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
It’s a good season for subterfuge. While the rest of the world is watching Syria – or, more precisely, the omnishambles following Obama’s “red line” in the Syrian sand – […]
Isn’t this the craziest, twistiest international borderline you’ve ever seen? Unless you’ve studied the hyper-enclaved border zone of Cooch Behar [1], between India and Bangladesh, it probably is. But why […]
Driving through Yosemite a few years ago, we came upon a blackened patch of the park still smelling burnt. By the look of this map, it must have been the […]
That would make it about ten times older than the oldest accepted examples of cartography
To condemn the riots that rocked Belfast last Friday as “shameful”, as the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Theresa Villiers has done, fails to address the two conflicting […]
The long, slow process of towards adult lactose tolerance started some time after the last ice age.
Jules Verne used the failed project as inspiration for his last adventure novel
It’s the morning of Wednesday, 13 September 1939. In an America supremely at peace, newspapers hit front lawns with headlines screaming of war. The horrific conflict splashed across the front […]
To Orthodox Jews, eruvin are a crucial component to their faith. To everybody else, it is as if they didn’t even exist
The afterlife, in the words of Tennyson [1], is “that untravell’d world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move”. Death is the ultimate one-way trip, its […]
Draw two dots above a straight line, place them in a circle, and even children a few years old will spot the semblance with a human countenance. Whether it’s the features […]
‘Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. Dante Alighieri was about 35 and suffering from what […]
There’s much to criticise about this map of Pangea [1], but in spite of the geological anachronisms, it’s hard to tear your eyes away from it. The map shows a […]
Maybe you’ve never heard of Emmaland or Sophialand, but if you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a better than 90% chance that you live in either one of […]
Dakota was sliced in half to generate two extra Senators, and separated north from south because of resentment over the location of the capital
Dull Flag, Tongue of Gangsta and dozens more strange toponyms dot these windswept Scottish archipelagoes
How fear of swimming led to two very different evolutionary approaches to conflict resolution
Isogloss maps are irresistible, even if they are about cucumbers
It disappeared from central London in 1869, after an archeological magazine praised its historical value
Last week, Harry Beck finally got his blue plaque. The house where the designer of the iconic London Tube map spent his first years is now marked by a memorial […]
The strange birth of America’s two ‘radio nations’
The Pope is not just the supremo of the Catholic Church, he is also the head of state of the Vatican
One of cartography’s most persistent myths: mapmakers of yore, frustrated by the world beyond their ken, marked the blank spaces on their maps with the legend Here be monsters. It’s […]
Sure, the Allies are advancing… but a snail could do it quicker!
Why does the Purple Line in this alternate-universe railway map terminate in Quincy, Illinois?
What was first, the chicken or the map? That question is perhaps as unanswerable as the one featuring hen vs. egg [1]. Not that it matters. Stare long enough at […]
Question: Which contest is the nec plus ultra for puzzle fans and quiz aficionados everywhere? Answer: The MIT Mystery Hunt (MMH), which kicks off every year on the Friday before […]
A bizarre ‘planisphere palindrome’ version of the Earth