Strange Maps
A special series by Frank Jacobs.
Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more. "Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle."
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Ian Fleming picked James Bond for the name of his hero because it was “brief, unromantic and yet very masculine”; he later became friends with the original James Bond, author of one of his favourite ornithology guides.
In 1923, a British survey team doodled an elephant on a map of a remote part of the Gold Coast – now Ghana.
The emergence of email catapulted the @ from typographical obscurity onto everybody’s keyboard. Now the thing had to have a name fit for the digital age. Despite an early proliferation […]
New word of the day: equipopulous. Country A is equipopulous to country B if it has the same number of inhabitants. This map shows what a European Union with 28 […]
Here are two maps that are also cartograms, using the same method to present each country’s population size: one square represents one million people.
As any Bible reader, numerologist or Iron Maiden fan worth their salt knows, 666 is the Number of the Beast. It says so in Revelation 13:17-18, in wording enigmatic enough […]
Brazil v. Germany: 1-7. After the shock elimination of the Football World Cup’s host country Tuesday evening – by a historical and humiliating margin – one kind of expects as […]
Ah, if only Napoleon had never met his Waterloo, surely the world wouldn’t look like this! This being a map of foreign news as shown on France’s 6 terrestrial channels […]
The wreck of the General Slocum in 1904 broke the spirit of Manhattan’s German enclave
Political cartooning, curious cartography and questionable punning all rolled into one: what’s not to love about an artwork like Crimea River? The photorealist painting shows a pouting Putin, shedding a […]
Oslo to Copenhagen, the world’s next megacity?
Tell me where you shop, and I’ll tell you where you are
Belgium and its provinces have had roughly the same shape since independence in 1830. It’s taken those 184 years to make a shocking discovery: hidden inside Belgium is another Belgium. […]
Elections for the European Parliament have been held every five years since 1979, but none have been as crucial as this 8th edition, taking place from 22 to 25 May. […]
These international borders follow mathematically impartial pathways, laid out by so-called Voronoi diagrams named after the Ukrainian mathematician Georgy Voronoy.
German writer Timur Vermes’s 2012 bestseller is titled Er ist wieder da (‘Look Who’s Back’). The cover illustration leaves no doubt as to who the protagonist is: the trademark curtained […]
So Cheney Lavonia has a job for me. In Thailand. Could I email her back? The message is spam and the name is fake, but the pseudonym is both mellifluous […]
Cuddly toys, ripped to pieces. Their limbs and tails, snouts and eyepatches strung up and nailed to a museum wall. Teddy bears and their furry friends are supposed to be […]
“How can we possibly be giving £1 billion a month to Bongo Bongo Land when we’re in this kind of debt is completely beyond me”, Godfrey Bloom said in August […]
All maps tell lies, but this one does it better than most.
Oceans and deserts are on opposite ends of the humidity scale, yet at some weird level, the extremes are interchangeable. Rolling desert dunes are reminiscent of ocean waves, and as […]
Remember Syria? It’s the war everyone was talking about before the one about to erupt over Crimea invaded our screens. Turkey hasn’t forgotten, though. Syria’s northern neighbour has seen a […]
Who in history was clever enough to have made these maps?
The man who coined the country’s name was expelled from it, and died in exile
The best argument against German Unification came from French writer François Mauriac: “J’aime tellement l’Allemagne que je préfère qu’il y en ait deux”. It takes an American to propel that […]
This just in from Ukraine: President Yanukovych has sacked the country’s armed forces chief, has agreed a ‘truce’ with the three main opposition leaders, and wants to start ‘negotiations’ to […]
“Ladies, take special notice. Afghanistan is a heavy duty male chauvinist trip, so try to remember what your dear old Grandmother said about acting like a lady”
Truth is stranger than fiction. Especially if that truth is caused by fiction. Consider the strange case of Agloe, a place name that started appearing on maps of New York State in the 1930s.