Map O' The Day #10 - Haunted Houses USA

http://hauntedhouses.com/map.cfm

Ok, so this is a little bit different from what the Map O’ The Day’s are intended to be. But, considering the holiday, I figured this Interactive map to search for haunted dwellings and historical sites would be spot on.

Happy Halloween!

Map O’ The Day #9 – UFO Hotspots Map

Yes, that’s right a map about where the crazies live. That said, it troubles me there’s a big red dot on my hometown, Pittsburgh, PA.

Alien encounters, abductions and sightings are very much out of the picture since they were milked for televisual success by the popular series The X-Files in the 1990s. This diminution of media coverage for UFOs and suchlike could of course be part of the very elaborate cover-up by the US government, which obviously has to be in cahoots with the more ominous races of aliens currently running the show in Area 51.

That doesn’t prevent the brave J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies from Chicago from publishing a map of UFO sightings in the US. It indicates the number of UFO reports per 100.000 people by county in the continental US. Some observations:

• There is a marked difference in levels of UFO visitation between the eastern and western halves of the continental US. Apparently, extraterrestrials like it out west.
• Marked exceptions to this rule is a hotspot in northern Minnesota, several others spread out mainly in Missouri and Illinois and a small area in the Florida panhandle.
• Aliens like the west, but generally don’t care for Dixie: the south is remarkably UFO-free.
• Preferred landing spots of UFOs are concentrated in the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, the three coastal states and Nevada – with a spike around, of course, Area 51.

Map O’ The Day #8 – Online Web Communities Map

Somewhat in the style of a treasure map, this ‘Map of Online Communities’ shows MySpace, Wikipedia, SecondLife and other user-generated phenomena now populating the internet.

The geography is not as random as one could assume at first glance. Area and position are significant. Thus, each community’s geographic area represents its estimated size, and the ‘compass-shaped island’ gives clues as to what each quarter signifies:

• North are more ‘practical’ communities,
• South is for the ‘intellectuals’.
• West lie the communities with a ‘real life’ connection,
• East those with a focus on the web itself.

Map O' The Day #7 - Eclipse Map

If you want to witness a total solar eclipse and you live in Europe, you’re out of luck until at least 2026. Unless you live in one of a few of Europe’s geographical extremities (i.e. the Faeroe Islands, Spitsbergen, Nova Zembla, Abkhazia and other parts of eastern Georgia or the southern part of Russia), the astronomical phenomenon will pass you by.

North Americans are in a bit more luck: on August 21, 2017, a solar eclipse will culminate in the sky close to Memphis, Tennessee. And on April 8, 2024, an eclipse will be visible in a band stretching from Maine to Mexico.

South America will have three solar eclipses. On July 11, 2010 and again on July 2, 2019, eclipses will be visible across two different bands of Chile and Argentina. The third one will culminate over Patagonia on December 14, 2020. Oh, and there is a small strip of Brazil that witnessed the very beginning of an eclipse culminating faraway over the Libyan-Chadian border on March 29, 2006. Apart from that previous one, Africa witnessed two more eclipses, both over the southern part of the continent, in 2001 and 2002. But none until at least 2026. Small areas in Australia’s Northern Territory and the state of Queensland will observe an eclipse on November 13, 2012.

In Asia, bands of darkness will travel across Indonesia on March 9, 2016, China, India, Eastern Nepal, Northern Bangladesh and the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan on July 2009 and China, Mongolia, the eastern tip of Kazakhstan and Siberia on August 8, 2008. That last one will culminate near the lands where the aboriginal Nenets tribe live. If you’re their shaman, you might want to note that date in your diary, and prepare a good speech.

Total solar eclipses occur when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, obscuring the sunlight and leaving visible only a much fainter corona. This ´totality´is only ever visible in a narrow bands of the Earth´s surface, as this map demonstrates. Interestingly, the shape of those bands bends with their relative position on the map - from slight curves close to the equator to almost circular nearer the pole.
Don´t think that the Sun (and Moon) behave differently over different parts of the globe: it´s the globe that gets distorted when it gets stretched out over a flat map surface, especially over the polar areas.

Map O' The Day #6 - The Boss

So, it being Monday, I wanted today’s map to be a little less “serious”. So, for all your Bruce, (or Jersey, God help you), fans - Enjoy.

James Joyce once boasted that, should Dublin ever disappear off the face of the earth, the city could be reconstructed from the references to it in ‘Ulysses’.

The maker of this map did something similar: ‘Bruceville’ is New Jersey, as it can be reconstructed out of Bruce Springsteen’s lyrics.

Although one of his most famous albums was called ‘Nebraska’ (and one of his best-stelling singles was ‘Streets of Philadelphia’), Springsteen can’t hide the fact that he’s a real Jersey boy. The lyrics to his songs are peppered with references to the landscape of the Garden State. The Boss’s New Jersey is populated by ominous darknesses, glittering fairgrounds, empty parking lots, pining sweethearts, blinding ad signs – a landscape seen from that most essential machine for American living, the car.

Map O’ The Day #5 – Gastronomic Cartography: The France of Breads

This brilliant map is in a gang of one, for the time being - gastronomic cartography. An intriguing category nonetheless: La France des pains (’The France of Breads’) visually demonstrates the place of origin of France’s different local types of bread. It turns out they come in a lot more shapes than the one foreigners (non-French foreigners, that is) usually associate with a French baguette. That shape is represented by the six stick-like loafs forming a little fence across the north of France:

30 - pain de fantaisie (fantasy bread)
31 - pain marchand de vin (wine merchant’s bread)
33 - pain saucisson (sausage bread) and
35 - pain boulot (work bread);
but also by
46 - pain condé (?)
46 - le tordu (twisted bread); and
69 - le phoenix, pain viennois (the phoenix or viennese bread) further south.

