Random cool maps

I use a wildly (un)popular social network, the central algorithm of which has correctly deduced that I like maps. So it's showing me weird maps from lots of sources. I sort of hate how much I like them. :)

Anyway, here are a few, just in case you like maps too...

Post away - I love weird cool maps. Do you have any cool topo maps? Or nifty geology maps?

A friend of mine has a geology map with all the local small fault lines on it... thankfully none of which go through my land!

Do they have to be real maps?

A few more since it seems like I'm not the only one who likes these:

Yay for having 18 hours of daylight at summer solstice! Boo we're losing 20 minutes a week at the moment!

map of earth night lights

Particularly around dense urban areas, man made light sources dominate. Oil and gas wells burn against dark backgrounds.  

Natural light sources emanate from wildfires and volcano activity. Auroras create light shows in the polar regions. Moonlight and starlight reflect light off bodies of water, snow, clouds, and deserts as well as airglow.

Last batch for today (probably). I particularly like the first one because I live there and it talks about me. I live in a place that is: Democratic / Snowy Forest / Very Cold / Scandanavian / Crayfish / Most Canadian.

Neat one; I had no idea!

Oooh, dailyish…better freshen up the thread!

By the time we graduate high school, we learn that they never taught us the most exciting things there. Sure, you might be able to name the European countries or point New York on the map, but does that give you a real understanding of how the world functions? We have gathered a tremendous and informative selection of infographic maps that they should’ve shown us at school to fill this gap. Every single one of these cool maps reveals different fun and interesting facts, which can actually help you draw some pretty interesting conclusions.

https://www.boredpanda.com/fun-maps-they-didnt-teach-you-in-school/

A few:

I'm a linguist, so I love language maps. When I was an undergrad, a professor showed us maps before WWI, before WWII, and after WWII showing the most common non-English languages spoken at home. Before WWI, German was the most common. Before WWII, German dropped substantially but was still pretty common. After WWII, German was miniscule. It showed how language choice is often ideological.

I tried to find these maps with Google, but no luck. I did find this cool one, though.

3rd most common language after English and Spanish

Map by Priceonomics; data from the United Nations World Marriage Data 2015

source

In this data set—which does not include a number of poorer countries—men in each country marry 3.7 years later than women.

A few more!

Christopher Weeks wrote:Last batch for today (probably). I particularly like the first one because I live there and it talks about me. I live in a place that is: Democratic / Snowy Forest / Very Cold / Scandanavian / Crayfish / Most Canadian.

Hmmm...it seems I live north of the 9th circle of hell.  At least I know it's pop, not soda ;-)

Derek Thille wrote:it seems I live north of the 9th circle of hell.  At least I know it's pop, not soda ;-)

If one of these maps shows just the US, it would almost always be better if it included, at least, Canada too -- I find that endlessly annoying. Cutoffs in other parts of the world don't bother me as much because I'm not there.

"Pop" vs "soda" is funny. In 1979, my family moved from southern California to Missouri. We had to transition from saying pop to soda, though some of the heavily accented St. Louisans actually said "soady". But every time I see a map of who says what, SoCal says soda, so I'm not sure if it's just changed in the intervening decades or my family was weird or what. Anyway, living in Missouri, Illinois, New Jersey for 25 years, I got entirely used to soda, but it was still a delight to find that Minnesotans very often say pop, though it feels like it might be on the way out. I've fully re-adopted "pop" over the twenty years that I've been here.

You must be in the tenth circle of hell!

Christopher Weeks wrote:

Derek Thille wrote:it seems I live north of the 9th circle of hell.  At least I know it's pop, not soda ;-)

If one of these maps shows just the US, it would almost always be better if it included, at least, Canada too -- I find that endlessly annoying. Cutoffs in other parts of the world don't bother me as much because I'm not there.

"Pop" vs "soda" is funny. In 1979, my family moved from southern California to Missouri. We had to transition from saying pop to soda, though some of the heavily accented St. Louisans actually said "soady". But every time I see a map of who says what, SoCal says soda, so I'm not sure if it's just changed in the intervening decades or my family was weird or what. Anyway, living in Missouri, Illinois, New Jersey for 25 years, I got entirely used to soda, but it was still a delight to find that Minnesotans very often say pop, though it feels like it might be on the way out. I've fully re-adopted "pop" over the twenty years that I've been here.

You must be in the tenth circle of hell!

We are used to being cut off.  That said, I'm close enough to the 49th that we are often included in US maps which sometimes allows me to "cheat".

In the last month I visited friends in Isanti as well as a short but fun trip to Thief River Falls - I do get to MN fairly regularly so I do appreciate some of the language differences.

The one thing I struggle to remember is that "How ya doing?" is a greeting, not a question.  That said, cashiers and such often say "Hello.  How are you?" and it really throws them off when you answer with anything more than "fine".  I enjoy doing that....

Hell is in Michigan, so I'm not entirely sure where things fall in.  That said, I think of hell as hot rather than cold, so while the circle of hell reference is amusing, it messes with my mind since we are more in the bone-numbing realm.

In many areas of the southeast USA, it's all 'coke'. They'll ask "what kind of coke do you want?" I was VERY confused, when I first moved to southern Kentucky! Back then, the only options were regular & diet. So, I'd ask if they had anything other than just 'coke', which confused them... (I'm a Mountain Dew/Dr.Pepper/ rootbeer kind of gal).

