Map O’ The Day #24 – Turkey Trail

So, it’s not quite Thanksgiving, but I thought I’d send this out in the spirit of the oncoming holiday.

This map is a lifecycle of a turkey, well at least of a domesticated turkey. I think the imagery is very strong, and for some folks serves as a reminder of why they are vegetarians! It’s interesting that the illustrator has used such childlike design to represent the systematic slaughter and consumption of a quite tasty creature!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Map O’ The Day #23 – Pop vs. Soda

It’s definitely called POP!!!!

When on a hot summer’s day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics (Soda or Pop?, #24, 1996) and of a map, showing the regional variation in American English of the names given to that type of drink.

The article was written by Luanne von Schneidemesser, PhD in German linguistics and philology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and senior editor of the Dictionary of American Regional English. And although there might be weightier issues in life (or even in linguistics) than the preferred terminology for a can of soft drink, there’s nothing trivial about this part of the beverage industry.

“According to an article last year in the Isthmus, Madison’s weekly newspaper, Americans drink so much of the carbonated beverages sold under such brand names as Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Sprite, Mountain Dew, and 7-Up that consumption averages 43 gallons per year for every man, woman, and child in the United States,” Von Schneidemesser begins her article. “The Statistical Abstract of the United States (1994) confirms this: 44.1 gallons per person in 1992, compared to the next most consumed beverages: beer (32.7 gallons), coffee (27.8 gallons), and milk (25.3 gallons).”

Coke: this generic term for soft drinks predominates throughout the South, New Mexico, central Indiana and in a few other single counties in Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. ‘Coke’ obviously derives from Coca-Cola, the brand-name of the soft drink originally manufactured in Atlanta (which explains its use as a generic term for all soft drinks in the South).

Pop: dominates the Northwest, Great Plains and Midwest. The world ‘pop’ was introduced by Robert Southey, the British Poet Laureate (1774-1843), to whom we also owe the word ‘autobiography’, among others. In 1812, he wrote: A new manufactory of a nectar, between soda-water and ginger-beer, and called pop, because ‘pop goes the cork’ when it is drawn. Even though it was introduced by a Poet Laureate, the term ‘pop’ is considered unsophisticated by some, because it is onomatopoeic.

Soda: prevalent in the Northeast, greater Miami, the area in Missouri and Illinois surrounding St Louis and parts of northern California. ‘Soda’ derives from ‘soda-water’ (also called club soda, carbonated or sparkling water or seltzer). It’s produced by dissolving carbon dioxide gas in plain water, a procedure developed by Joseph Priestly in the latter half of the 18th century. The fizziness of soda-water caused the term ‘soda’ to be associated with later, similarly carbonated soft drinks.

Other, lesser-used terms: include ‘dope’ in the Carolinas and ‘tonic’ in and around Boston, both fading in popularity. Other generic terms for soft drinks outside the US include ‘pop’ (Canada), ‘mineral’ (Ireland), ‘soft drink’ (New Zealand and Australia). The term ‘soft drink’, finally, arose to contrast said beverages with hard (i.e. alcoholic) drinks.

Map O' The Day #22 - Economist Pizza Box

The Economist "Get A World View" pizza boxes: Using pizza boxes as a method for delivering more than just a pizza pie, British news magazine The Economist topped pizza boxes with pie charts showing stats relating to world food distribution, such as world cheese imports and global wheat consumption. Distributed through 20 Philly-area pizza shops with close proximity to universities, the charts aimed to inform students about how their consumption affects the rest of the world and also to show that The Economist's content is not only educational but also relevant to their lifestyle. Now that's food for thought!

Map O’ The Day #22 – Japanese View of America

This map is basically what would happen if you got a bunch of Japanese guys in a room, got them drunk, and then asked them to draw what they could remember about America on a bar napkin.

Some funny things of note:

• Alaska is an island, including the fictional city of Ice Palace.
• Montana is located oceanside, under Seattle, which apparently has a thing with cats.
• Portland and Lake Tahoe are near the supersized San Francisco Bay, which contains an equally inflated Alcatraz.
• San Fran itself is placed on the wrong side of its bay.
• Los Angeles (under the sign still reading ‘Hollywoodland’) is just north of Arizona; close by are the cities of Las Vegas, Tombstone, Phoenix and Carlsbad Caverns.
• So great they named it twice: another Carlsbad Caverns appears near El Paso, which is separated from Houston by a large bay, near which can also be found the (Mexican) cities of Oaxaca and Mexico City.
• The north (labeled ‘Minnesota’) is dominated by St Paul, Minneapolis, Yellowstone and Chicago, which boasts an enormous skyscraper (probably but not recognizably the Sears Tower).
• The northwestern peninsula of America is called Michigan, and counts two major cities: Detroit and Indianapolis.
• New Jersey apparently is a hole in the ground, while New York is located on an island way off the mainland.
• New Orleans is placed about right, Atlanta is too far south (and south of Florida).
• The centre of the country is dominated by the gigantic monument of Mount Rushmore, not far from the town of Missouri. To the south, apparently surrounded by desert, is the city of Dallas.
• Oh yes, and there is no Canada! Makes one wonder where that waterfall on America’s northeastern peninsula comes from.