Interesting to note is that the elongated shape of the ‘typical’ French bread has quite some competition from the atoll-shaped bread:
12 - (illegible)
44 - pain collier (collar bread)
43 - le fer à cheval (horseshoe bread)
49 - (illegible)
52 - la couronne bordelaise (the crown of Bordeaux)
Other local French bread types more notable for their name than for their shape, are:
4 - pain chapeau (hat bread)
13 - pain bateau (boat bread)
22 - pain polka (polka bread)
28 - petit pain empereur (little emperor bread; why don’t they just call it ‘Napoleon’?)
48 - pain chemin de fer (railroad bread)

Map O' The Day #4 - Land of OZ

Oz is an imaginary magical monarchy, first introduced in L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). In all, Baum wrote 14 childrens’ books about Oz, presenting himself as the ‘Royal Historian’ of Oz. After his death, Ruth Plumly Thompson continued the series. Using clues in the series, fans have drawn up maps of Oz.

The Land of Oz is rectangular in shape, divided along the diagonals into four counties:

Munchkin Country (east)
Winkie Country (west)
Gillikin Country (north)
Quadling Country (south)

In the centre is Emerald City, the capital and seat of Princess Ozma. Oz is completely surrounded by deserts, insulating the country from invasion and discovery. The isolation may be splendid, it is not total: children from our world got through, as well as the Wizard of Oz and the more sinister Nome King. To prevent further incursions, Glinda created a barrier of invisibility around Oz.

Peculiar on some maps is that west is right, while east is left (while north is still top and south bottom). Some say this is because Baum looked at the wrong side of a glass slide while copying the map. Others believe the reversed compass rose simply reflects the ‘confusing’ nature of Oz, possibly due to Glinda’s spell. The reversal of east and west makes sense in that the Wicked Witch after enslaving the Winkies was called the ‘Wicked Witch of the West’ even though Winkie County is on the right hand side of the map. Robert A. Heinlein claims in his book The Number of the Beast that Oz is on a retrograde planet, spinning in the opposite direction of Earth.

Oz is the largest country on the continent of Nonestica, which also includes the countries of Ev, Ix and Mo (also known as Phunniland). Nonestica lies in the Nonestic Ocean – possibly a local name for the Pacific Ocean. In fact, some hints indicate that Oz is in the South Pacific: there are palm trees and horses are non-native. In Ozma of Oz, Dorothy is sailing to Australia when she is washed overboard and lands on the shores of Ev. Intriguingly, Oz is commonly used to refer to Australia, which borders the South Pacific Ocean.

The origin of the word ‘Oz’ is uncertain. One story holds that L. Frank Baum took it off a filing cabinet, which was divided into two alphabetical drawers: A-N and O-Z. Another holds that it is a corruption of Uz, the biblical homeland of Job. It could also be a reference to ounce (abbr. oz.) – with the story of Oz being an allegory for the populist struggle against the gold standard (personified by the powerless, frightened wizard in the books).Other theories state that ‘Os’ is and old English word for God, and in Wicked, a clever parody on the Oz material, it is proposed that Oz derives from ‘oasis’ or ‘ooze’, being a reference to the creation legend of a great flood.

Map O’ The Day #3 - Orwellian World of 1984

So, in my opinion, perhaps one of the best books ever written.

In George Orwell’s dystopian novel ‘1984’, the world is ruled by three superstates:

• Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.
• Eurasia covers Europe and (more or less) the entire Soviet Union.
• Eastasia covers Japan, Korea, China and northern India.
Unfortunately, there’s not much ’super’ to these states except their size. All three are totalitarian dictatorships. Oceania’s ideology is Ingsoc (English Socialism), Eurasia’s Neo-Bolshevism and Eastasia’s is the Obliteration of the Self (one imagines some kind of buddhist-inspired fascism. If one can). These ideologies are very similar, but the people are not informed of this.
The three states are in a perpetual state of warfare – sometimes two against one, sometimes all three against each other. These wars are fought in the disputed territories, running from North Africa over the Middle East and southern India to Southeast Asia.

And yet…

And yet the war might just not even be real at all. It’s clear that the Oceanic media are one-sided and fabricate ‘facts’. A dissident book central to ‘1984’ suggests the two other powers may actually be a fabrication of the government of Oceania, which would make it the world government. Or, on the other side of the scale of thinkable alternatives: Airstrip One is not an outpost of a greater empire, but the sole territory under the command of Ingsoc, which fabricates eternal global war to keep its people permanently mobilised, scrutinised and on rations.

Map O' The Day #2a/#2b – Views of Manhattan

#2a. - NYC - Any and every American city is built up out of Avenues and Streets, most of them numbered. A much nicer way to describe a city is by mapping its neighborhoods. As in this map of Manhattan.



















#2b. - Manhattan - A variation on Map #2a done by Alexander Cheek. The differences between these two maps indicate that neighborhoods in Manhattan are ‘fluid’, and constantly evolving.

Map O' The Day #1 – Microsoft Empire Map

This graphic is an interesting take on the current IT landscape. The explosions and dotted lines express the barriers to entry and the specific conflict points relevant to their market segment.