Author: John

I am experimenting with CSS filters and blend modes to merge a hillshade map layer with a satellite imagery map layer, with noble (or, eh, ignoble) cartographic goals. Anyway, it goes like this… Take an imagery basemap, like this… Give it some CSS Filter secret sauce, then add a hillshade layer, like this… And give … Continue reading Blending Hillshade & Imagery in the Browser

What do we Americans wonder about our, or other, states such that we just go ahead and Google it in such numbers as to appear in auto-suggest? Here is a simple zeitgeist-y app, made my Jinnan Zhang and me (inspired by the Ur example from Dorothy Gambrell) that shows you what people wonder about these … Continue reading United States of Wonder

Download this template with all the glob-y components and instruction pics. Cut out all 20 little maps (tip, there are 4 PDF pages, you can stack the North Pole / Lower Latitudes and the South Pole / Upper Latitudes pages and save half the cutting). Crimp along the dotted lines and start assembling the little … Continue reading Geodesic Globe Christmas Ornament Thing

Here is a map of 2.3 million places (160MB geodatabase) that have official US Board on Geographic Names names. When color coded by their elevation they look like this… I just like it. Continue reading Named Places by Elevation

How-to and data source here. Continue reading What Would You Name a Way Through Mountains?

The Northern Lights have been particularly amazing this fall in arctic areas, to the extent that satellites capturing nighttime imagery actually detected the surface of the Earth—illuminated by the intense aurora. Here is that remarkable imagery, via NASA Visible Earth… You can actually spot the topographic relief, particularly in southern Alaska and Yukon Territory (one … Continue reading Aurora Illumination

    Explore this data in more detail here. Continue reading Health Risk Factors, Top 10s