Map O’ The Day #20 – Gnomes of Europe

In 1976, Dutch illustrator Rien Poortvliet and writer Wil Huygen published ‘Gnomes’, a quasi-scientific work about the history, anatomy, habits, quirks and other aspects of the lives of these little people. The book, supposedly written with the consent and cooperation of the gnomes, was an international success, translated in 21 different languages and selling over 4 million copies.

Gnomes are extremely small, human-like creatures who wear pointy red hats, all have beards (the men, not the women) and live in holes beneath the ground. They are benevolent, caring for animals, but also sympathetic to humans. Several subspecies can be distinguished: wood gnomes, garden gnomes, dune gnomes (at the coast), farm gnomes and mill gnomes. Or at least some people believe so; in the olden days, gnomes were an accepted fact of life, as is attested by the widespread knowledge of them, but their ever rarer sightings have confined them to the realm of folklore.

This map shows the extent of the gnome habitat in Europe: vast but fragmented, from Ireland in the west to an eastern boundary deep in Siberia, and from high up in Scandinavia to a southern limit running through Belgium to Switzerland and down into the northern Balkan. Southern countries like France, Spain, Italy, Albania, most of ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece are (almost) completely gnome-free. Heavy concentrations of gnomes can be found in the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Alps and Carpathians and areas of Belarus and the Ukraine.

Map O’ The Day #19 – 2008 Voting vs. 1800’s Cotton Production

The top map is voting patterns in this 2008 election– the bottom map is cotton production in 1860

Map O’ The Day # 18 – World’s First Sat Nav

So, this isn’t REALLY a map, but it’s just too cool to pass up.

Satellite navigation (SatNav) is a lot older than previously thought. In fact, it’s even decades older than man-made satellites themselves. This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.

The technology - a curious cross between the space age and the stone age - consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be ’scrolled’ (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.

The system has several obvious drawbacks - a limited number of available journeys, and the inability of the system to respond to sudden changes of direction. Also: no warning of road works or traffic jams ahead.

Not that there were that many traffic jams in 1920s Britain. The Routefinder, one of many bizarre patented gadgets now on display at the British Library, didn’t take off because there were too few drivers, i.e. potential customers, at that time in Britain. Or maybe also because it was a bit impractical, distracting drivers from what they were supposed to watch - the road.

Map O’ The Day #17 – Atlantropa

Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa is the craziest, most megalomaniacal scheme from the 20th century you never heard of.

Sörgel (1885-1952) was a renowned German architect of the Bauhaus school, and a philosopher reflecting on culture, space and geopolitics. On the future’s horizon, he saw the emergence of three global superpowers, one uniting the American continent, another a Pan-Asian block, and Europe – possibly the weakest of the three.

His solution was to engineer Europe out of its problems. Sörgel based his solution for Pan-European power and self-sufficiency on the observation that, although significant amounts of water flow into the Mediterranean through the Strait of Gibraltar (from the Atlantic Ocean) and the Dardanelles (from the Black Sea), its level stays the same, through evaporation. Hence his proposal to dam the Mediterranean at both ends, using the reduced inflow to generate massive amounts of hydroelectricity (110,000 Megawatt via several dams, of which 50,000 MW via the Gibraltar dam alone) and in the process create new land, which not only could be used for colonisation, but would also connect Europe to Africa. Thus would be created a new supercontinent, Atlantropa (giving the former easy access to the latter’s raw materials).

Sörgel first publicised his ideas in his 1929 book Mittelmeer-Senkung, Sahara-Bewässerung, Panropaprojekt (‘Lowering the Mediterranean, Irrigating the Sahara: the Panropa Project’), reiterating and specifying them in Atlantropa (1932). Later versions of the project included plans to create a series of giant lakes in Central Africa (Sörgel’s father, significantly, pioneered hydroelectricity in Bavaria).

