Subways of North America

xkcd once again embraces their love of maps with Subways of North America. While I've seen similar subway map mashups, I've never seen them connected before.

These inter-city connections create some wonderful highlights. Here are some of my personal favorites:

The Cleveland Circle (Boston) to Cleveland shuttle - passing through West Trenton, this shuttle would be a nice easy way for me to leave work and go visit my Mom. West Trenton's location along Lake Erie just beyond South Harbor is also a bit curious.

The Green Line extension from Cambridge to Montreal - if it even makes it to Medford that would be remarkable.

The extension of the Market Street elevated subway line in West Philly/Upper Darby from 69th Street to Long Beach and LA.

The Rocky Mountain Tunnel (at sea level) connecting Chicago's O'Hare airport to Oakland.

A couple of extremely long subway tunnels from Atlanta and Miami to Mexico City.

The Puerto Rico submarine from Staten Island to San Juan and the connection from Jamaica (Queens) to Jamaica.

The Springfield Monorail connecting to nowhere, not even North Haverbrook.

There's lots of other things to explore including tunnels in the Caribbean,  "covertly repurposed" Amtrak lines, strangely renamed Red Line stations in Quincy, Mass. and a graveyard for passengers killed by closing doors - have fun exploring!

Speaking of April Fools...

On a recent Air Canada flight I got to see a little Canadian TV, specifically This Hour Has 22 Minutes. They like to make fun of Toronto mayor Rob Ford who has a long history of saying dumb things. On a recent visit to Chicago someone told him they'd been to the part of Canada "across from Detroit" and Ford responded "Oh, Manitoba!" Actually Rob, it's your own province! 22 Minutes had a little map fun at his expense. Here is a screen shot of the Rob Ford's map of Canada via the Torontoist.

Google Treasure Maps

Google has launched it's latest mapping feature, the Treasure Map just in time for April Fool's Day.

The treasure view has icons and some of them have numbers referencing latitude and longitude that take you to clues. For example, this mermaid swimming in Lake Washington near Seattle...

 ...takes you to southern Alberta, where the gold coin is actually a letter. These letters spell out an important message.

If you happen to be in southern Ireland, you might come across this rope letter.

Not all icons give you clues, some are just there to be cute. Here's Lucy The Elephant in Margate, New Jersey.

Here are various icons in Seoul including the gangnam style guy.

Also, the street view is altered to look like a telescope with sepia-like tones and cracks and dust on the lens.

For more information watch this video:
For even more insight and some spoilers go to Google Maps Mania. Happy treasure hunting!

Peeking in at the Map Restorer's Shop

Last week we took a short vacation in Paris. One of our many long walks was along the Promenade Plantee, a linear elevated park that runs along an old railway viaduct. The Viaduct des Arts is a line of specialty arts and crafts stores in the archways underneath.

One of these shops specializes in the restoration of antique maps. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately since it prevented me from spending hundreds of euros) the shop was closed for lunch. I peeked through the windows and took a few photos. This map illustrates the look before and after restoration. The area shown is just south of Versailles.

They also offer hand colorization. Below is the Roussel Plan of Paris from 1730. A sign in the window has the following prices in euros (about $1.30 per US dollar); 355€ for the black and white map, 2,050€ for colorization and the complete package with masking and framing for 3,020€.

 

Expand that out to the entire map and you get a lot of colorizing for your 2.000 euros.

 

Why the New Pope is from South America

Just a demographic speculation.
Image from Old White Popes Can't Jump

March Pope Madness!

When I saw the list of papal candidates today, I immediately thought about the March Madness brackets. Apparently, the Religious News Service beat me to the idea.

You can vote for the final two (Ouellet vs Onaiyekan) here.

UPDATE: It's Onaiyekan from Nigeria!

Watch the Snow Fall

The National Weather Service has a Snow Analyses page where you can see current regional and national conditions. You can also see animations of the yearly snowfall as well as snowpack depth, temperature and sublimation. Here is a still photo from today showing the storm that just came through the Midwest.

Once again, purple is the scary color. This one, from February 9th shows the storm that hit the Northeast.

Today's snowpack temperature:

If you're stuck indoors today from the snow,  choose a region, date range and topic and watch the snow fly (or melt.)