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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On 18 September, Scotland voted to stay in the UK by 55% to 45%: a wider margin than most expected, but still close enough to warrant the constitutional re-think promised […]
Ayn Rand fell for the popular misconception of the ancient myth
Kick out the French, send over colonists, break the three ‘doors’ to the outside world
As Scots go to the polls to determine their future, one oracle has already decreed that independence is inevitable: Englishman Terry O’Neil discovered this piece of chicken in his KFC meal, and was struck by its resemblance to the contours of Britain — minus Scotland.
Yes, there is a map for that.
Vice was just around the corner – but this map refused to show you where exactly.
Probably the most recognisable map from the latter half of the 20th century – if you like tv westerns.
Wyoming and Colorado are not the only cartographic twins
We do not set out to cause offence. But we go where strange maps lead us.
No, this is not an illustrated guide to basket weaving. This is indeed a map. Or to be precise, a cartogram: statistical data presented in a geographic context. Even if […]
Ian Fleming picked James Bond for the name of his hero because it was “brief, unromantic and yet very masculine”; he later became friends with the original James Bond, author of one of his favourite ornithology guides.
In 1923, a British survey team doodled an elephant on a map of a remote part of the Gold Coast – now Ghana.
The emergence of email catapulted the @ from typographical obscurity onto everybody’s keyboard. Now the thing had to have a name fit for the digital age. Despite an early proliferation […]
New word of the day: equipopulous. Country A is equipopulous to country B if it has the same number of inhabitants. This map shows what a European Union with 28 […]
Here are two maps that are also cartograms, using the same method to present each country’s population size: one square represents one million people.
As any Bible reader, numerologist or Iron Maiden fan worth their salt knows, 666 is the Number of the Beast. It says so in Revelation 13:17-18, in wording enigmatic enough […]
Brazil v. Germany: 1-7. After the shock elimination of the Football World Cup’s host country Tuesday evening – by a historical and humiliating margin – one kind of expects as […]
Ah, if only Napoleon had never met his Waterloo, surely the world wouldn’t look like this! This being a map of foreign news as shown on France’s 6 terrestrial channels […]
The wreck of the General Slocum in 1904 broke the spirit of Manhattan’s German enclave
Political cartooning, curious cartography and questionable punning all rolled into one: what’s not to love about an artwork like Crimea River? The photorealist painting shows a pouting Putin, shedding a […]
Oslo to Copenhagen, the world’s next megacity?
Tell me where you shop, and I’ll tell you where you are
Belgium and its provinces have had roughly the same shape since independence in 1830. It’s taken those 184 years to make a shocking discovery: hidden inside Belgium is another Belgium. […]
Elections for the European Parliament have been held every five years since 1979, but none have been as crucial as this 8th edition, taking place from 22 to 25 May. […]
These international borders follow mathematically impartial pathways, laid out by so-called Voronoi diagrams named after the Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy.
German writer Timur Vermes’s 2012 bestseller is titled Er ist wieder da (‘Look Who’s Back’). The cover illustration leaves no doubt as to who the protagonist is: the trademark curtained […]
So Cheney Lavonia has a job for me. In Thailand. Could I email her back? The message is spam and the name is fake, but the pseudonym is both mellifluous […]
Cuddly toys, ripped to pieces. Their limbs and tails, snouts and eyepatches strung up and nailed to a museum wall. Teddy bears and their furry friends are supposed to be […]