Bad AI Maps - Part 1

This map has been making the rounds on social media lately.

I’m not sure where it originated. The Reddit post shows a Twitter (X) site for a travel concierge, but I’ve seen this in other places too. From showing a north-south route as east-west to the duplicate Hamburgs this one is full of AI “hallucinations”. Seeing this prompted more of a deep dive into what other crappy AI generated maps are out there.

It turns out that this fall Brilliant Maps did their own post on this. Most of these maps are from the chatgptlunatics Twitter and have a similar look, either a map of US States or European countries with prompts like this one.

These maps are full of unfinished or poorly spelled words. Or just weirdly generated ones as seen in Utah and Tennessee above. Here is a European example.

Gears? Dysies? I like that the common cause of death in Austria is “Austra”. The unreadable text for Portugal and Greece seems to be a common feature of these images. 

Here’s a few more I found. 

This one is from Facebook. The ones that point (even London) point to the wrong places. Others have no point. From this map I’ve learned that Rome (in France) gets slightly more visitors than “Rom”, in Spain. Also, there are some strange boundaries and merged countries in central Europe around the fake Istanbul. 

Here’s an interesting weather map of an extra elongated Nova Scotia with some duplicated cities, via LinkedIn.

The strangest one I found was generated from Freepik. For a future post I created my own account to see what I could generate, but here is one where another user’s prompt was A map of a map that says mellow. Granted the prompt is absurd, but the results are kind of wild. Does the world need an extra Texas and Louisiana? I tried to use a language detector to make sense of these words but very few of them were recognized. The ones that were ranged from Gaelic to Indonesian. Anyway enjoy the randomness.

 

Iran's Many Ethnicities

With all that is going on in Iran, it may be useful or at least interesting to see a map of the country’s ethnic diversity. As with many other countries, it is easy to think of today’s boundaries as reflecting homogeneous regions. This map shows a much more complicated picture. 

-CIA map via the University of Texas Map Library.

According to Wikipedia, Persians, often considered identical to Iranians only make up 51% of the population. Azeri’s (from Azerbaijan) make up 24% and are represented in purple above. Two of the northern provinces are named East and West Azerbaijan and there is speculation that should Iran’s government fall, Azerbaijan might look to grab these provinces. There is also a significant Kurdish presence in this and other regions. Also in the north are some significant minorities along the Caspian Sea coast such as Gilakis and Mazandaranis, whose populations make up 8% of the country’s ethnic breakdown. Less numerous but covering much more land are the Baloch, mainly based in neighboring Pakistan with a significant separatist movement in both countries.

Other significant minorities include Turkmen (on the border of Turkmenistan and whose color is hard to distinguish from the Talysh on the opposite side of the Caspian Sea), Lurs, and Arabs. It is also interesting to see how much area is “sparsely populated”.

The map also indicates many Sunni Muslims in the outermost regions of the country though according to Wikipedia they only make up 5-10% of the population.

CBS Radio Network

The once respected CBS network, before becoming the butt of jokes, has its beginnings as a network of radio stations under the Columbia Phonograph Company. By 1935 this network had a nationwide reach and extended into Canada. This charming map from that year illustrates and advertises its reach.

The map shows people listening to their radios (and sometimes singing along) while doing cliched activities for their regions such as driving a tractor in North Dakota,

hula dancing in Hawaii,

and whatever this is - some kind of emergency radio drop from a lighthouse?

My favorite one is the lobster listening off of Cape Cod.

I also like how the constructed a north arrow from a microphone.

Lynching Maps - Part 2

 Since it is now United States government policy to erase Black History and ignore Black History Month and further since it is also their policy to not want to tell stories that make Americans feel bad about their county, I will do my little bit to refute that.

To clear up the “Part 2” bit, Part 1 was from a 2021 blog post on the same subject, featuring a NAACP map produced 100 years earlier. 

A modern mapping update was done by the Equal Justice Institute, their stated goal being to “change the narrative about race in America in order to advance our collective goal of equal justice for all.“

This map covers the period between the Civil War and World War II when over 4,000 African Americans were lynched. This figure does not account for the many unreported lynchings and unknown victims. The patterns between the two maps largely tell the same story though the modern map gives you a more granular picture by breaking them down by county. For example, Almost all of the lynchings in Texas took place in the eastern third of the state-of course most of the population lives in those areas.

The white dots can be clicked for featured video stories.

You can click on any state and see how many lynching were reported statewide and by county. Georgia had 599 reported lynchings in this time period.

Sorry if I made anyone feel bad about their county.

Cortina Panorama

When I first watched the television coverage of the Milan-Cortina Olympics I thought I saw some pretty impressive map graphics but a long online search for them has come up short. However, I did find this very nice map of the Cortina area.

The map is from Cormar Panoramic Maps, a company based in Bolzano, Italy not far from Cortina. This year’s Olympics are very spread out and only a few events are being held in Cortina. Those include curling, women’s alpine skiing, bobsled and luge, all of these in the immediate vicinity of the town.

The Ossario in the bottom left above is a World War I monument. 

There’s a lot of nice looking ski areas that from what I can tell are not being used in these Olympics at all. If you’re staying there to watch curling you’ll have plenty of access to ski areas.

Here is a map from the IOC, via TrueNorth, a Canadian Sports blog, showing just how spread out these Olympics are. For context the distance between Milano and Venezia across the bottom of the map is 267 kilometers (166 miles). 

 

 

 

 

The U.S. Master Plan for Gaza.

At the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, real estate developer Jared Kushner unveiled the administration’s plans for Gaza.

This map is from Al Jazeera though it’s unclear if they’re showing a direct copy of it. It’s a little hard to take seriously a brightly colored map that appears to show a bunch of giant three mile long football fields supposedly representing residential areas. Of course, no Palestinians were consulted and it doesn’t appear that the Israelis were either. Like the massive grid pattern overlaid on most of the United States in the 18th and 19th Centuries because “nobody lives there”, this plan presumes to build a riviera of glass towers and marinas, but not housing over existing populations. As quoted by architecture professor Ali A Alraouf - “Technically, this creates gated communities designed for a specific economic class, rather than an organic city fabric that serves the local population.” “This is real estate fantasy rather than urban planning,” he argues.

An image was created for the article superimposing the current population on top of this plan to show what and who would need to be removed for this plan to work.

Giant Isometric Pixel-Art Map of New York City

Andy Coenen has created this amazing gaming style map of New York City.

Using a combination of Google Maps 3D tiles and artificial intelligence, he was able to extract a model of the entire city as well as parts of New Jersey.

You can read about the entire process here. The upshot is that if you really understand how .ai models work and how to work with these tiles, you can do a massive job with minimal coding and in a relatively short time frame. These buildings look even better than most gaming models I’ve seen though if you zoom way in, you can see his complaints about how the trees look. I did a deep dive into some places of personal interest, like where my sister lived in Brooklyn for decades before moving last summer,

to my brother’s building, mostly obscured by the taller one to the south.

One appealing, but also disconcerting aspect of this map is the lack of people and their imprint. There’s no trash on the streets, no distressed property and very few cars, mostly in parking lots. The scaffolding that you see everywhere is missing. Ugly urban details like razor wire, construction fences and fire escapes are also gone. Everything looks happy and empty.

Here are more areas; Coney Island,

and some interesting details at LaGuardia Airport.

For a taste of the suburbs here is part of Cliffside Park, New Jersey with some fancy houses and their million dollar views overlooking the fancy Alexander building.

Liberty Island,

and Central Park.

Explore the whole thing online here