Harry Beck's Famous Subway Map Goes Airborne

This map was published a month ago in the Londonist. Just about every other map blog has already picked up on it and I am late to the game. However, I've spent so much time looking at it that I think it's worth a visit even if you've already seen it. It was drawn by Harry Beck, author of the iconic London tube map that discarded geography for straight lines. Here he applied it to airline travel.

via Londonist

Specifically it shows all the routes of Imperial Airways and it's subsidiaries. The map was discovered at the Croydon Airport in England and dates from a few years after his subway map was produced. The legend takes a little work to understand. Generally the busier lines have more service but there are various complications within that scheme.

Here is a close up from Europe where things are busiest to illustrate the differing line weights. Interesting how the routes through Germany differ in winter and summer.

I spent a lot of time looking at Africa, trying to translate the colonial country and city names to their current ones. 

You too can spend way too much time exploring the eastern hemisphere's 1930's airports here.

The Real World Costs of Bitcoin

 This is from April but at last week’s NACIS conference I saw Zach Levitt speak about making these graphics for the New York Times. The story details how in the midst of a winter storm that left tens or thousands without power, bitcoin mines in the state kept running, until the companies were finally paid handsomely to shut down operations. One company was paid $18 million over four days for not operating, at the expense of the state’s taxpayers.

Here is a map showing the largest power users in Texas.

Bitcoin mines can use as much power as small cities do, with computers continuously refreshing their algorithms. China drove out bitcoin mines a few years ago because of their power usage but they have found a welcome home in many U.S. States.

Here is a map showing the number of households that use equivalent power to the nearby mines. 

In Texas local energy bills have gone up significantly.

Bitcoin defenders tout the jobs they are bringing to rural areas but while Ethereum, another cryptocurrency reduced their electricity use by 99 percent, Bitcoin has refused to change their algorithm. The heavy power usage is keeping us reliant on fossil fuels, greatly hindering our abilities to reach our climate and pollution goals. The whole story can be seen here.

Pittsburgh Week

This week I am attending the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) meeting in Pittsburgh so I haven't had time for a proper blog post. There's lots of great stuff here that may make for future blog posts but in the meantime here are a few random maps I've come across.

Here is a map of the original Fort Pitt, located on its site at Point State Park. The park and fort remains are located at the confluence of the three rivers (really two rivers coming together) and the location just feels  important. This is a look out from the point with another map in the ground, looking out at the newly formed Ohio River,

and a view from above on Mount Washington.

I got up and down Mount Washington via the two remaining incline railroads. Here is the busiest part of a map hanging at the incline station of all the historic inclines.

I took number 2 up and number 4 back down, the rest are gone.

Finally, a NACIS tradition is the quilt - using maps various members create of the host city, pieced together.

Seoul Maps

I found this nice collection of maps of Seoul, South Korea's largest city and capital from theSEOULlive. This is a website/magazine of Korean culture that "focuses on unraveling the hidden jewels of Seoul that can only be found with rumination." 

Unfortunately these maps are shown at a fairly low resolution so the details are hard to read. The maps vary from the purely pictorial,

to themed maps such as "Literature",

 "Mountain",

a map of medical facilities titled "Cure",

"Night",

and this schematic map with the river straightened out highlighting urban farming.

There is no easy link to the entire collection but you can browse them by clicking the Seoul Map dropdown at the top of theSEOULlive page and choosing the entries for 2017-2020.