Quotulatiousness

December 6, 2016

Bowmanville, Ontario from 1984-2016 in Google Timelapse

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Description from the Timelapse page:

Timelapse

Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that lets you see how the Earth has changed over the past 32 years. It is made from 33 cloud-free annual mosaics, one for each year from 1984 to 2016, which are made interactively explorable by Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab’s Time Machine library, a technology for creating and viewing zoomable and pannable timelapses over space and time.

Using Earth Engine, we combined over 5 million satellite images acquired over the past three decades by 5 different satellites. The majority of the images come from Landsat, a joint USGS/NASA Earth observation program that has observed the Earth since the 1970s. For 2015 and 2016, we combined Landsat 8 imagery with imagery from Sentinel-2A, part of the European Commission and European Space Agency’s Copernicus Earth observation program.

December 6, 2015

The American Civil War: Every Day

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Published on 31 Oct 2014

See every day of the American Civil War unfold as the Union fights against the Confederacy to reunite the country in a bitter struggle.
Legend:
Maroon = Confederate States of America and territories
Red = Areas occupied by Confederate forces
Pink = Gains for that Day
Dark Blue = United States of America and territories
Blue = Areas occupied by Union forces.
Light blue = Gains for that day
Yellow = Border states / disputed areas.

H/T to BoingBoing for the link.

November 24, 2015

The Mercator Puzzle

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

How badly distorted is your mental map of the world thanks to the use of the Mercator projection? You can test yourself right here in your web browser with The Mercator Puzzle. Click on the image below, then drag each distorted country outline to its correct location on the underlying map:

Click the image to play in your browser

Click to play in your browser

H/T to Laura Hudson for the link.

September 7, 2015

Twenty-five interesting maps

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

H/T to AEI for the link.

February 14, 2015

Europe in 1899, according to Fred W. Rose

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Before the modern age of the infographic, artists like Fred W. Rose still had their own idiosyncratic ways to present as much information as they could for a wider audience:

Fred W Rose - Map of Europe in 1899

H/T to Tam for the link.

November 23, 2014

The odd names of Britain – now available as a wall map

Filed under: Britain, History, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:02

Like most denizens of North America, I’ve sometimes stumbled upon odd village names in Britain. There are some weird and daffy names still in use in the UK and you can now get a wall map highlighting a large number of them:

Weird British place names

H/T to Jessica Brisbane for the link.

November 9, 2014

A Viking view of Europe, circa 1000AD

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:00

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

Europe According to the Vikings (1000) from Atlas of Prejudice 2 by Yanko Tsvetkov.

H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.

September 24, 2014

Britain is big on Minecraft

Filed under: Britain, Gaming — Tags: — Nicholas @ 09:13

Er, sorry, I mis-spoke there … Britain is big in Minecraft:

Blighty’s Ordnance Survey organisation has updated the country’s map in Minecraft, adding roads, national rail networks and houses to the digital overview.

A plucky intern at the mapping org stuck Britain into the vastly popular game this time last year. Now that he’s bagged himself a full-time position on the grad scheme, Joseph Braybrook decided to add 83 billion bricks to the map, which is now so detailed that folks can find their houses on it.

“The terrain has been doubled in scale to provide more detail. It uses 1:25 000 scale OS VectorMap District to give a smoother, more expansive appearance that is closer to real life,” Braybrook explained.

“The water features now appear in sharper detail, too, so you can see individual streams and tributaries coming off rivers. The forests and woodlands are now populated with generated trees, and the national rail network has been added. I’m looking forward to seeing if people eventually build a working railway system in game,” he added.

Britain is big in Minecraft

June 29, 2014

Maclean’s puts Canada on the map, sorta

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:39

For Canada Day, Maclean’s tries portraying the country in various different ways:

Happy Canada Day! For a different perspective on the country this year, Maclean’s went to the maps. Drawing on a variety of sources, from government statistics to various online databases to tweets, here are some maps to illustrate Canada as you’ve never seen it before.

[…]

It’s always a surprise when people first learn that the very tip of southwestern Ontario is at a lower latitude than parts of California — which got us wondering: How do other parts of the country line up with the rest of the world? Here are the results, using Earthtools.org. Most of the cities on this map, and their global counterparts, lie within less than 50 km of each other, latitudinally speaking, of course. Only Quebec-Ulan Bator and Fort McMurray-Moscow are a full degree apart.