Sörgel, as a visionary pacifist, had noble motives and his ideas were not without merit, but the logistics of the project were daunting. He saw cheap hydroelectricity as the answer to a future in which non-renewable energy sources such as coal, gas and oil would dwindle to depletion; he thought colonising new lands in the Mediterranean would give European nations a positive focus towards cooperation and help avoid another war. The growth of industry and agriculture would thus be safeguarded. And the land reclamation of parts of the Mediterranean seafloor would mirror, on a much larger scale, the centuries-old communal struggle of Holland against the North Sea. It would also provide another outlet for Napoleon’s vision of forging a peaceful European Union through the joint colonisation of Europe’s East (an idea no doubt constructed to co-justify Napoleon’s Russia campaign of 1812). The massive works would go on for more than a century, eliminating unemployment for generations.

But consider what was to be the lynchpin of Atlantropa, the Gibraltar dam. At its narrowest, the Strait of Gibraltar is 14 km (9 mi) wide. And yet, for some reason, Sörgel decided the dam should be built 30 km further inside the Mediterranean, where it would have to be significantly longer. The foundations for the dam would have to be 2.5 km wide, and 300 m high. To complete, it would take 10 years, and 200,000 workers, labouring in 4 continuous shifts. The dam would be crowned by a 400 meter high tower. Calculations at the time cast doubt on whether there would be enough concrete in the world to complete the gargantuesque project.

And consider what would happen to the Mediterranean, cut in two by the lower sea levels, with Sicily connected to both Tunisia and the Italian mainland (allowing, among other things for a regular train service between Berlin and Cape Town). In the western half, the water would be lowered by 100 meters, in the eastern half by as much as 200 meters, combining to create 576,000 km2 new dry land, a fifth of the Mediterranean’s surface, or more than the surface of Belgium and France together. Imagine the problems and traumas this would create for coastal cities such as Marseille or Genoa. Sörgel did propose the construction of new harbours, and did provide a special solution for Venice: another dam would safeguard its lagoon from drying out. But that lagoon would be a lake, 500 km away from the nearest seashore.

Sörgel’s plan would be considered outdated today for more reasons than just its megalomania. It was also completely eurocentric, proposing a Euro-African continent entirely run by and for the benefit of Europe(ans), Africa(ns) being reduced to supplying raw materials (he also saw a strong Atlantropa, also controlling the Middle East, as a bulwark against the ‘Yellow Peril’). Furthermore, there was totally no regard for its ecological impact (the increased salinity of the remaining Mediterranean Seas would have killed off much of the flora and fauna, the precipitation patterns could shift dramatically). And one shudders to think what would happen if the giant Gibraltar dam would be breached by a tsunami, an earthquake or a terrorist attack.

Despite his pacifist leanings, Sörgel attempted to reformulate his ideas in a way more favourable to the national-socialist world view. In 1938, he wrote Die drei grossen A: Amerika, Atlantropa, Asien - Grossdeutschland un italienisches Imperium, die Pfeiler Atlantropas (‘The Three Big A’s: America, Atlantropa, Asia – Greater Germany and the Italian Empire, the Pillars of Atlantropa’), and in 1942 the equally Lebensraum-ish Atlantropa-ABC: Kraft, Raum, Brot (‘Atlantropa ABC: Strength, Space, Bread’).

Sörgel’s ideas never caught on with the Nazis, whose expansionist plans were oriented more towards the East than towards the South. The idea therefore survived the Second World War, but was eventually rendered moot by the advent of nuclear power and the end of colonialism. Sörgel kept defending his ideas literally to the death: in 1952, he was hit and killed by a car while biking to hold a speech on his Atlantropa project, the dream of which died a slow death after his own. In 1960, the Atlantropa Institute was closed. Although Atlantropa never came close to realisation, or maybe because of it, the concept did gain some currency in science fiction circles. A few examples:

• Soviet SF writer Grigory Grebnev’s ‘The Flying Station’ (1950) describes a future in which the Socialist Revolution has triumphed, but small groups of Neo-Nazis hiding near the North Pole are conspiring to destroy the Revolution’s most precious project, a Gibraltar dam.
• Philip K. Dick’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’ (1962) mentions in passing the draining of the Mediterranean by the victorious Nazis (as well as their genocide on Africans).

It shows (in the upper left corner) Venice, connected via a canal to the Mediterranean, and (in the upper right corner) the Sea of Marmara with dam and power station, (in the lower left corner) the main dam and power station at Gibraltar, (in the lower middle of the map) a second dam at Sicily to facilitate the differentiated lowering of the eastern Mediterranean’s sea level and (in the lower right corner) an extension of the Suez Canal. The legend indicates planned rail links, planned irrigation areas through desalinisation plants, and amount of land reclaimed (in kilometers).

