Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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All Stories
n Here’s a map reminiscent of the Bruceville map – another piece of musical cartography treated earlier on this blog (entry #134). This one charts the haunts of Tom Petty, […]
n Egyptians one generation more ancient than the ones we usually call Ancient Egyptians perhaps thought the pyramids to be detestable eyesores on the desert skyline, and Greeks old enough […]
n For cartophiles, the main problem with this map is not that interviewer Larry King‘s head covers most of Europe, or that the bulky figure of his guest, moviemaker Michael […]
5,000,000 Hits n Thirty hits – that’s how many this blog accumulated for the whole of September 2006, the first month of its existence. The numbers for October were a bit better – […]
As most news bulletins prove, the world is not, alas, an harmonious place. The same point is proved, if inadvertently and on a more symbolical level, by this stunning musical […]
There is a ‘precious’ level to this map, and a naughty one.
What if New York had somehow managed to remain New Amsterdam?
… But some are more insular than others. Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, according to this disputed article on Wikipedia “best known for his ceramics and his cross-dressing”, is the […]
The famous and not-so-famous dead of Pere Lachaise
Ebenezer Howard’s utopian plan to blur the line between gardens and cities produced a number of depressing ‘new towns’
Praise the Lord and pass the dictionary!
Madonna should love this map, having both gone all British and jewish-mystical. This map, in the style of the London Underground(*), depicts the Kaballah Tree of Life. Sephiroth (Hebrew for […]
n Not many people know that the epithet Windy City was bestowed on Chicago not for meteorological but political reasons – apparently, Chicago politicians at one time were known for […]
n Five years have past; five summers, with the lengthnOf five long winters! And again I hearnThese waters, rolling from their mountain-springsnWith a soft inland murmur (…) n So begins […]
n There are three Christmas Islands in the world. One is a small community on mainland Nova Scotia (Canada) named after a nearby island, which is presently called Ghost Island […]
One of the few best-in-class lists topped by PNG
Vital statistics of Napoleon’s deadliest campaign
Everybody was getting ready for conflict, but at least they all agreed this map was funny
 n “Geographical manuals in US schools show an amputated Brazil, without the Amazon and the Pantanal. This is how students are taught that these are âinternationalâ areas, in other […]
According to Genesis 4:16 (KJV), “Cain went out from the presence of the LORD and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.” According to this map, […]
Lost is not only the title of a popular American tv series, it also describes the exasperated feeling of those viewers looking for a semblance of a plot in the […]
n This is interesting: these cartoons obviously are about the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. But since I’m offline while writing this, I can’t find out much more of the context. […]
Mississippi is the poorest of all states, but fortunately also has a happier distinction: it’s the place where most of the quintessentially American music genres originated, from blues and jazz […]
Taiwan – officially: the Republic of China – claims territories of ten of China’s neighbours
North Korea is the Dark Side of the peninsula, literally.
n n In its issue of 22 April 1996, the New Yorker Magazine published a parody map of Montana, by cartoonist Roz Chast. The state ranks 4th in surface (after Alaska, […]
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.
“Is this what will become of the Earth’s surface?” asks the entry for 22 September 2007 of Astronomy Picture of the Day, a website affiliated with Nasa (judging from its […]