Thirty Day Map Challenge 2023-Days 1 and 2

 

Yes it’s November and time for another 30 Day Map Challenge. As in previous years (see here for last year) I began with no real goal of completing it or much idea beyond the first few days. Also as in previous years I’m getting sucked in again. Only two days of action to report so far: here they are.

Day 1 - Points

Goals per game for each NHL team. Yes technically these are called goals, but for the players they register as points.

The puck sizing thing wasn’t a huge success but you get the idea. San Jose isn’t scoring much while Vancouver is. Teams have played less than 10 games so this is a very small sample size. Statistically and visually there’s not much anyone should take away from this other than me having fun with a pun and a bunch of hockey logos.

Day 2 - Lines

Here are the overlapping claims in the South China Sea (even the name is in dispute) from China, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei-marked out in yarn.

The yarn idea came about partially from last year’s South America map (Day 17 here) but also because I was having trouble drawing proper curves with my software. I like the idea of using soft lines for claims that many might consider absurd. Are those longitude lines? No, they’re the lines of a bad printer. I was going to photoshop them out but then decided I kind of like them.

Will there be more? Stay tuned. These are being posted daily on my Mastodon and Bluesky pages if you care (you probably need an account to see Bluesky).

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.

Mid 1900's Urban Planning in Philadelphia

Here are a few urban planning items to close out Philadelphia month. Hope you have enjoyed the journey.

Cathedral Road:

There are many discontinued highways and roads to nowhere throughout the United States, including Woodhaven Road, a dead end expressway in Northeast Philadelphia. Cathedral Road was planned as a major four lane highway connecting the affluent areas of Chestnut Hill and Bryn Mawr across large parts of Northwest Philadelphia and across the Wissahickon Creek. 

via Hidden City

While this is mainly a local story (extensively documented in Hidden City), I find it interesting to see a four lane, empty tree lined highway on Google Street View,

eventually ending at the woods.

images via Google

Here is an overall plan of the area via Hidden City

Mid-century city planner Edmund Bacon was one of the era's primary visionaries though some of his early projects were more beneficial to suburban commuters than to city residents. Here is a picture of his 3D model of the city.

via Philadelphia Inquirer

Bacon believed in a top down approach to planning. As an antidote, University of Pennsylvania professor and landscape architect Ian McHarg advocated for a nature based approach to planning. His book Design With Nature influenced many future planners including me in college. He was also an early pioneer in the idea of creating overlays (showing natural features such as soils and aquifers underneath the built environment), one of the foundations of GIS.  Here is a piece of a very large map he created with his students showing the area's geology under the city's grid.

via WHYY Philadelphia

More on McHarg here.

Philadelphia Bookstore Map

Note: As September comes to a close so does Philadelphia month. There will be a couple more posts today and tomorrow before I return to my normal weekly schedule.

This one is personal. Several years ago I was working with a Philly-based computer programmer and an artist to create a map of bookstores in Philadelphia. We put together lists, artwork and I made a few mock up maps but we never got much interest from the store owners. Apparently someone else did because the Philadelphia Bookstore Map is now a reality. A creation of artist Henry Crane (I don't know him) and the booksellers (unlike us he got them to buy into the project), the map succeeds pretty well while incorporating some similar artwork to what we were going for-images of the stores and some local sites.

As a disclaimer, I have not yet seen the paper copy, only what is available on the web page and on Instagram. It looks like there is an inset map (not shown online) of the stores on South Street, a good way of the solving the density problem we also faced.

A few minor points of criticism. I would have muted the background map to make the points stand out more though he could have also done that using bolder point colors. I'm not a big fan of the overly Google-looking teardrop shapes but they work fine here. The colors for different categories of stores could also be more distinct. 

One of the best things about this is that in the online version there is a page to access sub-pages for each store by clicking on the bookstore drawings.

I chose this image of Bindlestiff Books because that is one of the stores we visited on our journey. One last nice detail - he used one of my favorite Rittenhouse Square statues from my childhood, Billy the goat on the cover.

via Instagram