The second map of the ‘African’ part of the project can be found here, on a page called Xefer. It shows the African interior dominated by a few huge, artificial lakes: Lake Chad hypertrophied into the Chad Sea, reaching deep into the Sahara, its overflow connected to the Mediterranean, but also connected via the Ubangi Overflow to a titanic Congo Lake, created by damming the Congo River and flooding most of Congo’s interior.

Map O’ The Day #16 — Holmes, Sweet Holmes

Truly some of the great stories of all times.

Russell Stutler is an American artist living in Tokyo; his website showcases, among other examples of his graphic art, this ink and pen floorplan of 221B Baker Street in London, one of the best-known fictional addresses of all time – as it is the residence of literature’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. The floorplan was “drawn from notes taken while reading all 60 Sherlock Holmes stories twice in a row. If it appears in the books, it appears in this drawing,” says Mr Stutler.

Baker Street, in Westminster’s Marylebone district, these days is a busy thoroughfare, more prosaically known as the A41. When you exit the Baker Street Tube station – the first underground station in the world, by the way – you can’t miss the larger-than-life bronze statue of the street’s best-known resident. But Sherlock wasn’t the only fictional figure to live on Baker Street: so did James Bond, DangerMouse, Sexton Blake (the “poor man’s Sherlock Holmes”) and Dusty Springfield (okay, she’s not fictional). Mme Tussaud’s waxworks museum had been a fixture on Baker Street from 1835 to 1884, and is now located on Marylebone Road, just around the corner.

Holmes, created by Arthur Conan Doyle, was located by the author in an upstairs apartment of one of Baker Street’s then very high-class residences. In Doyle’s day, the street numbers on Baker Street only went up to 100, which probably explains why he chose 221B – to fictionalize Holmes’s address. More recently, the number 221 has been assigned (among others) to an art deco building housing, until 2002, the Abbey National building society. The company had to hire a ‘secretary to Mr Holmes’ to deal with all the incoming mail addressed to Doyle’s intrepid detective. A bronze plaque at the building’s facade details Holmes’ and Watson’s moving in to 221B.

And yet, the ‘true’ location of the detective’s residence remains a matter of dispute among hardcore Holmesologists. For Baker Street also houses a Sherlock Holmes museum (officially at number 239, but displaying ‘221B’) in a Georgian house similar to the one Holmes would have occupied. Holmes’s mail is now delivered to the museum instead of at number 221. A third version of the Holmes residence is in the upstairs floor of the Sherlock Holmes Pub, on Northumberland Street near the Charing Cross station.

But Mr Stutler’s floorplan may be the truest rendering of the pipe-smoking, fact-deducing detective’s residence: after all, it is as fictional as its occupant, and was constructed from all the relevant data in Doyle’s stories.

Map O' The Day #15 - Blonde Map of Europe

Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree?
A: Wave

According to this map – and if you really believe that blondes have less brains –a nasty fall like that is more likely to happen in the central parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired, the highest figure in all of Europe.

This map, indicating the varying degrees of ‘blondness’ in Europe, shows how fair hair gets rarer further away from this core area – towards the south, as one intuitively might presume, but also towards the east, west and even towards the north.

The consecutive bands (coloured in such a way as to approximately represent the ‘average’ hair colour in each area) surrounding the core blonde area in Scandinavia in most cases don’t correspond with national boundaries, but could be taken to represent certain degrees of ethnic variation, often with a possible historical explanation.

The highest percentages of fair-haired people can be found around the Baltic Sea (e.g. Denmark, the Polish coast and the Baltic states), making it in effect an almost entirely blonde-bounded lake. Only the German part of the Baltic coastline is remarkably un-blonde.
Iceland was settled by mainly Norwegian colonists, and Icelanders still share the same degree of blondness with the largest part of Norway.

The southern border of the fairer-haired part of Great Britain seems to correspond quite well with the southern border of the Danelaw, which was ruled and settled by the Danish in the early Middle Ages.

The northern border of the 50-79% blonde area in Britain excludes the Highlands, perhaps indicating this was a refuge for the darker-haired Celtic people of Scotland.
The darkest-haired part of France seems to correspond with those areas most heavily populated by its more ancient Gallo-Roman inhabitants, lighter-haired regions possibly reflect a later influx of Celts (in Brittany) and a more pronounced settlement of Frankish tribes of Germanic origin (in northern France and down towards Burgundy).

