Zeus spot

We haven't done an Atlas-themed comic in quite a while.  Here's one from debuting-on-this-site webcomic Goneintorapture.com:

Nast-y comics

Thomas Nast looms large in the universe of political cartoons.  He is responsible for the iconic red-and-white-themed branding of jolly old Santa Claus.  He is also responsible for the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey.  He's arguably the father of modern editorial cartooning.  So it makes sense that he might have had some strong and controversial opinions. Unfortunately some of those opinions involved some thoroughly despicable attitudes towards the Irish and Catholics, often drawing them in sub-human tones. Here's an example which includes a map of what may be New York City?  Not entirely sure. But it's a map...in a cartoon...so now it's here. Nast's virulently anti-Irish, anti-Catholic cartoons may seem a bit odd given his penchant for drawing pro-Chinese-immigrant and anti-Jim-Crow cartoons. Whatcha gonna do?


 

Superiority complex

I think this may have been a difficult angle at which to depict the Great Lakes.... and as "Great" Lakes I think they're likely all a bit conceited:...except maybe Lake Erie... he's just creepy.

Is anybody this dumb?

Yay, she got a new map-themed card:

Disneyland Mark 0

This is the original map for Disneyland as imagineered by Walt himself in the original prospectus for the product.  If it's even possible to imagine, the original plan was even more shopping-oriented than what Disneyland itself became.  Indeed, reading the article I was reminded about how wildly radical the shift to mass consumerism was to U.S. society.  What will the next shift look like?  Are we already in the midst of it? 

World of Reality (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.

Werner - Now a world of stark reality - 21 Jan 1953

Breathing Manhattan

This animated map by Joey Cherdarchuk of data firm Dark Horse Analytics visualizes a 24-hour cycle of Manhattan’s populations at work and home. His article about it gives details on how it's done. It was, of course, inspired by the Breathing Earth animations I posted a few days ago.

Animated pale dot

We've had a look before at a cartoony adaptation of Carl Segan's Pale Blue Dot comments.  Here's an animated adaptation of the same Ehdubya.

Pale Blue Dot - Animation from Ehdubya on Vimeo.

Breathing Earth

What would it look like to get rid of the clouds and watch a time-lapse of the Earth go through a year's worth of seasons (minus the sea-ice)? Data visualizer John Nelson’s Breathing Earth shows us.

Inman's love letter to Tesla

Some of you may have heard about this recent item where Matthew Inman, the cartoonist behind The Oatmeal, drew up a rapturous ode to his Tesla S-Class automobile (Part 1, Part 2)and, towards the end of his orgasmic love song asked billionaire Elon Musk to build a museum dedicated to Nicola Tesla...and Musk heard about it and agreed. Here's a part of the tome that includes a map-like thing:  

Bad dream

This is submitted by frequent-poster Amanada.  We haven't had a submission from the Perry Bible Fellowship in a while.  This one uses the globe-as-shorthand-for-learning imagery in the last panel:

Big data mirror room

In an effort to show off their big data capabilities Microsoft built this mirror room and presentation for their 2014 SQL Server launch party. There's maps at the 1:45 and 2:45 marks.  Watching it in full-screen or even in the 360 version is fun.

Microsoft / Infinity Room from Freefarm - Sound Design & Music on Vimeo.

The world pilloried (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.

Talburt - Pilloried - 1930-1

Third languages

From friend-of-blog Andy there's this map of the most common language spoken in a state after the first two big ones. I believe that this is one of the possible outputs from the interactive viral map generator at Slate.com. It's not completely depressing to note that at least a few states still have fairly common Native American languages.

Alex Chacon around the world

Alex Chacon went around the world with a GoPro camera and began and ended his world tour selfie video with a map travel log.


It's a similar concept to the gone-viral Matt Harding dancing-around-the-world videos but with a bit more map:

Moonwalk

Maybe i'm beginning to like this AccordingtoDevin webcomic.

Does this make philosophy accessible?

There is an explosion in short videos that explain science things. This trend has spread into arguably less-sciencey fields such as philosophy. On the one hand philosophy is probably more digestible in such smaller chunks, on the other hand *yawn*. At least this one from PhilosophyTube has some maps in it:

Ben Sack's city

This is artist Ben Sack drawing a fantastical bird's-eye-view cityscape of overwhelming detail all set to Camille Saint-Saëns' orchestration of Danse Macabre:

See it?

Pat Bagley has this editorial cartoon on the XL Pipeline:

Worried world (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.

Sweigert - Enough light to read by - c Sept 1949

Despicable

David Fitzsimmons with an editorial cartoon about Putin's designs on the Ukraine.

Judgmental maps

We've posted the stereotypes maps.  here's the Judgmental maps full of more unpleasentness towards one's urban neighbors.  Is this funny or simply hateful? Or both?

Insurgency Tracker

Friend-of-the-blog Rob has submitted the Invisible Armies Insurgency Tracker which an interactive mapping tool that looks at a database of insurgencies from 1775 to 2012. It goes with the book Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present, by Max Boot.

Viral map generator

Slate.com has an article about viral maps and an interactive viral map generator that can be used to create a broad array of maps such as this one: The most common UFO shape sighted in each state:

James Hancock's famous people

Australian illustrator James Gulliver Hancock's fantastical drawings of famous figures double as cultural literacy cheatsheets for facts both intimate and mundane.  This one of John Lennon has a map of England on it.  They're all in his book: Artists, Writers, Thinkers, Dreamers: Portraits of 50 Famous Folks & All Their Weird Stuff.

Wham!

Between 2000 and 2013, 26 asteroids packing at least the energy of 1 kilotonne of TNT hit Earth or exploded in its atmosphere. That's up to 10 times as many as you would expect from existing models of the frequency of asteroid strikes.

These strikes were partially detected by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Detection Network, which monitors for the covert testing of nuclear weapons. Now the B612 Foundation, which is building the first privately funded asteroid-hunting space telescope, has turned the underlying data into a visualization.

B612 released this animation/visualization of those impacts.  It's not clear whether this 13 years of data shows more asteroid impact activity than usual or if it's par for the course.

Marcus Edwin (4/4) (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.

Here are a few more cartoons by Marcus Edwin that feature the globe:

Marcus - The trail blazer - 1946-58

Marcus - Wacht am Rhein - c 1949

Marcus - While he's thinking it over - 23 June 1948

We have GPS

This exchange, caricatured perfectly here Dave Kellet in his Sheldon webcomic, will haunt us for a generation or two yet:

Century of earthquakes

Flowing Data has a map of every 5.0-or-larger earthquake for the last 100 years. Their article about it even includes the code so that you can make recreate the map yourself.

Subway map of the USA

Portland-based graphic designer Cameron Booth has spent the last few years making this detailed subway-map-style illustration of every single current and signed Interstate Highway and U.S. Highway in the contiguous 48 states...because MAPS!.

Google Map of Thrones

The Google Maps Mania blog has a roundup of maps of Westeros and Essos from Game of Thrones mostly  built in Google Map platforms.


Game of Thrones is an Esri StoryMap of Westeros and Essos. The map sidebar includes links to important locations on the two continents.


The Interactive Game of Thrones Map is a Google Map of the fictional continents of Westeros and Essos from George Martin's series of fantasy novels A Song of Ice and Fire.


The Westeros Map is another Google Map of the fictional continent of Westeros


Arya's Journey plots the story of Arya Stark,the youngest daughter and third child of Lord Eddard and Catelyn Stark of Winterfell.