn't use the Roman numerals in the official logo design like they usually do, especially since 30 is an easy even number for Roman numerals, and this year's 2012 logo is, frankly, kinda lame. But that thought lasted about half a second until the Roman numeral for 30 flashed into mind.  Oh.  Right. That'd be a bit tough to deal with.

Then I began wondering whether they're going to avoid Roman numerals completely for the next...let's see... 36 years?  Or do they figure it'll be OK with the extra Roman numerals in there?  But looking back at Olympics logos past they haven't used Roman numerals since about 1980 anyway.

Introducing In Maps & Legends

In Maps & Legends is a digital graphic novel by Niki Smith that's now in its 9th volume.  I haven't read it but the concept looks amazing:

Kaitlin Grayson considers herself just an artist until she gets recruited by a strange man named Bartamus, who shows up at her place in the middle of the night and demands she use her skills to save his dying world. Soon Kait gets caught between two worlds, and if Bartamus’ world falls, Earth is next — along with untold other worlds.

Rap Map

It's a map... of rap... in New York City. From the data visualization people at Very Small Array

The place where I found this also linked to a more international "The Rap Map", but I can't get much out of that site.

I have been following Brain Rot's serial graphical history of Hip Hop by Ed Piskor over at BoingBoing.net.  Informative, sure, but I'm still not that interested in hip hop or rap.

Visualize pizza

Fascinating video from the new PBS series "America Revealed", this one showing the supply chain for Dominoes pizza all the way through to the perspective of the deliverer:

There are a lot more fascinating data visualization videos at the show site.

How to get there, mate

Remember Steve "The Crocodile Hunter" Irwin? Here's an older bit from Sherman's Lagoon strip by Jim Toomey featuring a visit from the late teladventurist.

Compu-Toon two-fer

I want you to have a look at this first example from Charles Boyce's Compu-Toon single-frame daily

August 2012

 .... and then click on this link to the one I posted last April (it actually ran September of 2007). Notice everything similar?:

September 2007

I don't mean to criticize this technique of cartoonists' liberal use of the copy-paste function in their art... heck, Dinosaur Comics is actually built around using the exact same artwork every single week for almost 10 years now and that webcomic is fairly successful.  I'm merely pointing it out here.  Some of the longer-running newspaper comics re-use art, text, punchlines, or even entire strips frequently enough, though at times the material comes off as quite dated.  There can even be a rather fine line between recycling art and establishing a running gag in a strip.  Billy's "pun-island" Sunday strips from Family Circus come to mind.

I will say, however, for a comic titled "Compu-toon", an awful lot of the equipment depicted in the strip is quite significantly out of date. Most of the cell phones shown in the strips are in the old clam shell style with the traditional keypad buttons. Many even sport antennas. And unless it's a joke specifically about oversized flat-screen TVs, pretty much all the monitors are the old, bulky CRT models. I should think that at the very least the newer flat monitors would be easier to draw.  He's even got jokes about texting where the characters are using laptops.  And why so very many "desert island"-themed comics which almost never have anything to do with computers?

It's not like this particular store setting is part of some running gag, though.  He's drawn other retail-establishment settings for other gags:

Maybe he's got one scene for phone stores and another for GPS counters n electronics outlets?

Sesame Street GPS

Another example of the webcomic Basketcasecomix by Kelly Ferguson.

World of money

Here is a map of the world with nations "colored" using some of their paper currency.  From the "I Love Charts" Tumblr (click onthe image above to see a larger version).

This is rather like the flag maps from last summer.

Following the GPS too closely

I've heard of several stories (mostly about Germans) following their GPS units too closely. And there was that episode of The Office where Michael Scott follows the GPS directions into a lake:


Here's a news report of somebody actually doing the same:

B.C.: Before cel phones

Regular contributor to The New Yorker Farley Katz has a phone reminiscing about the good ol' days.