There are many things to take from this story — about beginner’s mind, the diversity of human experience, and the interoperability of language. But what stood out to me most was two opposing lessons about shared protocols and modularity. Tomás’ experiment failed. It failed because each amateur cartographer injected their own methodology and process, resulting in incompatible maps. But in another sense, Tomás succeeded. Sure, maybe this collection of artifacts would be useless for military strategy or commerce, but on the other hand... LOOK AT THESE MAPS, THESE MAPS RULE.

source: HN

GPS is perhaps one of the most audacious geo-engineering feats ever undertaken, and its traces can be felt with just an antenna and a motive.

All that said, it’s not as though there’s a cacophony of navigation data swarming around you, deafening if you could just hear it. In reality, the GPS signals surrounding you are astoundingly weak. To take an analogy: imagine a normal light bulb, like the one that might be above you now. Pull it twenty thousand kilometers away from the room you’re in, and have it flash, on, off, on, off, a million times a second. Imagine straining your eye to watch the shimmer of the bulb, two Earths away, and listen to what it’s telling you.

source: trivium

Today, I’d like to tell you about the Etak Navigator, a truly revolutionary product and the world’s first practical vehicle navigation system.

Back in 1985 you used paper maps to navigate, like this one from a Thomas Brother’s map of Los Angeles: A Thomas Brother’s Map. As you can see, the maps weren’t always pretty. By today’s standards it was also supremely difficult and tedious to find locations and even more difficult to work out how to get there. So, when the Etak Navigator launched, it was like something from the future.

source: HN

Friends, I’m excited to offer to you a new poster. Not a map this time around, but something map-related. A 16 × 24-inch tangled web showing how 100+ different map projections are all related to each other.

source: jwz

Washington is a city of great bridges and terrible bridges. These are their stories.

This map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter - about 10000 asteroids - as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. Each asteroid is shown at its position on New Years’ Eve 1999, colored by type of asteroid.

https://github.com/eleanorlutz/asteroids_atlas_of_space

source: grugq

Reddit today had this delightful map, I think drawn by PeterVexillographer, of “the largest city in each 10-by-10 degree area of latitude-longitude in the world”:

Some commentary on the near misses.

Scientists are hard at work recalibrating where and how the nation physically sits on the planet. It’s not shrinkage — it’s “height modernization.”

The grand recalibration, called “height modernization,” is part of a broader effort within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, to establish more accurately where and how the United States physically sits on the planet. This new National Spatial Reference System, encompassing height, latitude, longitude and time, is expected to be rolled out in late 2022 or 2023, Ms. Blackwell said. It will replace reference systems from the 1980s that are slightly askew, having been derived from calculations that were done before the advent of supercomputers or global navigation satellite systems such as GPS.

For the first time during a global outbreak, scientists have been able to use genomic data in real time to track how a virus is traveling around the world, revealing sources of outbreaks and shedding light on cases with unknown origins.

By identifying mutations in the genetic sequence of samples of the coronavirus, which are markers for various strains, researchers have offered clues to whether some cases came from a local source or elsewhere in the world.

This week, why not venture even farther afield, to lands that don’t really exist at all? Atlas Obscura recently asked map collectors and curators to suggest some diverting maps that chart imaginary terrain.

The David Rumsey Map Collection was started over 30 years ago and contains more than 150,000 maps. The collection focuses on rare 16th through 21st century maps of North and South America, as well as maps of the World, Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. The collection includes atlases, wall maps, globes, school geographies, pocket maps, books of exploration, maritime charts, and a variety of cartographic materials including pocket, wall, children’s, and manuscript maps. Items range in date from about 1550 to the present.

This is fantastic.

The Pond and Plaza Hotel in 1933: https://www.oldnyc.org/#718363f-a

George III’s collection of military maps comprises some 3,000 maps, views and prints ranging from the disposition of Charles V’s armies at Vienna in 1532 to the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

Most notable among these are the military maps, prints and drawings collected by his uncle, William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), particularly during his period as Captain General of the British army during the War of the Austrian Succession (1743–8) and the Seven Years War (1756–63).

The second major collection, bought by George III in 1763, was that of the military prints collected by the Italian art patron, Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657). In addition to these, George III acquired hundreds of maps of contemporary conflicts, such as the American War of Independence (1775–83), and the French and Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815).

This website allows you to visualize elevation of any area on the map with filled area charts (also known as a ridgeline):

https://anvaka.github.io/peak-map/

source: K

The three ins of web design: interesting and infuriatingly interactive.

source: DF

In the 30 years since, chunks of the wall have made their way to some 237 locations in more than 40 countries, according to records from a German government foundation tracking them.

Animated slideshow.

Related: https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-to-lose-a-2-6-ton-piece-of-the-berlin-walland-find-it-11572983620

The first volume of the History of Cartography was published in 1987 and the three books that constitute Volume Two appeared over the following eleven years. In 1987 the worldwide web did not exist, and since 1998 book publishing has gone through a revolution in the production and dissemination of work. Although the large format and high quality image reproduction of the printed books (see right column) are still well-suited to the requirements for the publishing of maps, the online availability of material is a boon to scholars and map enthusiasts.

On this site the University of Chicago Press is pleased to present the first three volumes of the History of Cartography in PDF format.

The usual before and after analysis.

source: DF

In 1994, Cesare Marchetti, an Italian physicist, described an idea that has come to be known as the Marchetti Constant. In general, he declared, people have always been willing to commute for about a half-hour, one way, from their homes each day. This principle has profound implications for urban life. The value of land is governed by its accessibility—which is to say, by the reasonable speed of transport to reach it.

But the endurance of the Marchetti Constant has profound implications for urban life. It means that the average speed of our transportation technologies does more than anything to shape the physical structure of our cities. To see how, let’s travel back in time by more than 2,000 years, and move towards the present.

source: K

I’d never heard of “Haberman” before. The name of the neighborhood that people who live here would recognize is Maspeth (which you can see up-and-to-the-right of Haberman). Is Haberman even a real neighborhood? Why did Google put this giant Haberman label on the map?

source: HN