40 Maps That Won't Explain Anything - Part 2

Here's the second installment of 40 Maps That Won't Explain Anything - Part 1 with a snarky explanation about this series is here.

11. Hand painted map of submarine fiber optic cables. A zoomable version is here.

12. James Niehues makes pretty ski area maps. Here's Mt Alyeska in Alaska with the aurora borealis lighting up the sky.

13. Upside down 1963 Esso map for travelers going from New York to Florida.

14. "Eastern Shore of Virginia - Most Fertile Trucking Area in the United States" G.L. Webster Canning Co.

15. Map of San Seriffe - from a Guardian April fool's prank.

16. Majority Home Heating Fuel Type - Washington. From the American Community Survey.

17. TweetMap - heat map showing where people were tweeting using the hashtag #Phillies last summer.

18. The Tacony Hoagie Trail in Northeast Philadelphia. Go for a healthy hike!

19. The Japan Railways System

20. 1915 stamp featuring a map of Mexico

How Hollywood has Destroyed America

From the Concourse - an animated map showing the many ways places in the US have been destroyed in movies.

Hollywood clearly does not shy away from destroying their own city. The page includes lists and explanations for each symbol type along with several caveats and a discussion of the fine distinction between monsters and creatures. The yet to be released Sharknado 2 was not included. 

Tufte at Fermilab

Informational Design guru Edward Tufte will be at Fermilab in Illinois tonight at a reception for the Edward Tufte Celebrates Richard Feynman art exhibit. Tufte's three dimensional steel sculptures are built in the shape of Feynman's diagrams. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and star of the wonderful book Tuva or Bust! created these pictorial representations of subatomic particle behavior. Tufte's work emphasizes their inherent beauty.

Fermilab, like the Tufte exhibit, is an intersection of art, science and nature.   

Named for Physicist Enrico Fermi, the lab contains the Tevatron, once the world's largest particle accelerator. It is housed in a circular tunnel with a 4-mile circumference, 30 feet underground below the ring visible on the map and showing up clearly on the aerial photos. The Tevatron has been replaced by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The lab also features numerous other research facilities, bike trails, open prairie and a herd of buffalo. It shows up on aerial photography as a remarkably open space in the middle of the sprawl of metro Chicago.

The reception is from 5-7 PM tonight and there are still tickets (no charge) available. If you're in the Chicagoland area, this would be nice opportunity to meet Tufte and see the fascinating Fermilab campus.

Waffle House America

Last year Deadspin posted this map showing the Waffle House-IHOP version of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  mapsbynik has added to this geographical foodways discussion by mapping the density of Waffle Houses.

The map was done by taking USGS 30x60 minute map quad sheets, overlaying them onto Google Earth, and extruding the height based on the number of Waffle Houses. More details and data by quad can be seen at mapsbynik's tumblr site. Atlanta is the home base for the chain so their dominance was expected, however the degree to which it towers above the rest of the country is truly impressive.

USGS quads are not a common unit for this type of mapping (counties would be much more typical) but the quads work nicely for the Waffle House data pattern. Because the Atlanta area is spread among numerous counties, a county map would spread the data out. This would result in more of a boring low rise edge city look than the towering skyscraper we get here.

40 Maps That Won't Explain Anything-Part 1

In my continuing quest to make fun of the recent plague of "40 Maps That Will Explain Everything You Ever Needed to Know and Keep Your Breath Minty Fresh" articles such as this one and this one; here are 10 maps that blissfully do not pretend to explain anything. 40 maps is a lot to digest in one blog post so I will break this out into several posts that will appear from time to time.

1. Jeep tracks around the Pink Roadhouse at Oodnadatta Australia

2. Almost unreadable map of Chicago restaurants

3. Detail from Hand Drawn Map of Berlin by Jenni Sparks

4. Oregon Wine Regions using 1980's style computer graphics - somethingaboutmaps

5. The Milky Way Transit Authority by Samuel Arbesman

6. Panama Shipping Routes from a lemon crate

7. Detail from a zoning map of Minsk-the full map is here.

8. Fort Wayne, Indiana art print from Jennasuemaps

9. Forth Worth, Texas art print, also from Jennasuemaps - really you can't tell the difference?

10. Map of Kashi (Kashgar) just because I've always been weirdly fascinated by the place. Note the areas that were not surveyed due to the arrest of the surveyor.