Maps and stuff. Fun things.
“Whoa, you write weird.” I was a lab instructor for an intro to Geographic Information Systems class and I was scribbling something or another on the whiteboard. One of the students, and education major, noticed that my letter writing sequences were an abomination and called me out. I had never noticed it. So I proceeded … Continue reading Handedness
I stumbled on a fun technique the other day that afforded me a quick scale-independent means of adding in hand-drawn landscape features for fantasy-style map-insert things from awesome books. I’ll follow this post up with specifics on how to achieve it, but in the meantime, here is a quick hack for a hand-drawn tolkienish … Continue reading Fantasy Book Illustration Fun
In speaking with some of my fellow map-obsessed, I learned to my chagrin that my Lights On Lights Out map used a color scheme that was pretty much impenetrable to the color deficient. Sorry! It was a good reminder that good visualization should not needlessly alienate up to 10% of the population. Interestingly, I can count … Continue reading Brighter & Dimmer
Here is a woodcut bathymetry map. Why? I don’t know. But here it is. Here’s a version with Greg’s Cable data. Represented as various gauges of cord, or course. Here is a how-to, should you find yourself with nothing left to lose and the creation of a faux wooden map is your last best shot … Continue reading Woodcut Bathymetry Map
As a follow-up to last week’s visualization of Old Light and New Light, I wanted to make a single map, of the whole world, comparing NASA’s new 2016 Earth At Night image to the 2012 version. Using a simple pixel-difference math bot, this map isolates places where lights have come on (or increased) and where … Continue reading Lights On & Lights Out
This morning I saw the achingly beautiful set of “Black Marble” images of the Earth at night. Joshua Stevens, of NASA’s Visible Earth team, presented some fascinating comparative images of how some places have changed since the last comprehensive mapping of the Earth at Night, which was 2012. When looking at them, I thought it … Continue reading Old Lights and New Lights
Maybe you saw this ridiculous post, describing some fun, very manual, steps to make your maps look like they were assembled of 1×1 bricks on the wonderful vibrant Utopian plain that is a lego base plate. Vanni Zhang rightly saw a better way than all that manual tinkering, and assembled a robot to do the lego construction … Continue reading Lego-ifier