Canadian cities and other cities by latitude

[…]

What to say? Canada is a land of contrasts. It also offers up a bounty of clichés.

Canadian provinces by clichés

April 8, 2014

Map of the day

Filed under: Europe, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

Here’s an interesting map. What do you think it shows? An epidemic? Outbreaks of zombies? Incidents of flashmobbing?

Click to see full-sized image at the Washington Post

Click to see full-sized image at the Washington Post

The real answer is this shows where participants in an American survey plotted the location of Ukraine. The headline of the story is “The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene“.

Where’s Ukraine? Each dot depicts the location where a U.S. survey respondent situated Ukraine; the dots are colored based on how far removed they are from the actual country, with the most accurate responses in red and the least accurate ones in blue. (Data: Survey Sampling International; Figure: Thomas Zeitzoff/The Monkey Cage)

I’m not sure which responses worry me the most: the ones that show Ukraine in “flyover country”, Alaska, or Greenland or those that show Ukraine as an underwater modern-day Atlantis…

Update 10 April: I’m kicking myself for forgetting this Bierce quote.

April 2, 2014

Mapaholics rejoice!

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:53

The New York Public Library has released over 20,000 historical maps under a Creative Commons license:

Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads. We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions.* To the extent that some jurisdictions grant NYPL an additional copyright in the digital reproductions of these maps, NYPL is distributing these images under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. The maps can be viewed through the New York Public Library’s Digital Collections page, and downloaded (!), through the Map Warper. First, create an account, then click a map title and go. […]

What’s this all mean?

It means you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people.

Though not required, if you’d like to credit the New York Public Library, please use the following text “From The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.” Doing so helps us track what happens when we release collections like this to the public for free under really relaxed and open terms. We believe our collections inspire all kinds of creativity, innovation and discovery, things the NYPL holds very dear.

World's Fair New York 1939-1940. Proposed World's Fair site.

World’s Fair New York 1939-1940. Proposed World’s Fair site.

Complete railway map designed and engraved from the original maps, charts and schedules furnished by railway engineers, agents &c. to accompany the American Railway Guide (detail)

Complete railway map designed and engraved from the original maps, charts and schedules furnished by railway engineers, agents &c. to accompany the American Railway Guide (detail)

October 19, 2013

Amusing maps – US population distribution in units of Canadas

Filed under: Cancon, Randomness, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:19

You can find the most interesting things on Twitter. Here’s @Amazing_Maps with a map of the United States divided up into units of Canadas:

Click to embiggen

Click to embiggenate

September 13, 2013

QotD: The constant theme of British battles through history

Filed under: Britain, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

I have a theory that, while the battles the British fight may differ in the widest possible way, they have invariably two common characteristics — they are always fought uphill and always at the junction of two or more map sheets.

Field Marshal William Slim, “Aid to the Civil”, Unoficial History, 1959.

August 28, 2013

Hurricane and cyclone paths since 1842

Filed under: Americas, Environment, Pacific, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Wired‘s MapLab has a lovely visualization of both hurricane and cyclone tracks starting with the earliest records in 1842:

Historical Hurricane and Cyclone paths since 1842

This map shows the paths of every hurricane and cyclone detected since 1842. Nearly 12,000 tropical cyclones have been tracked and recorded, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration keeps them all in a single database. Long-term datasets can be really interesting and scientifically valuable, and this one is undoubtedly both.

In the image above, you can clearly see that more storm tracks have overlapped in the western Pacific ocean and northern Indian ocean. This is largely because of the length of the typhoon season, which basically never stops in the warmer waters there.

The tracks of the earliest storms are based on mariner’s logs and storm records, collected from various countries, agencies and other sources. Reconciling data from these different entities was tough. Most international agencies had their own set of codes for cyclone intensity, and only recorded this information once per day. India was even using different wind thresholds to designate cyclone stages.

August 24, 2013

The supercontinent of Pangaea with modern borders

Filed under: History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Pangaea with current international borders

From TwistedSifter:

Pangaea was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras, forming about 300 million years ago. It began to break apart around 200 million years ago. The single global ocean which surrounded Pangaea is accordingly named Panthalassa.

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