Dangerously cheesy (guest post)

Image links to source.

Humans dehumanizing humans

Ah, good old de-humanizing propaganda.  And with maps there's even less subtlety! Here's a pair of WWII-era propaganda images from either side of the conflict from an article in New Scientist about humans dehumanizing each other.

This is the French Vichy state showing what's supposed to be Churchill-as-octopus... because octopus is geographer shorthhand for global domination.

Translation: "Be assured, the amputations are proceeding methodically."

The sadness of the truth of this makes me sad:

Here there be...

Now you will always see the dragon:

Another fuse is lit (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe from the United States Library of Congress for the next few Mondays.

Duffy - The keeper of the light of Asia - 1950-3

Now with GPS

From the webcomic Poorly Drawn Lines by Reza Farazmand

Smiley Face Germany (guest post)

Here's a panel from SMBC that doesn't include the image, but does mention the shape of a map:

(Image links to source.)

Lost on the moon

Here's the debut of Invisible Bread by Justin Boyd on our blog with a guy who is very lost.

But not the first time this particular joke has appeared on this blog:
Driving to the moon
And again
Lunar jailbreak

Another Ed Fairburn map

More Map Art from Ed Fairburn

XKCD's Actually

xkcd by Randall Munroe that touches on a fundamental concept behind geodetics.  The "title-text" at the actual webcomic says:

Protip: You can win every exchange just by being one level more precise than whoever talked last. Eventually, you'll defeat all conversational opponents and stand alone.

Australia's cat-dog

The dog's kinda hard to see...maybe a scotty?  But the cat?  That's a cat!

Global defense (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe from the United States Library of Congress for the next few Mondays.

Fischetti - Now keep your fingers crossed - 1953

Global cocktail

What to drink around the world:

The only way to win is not to play

The sadness of the truth of this makes me sad:

Success? (guest post)

Hello! Amanda Murphyao here with some commentary on waiting for success:

When you wish

In this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic artist Zach Weiner reminds me of a passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Eventually of course, after their Galaxy had been decimated over a few thousand years, it was realized that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, and so the two opposing battle fleets settled their few remaining differences in order to launch a joint attack on our own Galaxy --- now positively identified as the source of the offending remark.
For thousands more years the mighty ships tore across the empty wastes of space and finally dived screaming on to the first planet they came across --- which happened to be the Earth --- where due to a terrible miscalculation of scale the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog. 

Global chicken

Re-arrange all the planet's landmasses to make a chicken...GO!:

Rain?

BC by Johnny Hart (deceased) and Mastroianni.  Theoretically there's a joke in the two-panel throw-away header and another in the rest of the panels.  Good luck finding them:

The fuse is lit (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe from the United States Library of Congress for the next few Mondays.

Crawford - The new fuse - c 1954

This is not uncommon

This bit of news lit up the interwebs last week.  But in truth there are actually several places on Earth that are frequently colder than some places on Mars.  There's a place in Antarctica that recently clocked in at -93C.  The more interesting thing is even when it gets that cold on Earth there's still stuff loony enough to live there...which is promising for those of us still hoping for some kind of Martian life.  

Down the drain

World class grafitti

Background map (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here with a classroom map cartoon by 

Michael Maslin:

Image links to source.

Interactive social media world

But what would social networks look like if you could see the cliques and groupings? This is what visual artist Alex Dragulescu has attempted to show with Ekisto--an interactive visualization of the communities behind StackOverflow, Github, and Friendfeed.

The interface is Google-Earth-ish and looks like cities.  Give it a spin:

True Tree

An etymological video from TED education about the origin of the word "true"... and it uses a couple maps to tell the tale.

Tattoo (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here with a tattoo map of Africa in a cartoon:

(Image links to source.)

Quit stalin' (guest post)

Hello! Guest contributor Amanda Murphyao here. I'm putting up historical cartoons involving the world or globe from the United States Library of Congress for the next few Mondays.

Chase - Stalin decides on next trouble spot - 6 Oct 1950

Did we know it?

In a world before viral videos some things still took the Internet by storm. From an article about such pre-viral viruses, here is a video about The End of the World which originated as a massively emailed flash animation:
 

Swing, batter batter

Hi! Guest poster Amanda Murphyao here with another globe:

(Image links to source.)

California on the run

Guest blogger Amanda Murphyao here with a map of California:

(Links to source.)

Introducing MinuteEarth

Studying bird migration has a lot to do with mapping and geography, as we learn in this video by the folks at MinuteEarth, an offshoot of MinutePhysics. Of those two YouTube channels, guess which one utilizes more maps?

Blowin' in the wind

A while ago we posted a link to the animated wind map of the USA.  The same guys (Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas) now did it for the entire planet... and this time in color.  It's stunning.  Click here to zoom and spin to your mesmerizing heart's content: