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Outside The Map Room

March 21, 2010 | Post a comment

I’ve always dug geography and considered myself a map nerd. It seems, however, that one of the charter members of the C&B blogroll has proven me wrong. If I were a real map nerd, I guess I would care about the kind of stuff most often posted at The Map Room these days — stuff like the conflation of neogeography with GIS, or the upcoming BBC4 radio series On the Map. I’ll admit that I got a slight kick out of the news that there are now global maps of the Moon and Mars available as apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, albeit a sarcastic one (I just know that the next time I’m on Mars and can’t find an ATM, I’m going to kick myself for not having an iPhone).

I had to scroll fairly far down the front page to find the kind of thing I used to see a lot more of at The Map Room: a link to this delightful set of map art by illustrator Christoph Niemann at his New York Times blog. As a cinephile, I suppose it’s natural that this one is my favorite:
casablanca

Thus it has come to pass that The Map Room must go without the torrential stream of traffic that surely resulted from its presence on my blogroll. I’m pretty sure he’ll be fine. To be clear, I have nothing at all against The Map Room — I’m just, as they say, not feelin’ it anymore.

As for the remainder of my “Niches” blogroll section, websurfers with or without a cartographic bent should find plenty of interest at the whimsical, wonderful, web-based world of Strange Maps. For example, check out this 1940 map by an Irish satirist endeavoring to make his country look maximally unappealing to possible Nazi invaders.

Or, if you’re both a history geek and a map geek (like me), you can frolic away the hours at the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection site. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google Maps, Now Featuring… Property Lines?!?

October 19, 2009 | Post a comment

I just noticed that the regular view of my area on Google Maps now shows property lines:

googlemaps-propertylines

Maybe only map nerds like me get excited about the rollout of this kind of feature. Frankly, I’m not even sure what utility it has for a normal Google Maps user. The nearest thing I can think of at the moment is perhaps for increased specificity in giving directions, as in, “It’s the fifth house on the right.” Or something like this… Read the rest of this entry »

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Irony Supplement

October 18, 2007

Lo and behold, though I have posted nothing in quite awhile and am therefore a bad, bad blogger… I came across this tidbit, which has languished for two months in my “drafts” folder. I must have run out of time after composing it and had to rush off somewhere.

Far be it from me to make light of auto accidents (a subject with which I have become all to familiar); nevertheless, I could not help but be struck (ha ha) by the following item, which I discovered at The Map Room:

CARS CRASH INTO THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA MAP LIBRARY

The University of Georgia’s Map Library seems to be a favourite target of wayward (and inebriated) drivers: it was hit last September (there are photos) and, less spectacularly, earlier this month. Via MAPS-L [a cartographic listserv] where the University’s map librarian reported on “what has apparently become an annual event.”

UGA map library Sept 2006

Since the librarians are writing poetry about it, I guess nobody was killed or anything. Then again, in my schoolboy days I did encounter a few librarians who were utterly cruel and heartless, so who knows.

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