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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Bending the rules of government in exchange for favours or bribes is a worldwide problem. It is certainly not limited to Mexico, but the statistic is shocking.
Also according to this survey, Brazil is the least corrupt country in Latin America
Of course, the reality is even worse than these maps suggest.
Nothing says “late great nation” like a new map of your country with its territory reduced
As the saying goes: “A Ronny alone is in bad company”
How location, temperature and moisture create the world’s biomes
Most Roman emperors died violent deaths, and many were far from Rome when they did
Pretty sure nobody has ever attempted this
Cartesian vortices are *so* 17-th century.
Unwittingly, thousands of Londoners cross zones of reduced civil liberties on a daily basis
All 24 cantons would meet at St Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna
The quest began with a simple enough question: “Where is the skull of Andreas Vesalius?”
Comparing NYC to Luxembourg, by way of iceberg A-68
Four countries around the world host both Russian and American military bases.
The Tour is both the oldest and most popular of the world’s major cycling races. The Tour has been to Holland more often than it has been to Corsica.
Perhaps it is more doable now than when it was first proposed, back in the early 1980s
Fancy a game of Japanese chess?
It’s not the ice that turns Greenland white, but the lack of data
Will your grandchildren live in cities on Antarctica?
The poem starts at the Pulaski Bridge and ends near the New York Aquarium
Visit the place where in 1593 an astrologer and a playwright used a shamanic ritual to found the British Empire
If you value your life, stay away from U.S. Route 1 in Florida
Are Macron and Le Pen re-enacting a centuries-old conflict?
Wingland? Flemingia? The indignity of colonisation includes the imposed ignorance of the coloniser
Britain hasn’t brexited yet, but the EU has already scrapped it from its map
How did New York end up there?