Galicia prides itself on its Celtic heritage. Maybe this explains the relative blondness of that nort-west corner of Spain. The darker-haired area of Switzerland seems to correspond with the areas where Rhaeto-Roman and Italian are spoken. The blonder area in northern Italy might reflect a larger Germanic, Celtic and/or Slavic component of the local population, a similar area in the heel of Italy, way down south, is more of a mystery.

A significant blonder-darker divide cuts through the Balkans, dividing Serbia in two (whilst Montenegro lands on the ‘blonder’ side of the border, and Kosovo on the ‘darker’ side).
Romanian areas closest to the Hungarian border are equally blonde – many ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, possibly most of them closest to the border. Moldova, ethnically Romanian, is equally dark-haired. As is an adjacent part of the Ukraine, which for the largest part is as blonde as most of central and eastern Europe (all the way down to Georgia). The darker areas in Russia’s far north (the Kola peninsula) and further east (Siberia) are probably due to the prevalence of native, darker-haired peoples, e.g. the Saami (formerly referred to as the Lapps), who also account for the darker area at the very north of the Scandinavian peninsula.

Map O’ The Day #14 - MoonWalk

On July 21, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. He didn’t moonwalk alone – ‘Buzz’ Aldrin joined him on the surface – and he didn’t walk far. After traveling hundreds of thousands of kilometers, the landing crew of the Apollo 11 lunar mission barely covered an area the size of a football throw.

Map O’ The Day #13 – Slumless, Smokeless Cities

The map was drawn up by Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928), the father of the garden city movement. Howard believed the living conditions of the poor, huddled masses cramped together in giant, insalubrious cities could be improved by combining the best aspects of town and country and carefully allocating space to housing, industry and agriculture.
He explained his urban planning ideas in ‘Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform’ (1898), republished as ‘Garden Cities of To-morrow’ in 1902, the year before he would actually found the very first garden city in the world: Letchworth Garden City, in the south of England. In 1920, he would found a second one, Welwyn Garden City, where he single-handedly planted a tree in the garden of each house.

The British garden city movement was important influence on the later strategy of building new towns in the UK, and spawned parallel movements in the US, Canada, Argentina, Israel and Germany.
As with most instances of social engineering, the garden city movement didn’t quite achieve what it set out to do. Its laudable motives and egalitarian vision contrast with the often depressing artificiality of ‘garden cities’, and the fact that they merely function as dormitories to the larger cities they so often adjoin.
This map of a planned, but as yet unbuilt conurbation of ‘slumless, smokeless cities’ has a few notable aspects:

• Central City (pop. 58.000) is the hub for 6 surrounding garden cities (pop. 32.000 each), all given idyllic names such as Philadelphia (’brotherly love’), Rurisville (as in ‘rural’), Justitia, Gladstone (presumably after the Prime Minister), Garden City and Concord.
• Each of these 7 urban centres is surrounded by a canal, which also connects them to the neighbouring and the central cities, forming a wheel-shaped system of waterways, the Inter Municipal Canal.
• A slightly smaller circle is formed by the Inter Municipal Railway. Within this circle lie several curious institutions: ‘Homes for Waifs’ (one imagines a neighbourhood populated by petite, sulking catwalk beauties), ‘Epileptic Farms’ (must be annoying for the cows when they’re being milked), ‘Large Farms’, an ‘Insane Asylum’ and a ‘Home for Inebriates’.
• Outside the circular railway, indeed outside the circular canal, are ‘Convalescent Homes’, ‘Stone Quarries’, ‘Cemetery’, a ‘College for the Blind’ and ‘Industrial Homes’.
• Although all basically the same shape (a circle divided into four equal parts by the intersecting waterways), each of the satellite cities has a different lay-out, allowing for variation (so those inebriates aren’t unduly confused on their way home)

Map O' The Day #12 - 2004 Electoral Map

Disclaimer: This is not a political statement of any kind, it’s simply a refresher of how that country voted last election.

Good reference for those of you planning to be peeled to the TV this evening.

Map O' The Day #11 - The Dark Side of the Moon

This map is of the dark side of the moon, which here looks more like a Jackson Pollock action painting, its riotous colours corresponding to geological materials and phenomena. Many of the colour spots are circular in nature, reflecting the large number of meteorites that have impacted on the lunar surface, unprotected by an atmosphere, over many, many centuries.

The map is one of a series produced by NASA and the US Geological Survey between 1971 and 1998.