America`s loneliest roads:



Source

A few more that I've seen...

Christopher Weeks wrote:...

That train route to Thailand, is that really possible? How many visa (permits) would I need if I would ride that train(s)? (btw I live in the Netherlands, EU).

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:That train route to Thailand, is that really possible? How many visa (permits) would I need if I would ride that train(s)? (btw I live in the Netherlands, EU).

I'm not willing to take on the role of fact-checker for these, though I won't share any that I seriously doubt. In the case of that one, I thought it was a little weird phrasing it like that's a single route. I very much assume that you can't buy a single ticket for that. But if all you have to do at each place is deboard, buy the next ticket and get on at a different platform (as well as attend to all the visas and other customs stuff), it's still pretty impressive.

I asked for a 'cool map'. From what I got this one I liked most:

Click Here for a zoomed in version.

A few more. It's interesting to categorize these. Sometimes the point is to show historical change over geography. Sometimes the point is a geographic depiction of one or more datasets. And others are just pretty. :)

A few more!

I've gathered a few more, but I have them on three devices, so I have to edit them in...

Ah, (D)ARPA...so many people think the Internet is newer than it is.  I remember Usenet forums at university in the early 90s, so I'm an earlier adopter than many, but well behind others.  I did an internship with IBM and we were looking at implementing some internal decision / troubleshooting trees using HTML within a year of Tim Berners-Lee coming out with it.  I've fallen so far behind...not exactly a Luddite, but definitely not an early adopter.

Derek Thille wrote:I remember Usenet forums at university in the early 90s

Yup! I'd had email for years before this, but I went back to school in '91 and got online for serious. We (University of Missouri - Columbia) were a node on the internet and on BITnet and there was a while where it looked like BITnet was the real deal and the internet would probably fade away...LOL!

Soda vs Pop vs Coke

Inge Leonora-den Ouden wrote:

Christopher Weeks wrote:...

That train route to Thailand, is that really possible? How many visa (permits) would I need if I would ride that train(s)? (btw I live in the Netherlands, EU).

Actually the rail road goes all the way from Portugal to Singapore. The journey takes 18,755 km and 21 days.

The algorithm hasn't stopped feeding me maps...

This is a neat batch, some a little permie and others just kind of neat.

Elevation in the USA.

The flow of maps that seem cool enough to set aside and share is slowing down.

I had no idea grizzly range extended that far south or that far east.

Interesting...we are somewhere over 2000 hrs of sunshine annually.  Considering the next month will only have about 8 hours of daylight, that isn't bad.

Now I have another rabbit hole to go down.  I've heard reference to "plains grizzly" as extinct.  Now I need to verify whether it is just considered one species and the range shrunk away from the humans or whether there was a distinct species or subspecies.

Interesting that they didn't consider Canada to be a close neighbour to Russia.  Seems like we are pretty close across the pole.

Tim Siemens wrote:Interesting that they didn't consider Canada to be a close neighbour to Russia.  Seems like we are pretty close across the pole.

I hadn't thought about that. But I think they were just measuring, not really "considering". On the left, everything is closer to Norway and on the right, Alaska messes it up for you. :)

Derek Thille wrote:Now I have another rabbit hole to go down.  I've heard reference to "plains grizzly" as extinct.  Now I need to verify whether it is just considered one species and the range shrunk away from the humans or whether there was a distinct species or subspecies.

From a short dive into the rabbit hole, it seems there's disagreement.  Some governments and wildlife authorities consider it to have been distinct and consider it extinct while others consider it to have been a population of grizzly that has been extirpated from the plains range.  Accounts suggest it was larger than most grizzlies suggesting more food supply or easier conditions.  Apparently accounts from Lewis & Clark refer to two different bears that weren't the black bears they would have been familiar with - one referred to as brown and the other, larger referred to as white (like silvertip grizzlies) and they avoided the latter unless they had at least eight marksmen at hand.  Apparently a pelt wound up somewhere in the Smithsonian collection, so if it could be located, with today's DNA analysis, they could settle the question.

It was apparently recent as well - in Saskatchewan, it was believed hunted to extirpation in the late 1890s/early 1900s although some accounts suggest a remote population lasted into the 1930s.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Derek Thille wrote:From a short dive into the rabbit hole, it seems there's disagreement.  Some governments and wildlife authorities consider it to have been distinct and consider it extinct while others consider it to have been a population of grizzly that has been extirpated from the plains range.  Accounts suggest it was larger than most grizzlies suggesting more food supply or easier conditions.  Apparently accounts from Lewis & Clark refer to two different bears that weren't the black bears they would have been familiar with - one referred to as brown and the other, larger referred to as white (like silvertip grizzlies) and they avoided the latter unless they had at least eight marksmen at hand.  Apparently a pelt wound up somewhere in the Smithsonian collection, so if it could be located, with today's DNA analysis, they could settle the question.

It was apparently recent as well - in Saskatchewan, it was believed hunted to extirpation in the late 1890s/early 1900s although some accounts suggest a remote population lasted into the 1930s.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

Thanks for going down that rabbit hole for us! You saved me some time this morning.