Link Banana

Neatorama points to some interesting maps. Basically: the total area of the moon covered by the Apollo 11 astronauts was smaller than a soccer field. Or, if they landed on a baseball diamond, they hardly left the infield.

GOOD has a pretty interesting map of history’s greatest journeys. Worth a look.

(via Snarkmarket)

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

The New York Times has put together another fabulous interactive chart — or maybe it’s a map — of how many medals countries won in each summer Olympiad since 1896.

(via Passport)

Far more variable than you might think. The comparison of various renderings is well worth a look.

(via kottke)

Worst title ever? In any case, Strange Maps has a striking maps of where federally-owned land in located around the United States. You may be surprised to know that Nevada has the most (84.5%), while Connecticut has the least (0.4%). And no, neither number is a typo.

Though they’re mostly small, The Economist makes the interesting point that there are actually a relatively high number of land-locked countries with navies.

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

Am I the only one who thinks it’s odd that that no gnomes live in France or Italy?

Wired Science has an approachable look at this report which measured the per-capita emissions of the 100 largest US metro areas. There’s not much terribly surprising — density is good, public transportation is good, coal is bad, mild weather is good — but the map’s still interesting to see.

Passport has pulled some maps from an interesting study, “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis” (PDF).

They divided the world up into sub-national swathes of land and analyzed population and disaster data going back about thirty years for six disaster types: drought, flooding, cyclones, earthquakes, volcanoes, and landslides. For reasons of data accuracy and availability, the results are relative rather than absolute likelihoods that disasters will occur in various corners of the globe.

The study focuses on more significantly populated areas amounting to about half of the world’s land area. It approaches loss as potential damage to that which is “valuable but vulnerable includ[ing] people, infrastructure, and environmentally important land uses.” And what’s more, based on data from a Brussels-based research center, the study hints that disaster frequency is increasing.

I linked to a part of Aaron Koblin’s Flight Patterns project a few weeks ago, without recognizing it as such. Neatorama has compiled some valuable links to his work, and pointed out the awesome video in the title link. Their summary:

In 2005, Aaron Koblin took all of the air traffic over United States data, as seen by the FAA, and visualized it in a beautiful animation. Aaron’s work was originally developed as a series of experiments for the “Celestial Mechanics” project (eye candy!) by Scott Hesels and Gabriel Dunne at UCLA.

Further proof that Europeans — admittedly, with some justification — don’t have a clue about the geography of the United States.

Both of these caught my eye:

• Delicious Ghost found some maps of where personality types, like extroversion and agreeableness, are located within (48 of) the United States. They’re from a column by Richard Florida, who has many more maps available on his site.
• Ben Fry, who recently made the “all streets” map, was pointed to a map [PDF] of the distance to a road in (48 of) the United States. He was pointed there by Tom Vanderbilt, who wrote that recent diatribe against playsets in your yard.

Passport has collected a few maps that show the extent of the damage done by the cyclone that struck Burma over the weekend. This before and after set is, as is usually the case with hurricanes, rather striking.

Though many angsty American teenagers probably think Europeans are “so much deeper” than American, this isn’t about that. This is about the fact that as a reformed geology nerd I feel obligated to take every possible opportunity to bring up the “Mohorovicic Discontintinuty.”

While the Earth’s global crust is an average of eight kilometers thick in the oceans and thirty-two kilometers thick under the continents, the new higher-res map shows a surprising amount of crust depth variation. The low-lands around the Netherlands sit on Pizza Hut flat rocks as thin (5-15 km) as some ocean crust while Finland’s got a 50+ kilometer thick lithosphere.

The scientists found that the so-called Mohorovicic Discontinuity, the boundary where the crust meets the mantle, lies at more variable depth than previously thought.

Wanna see something really cool? Watch this short video of all the flights in the air over the USA at a given time.

(via siracusa)

This isn’t about stealing music or movies, but real pirates in real boats, stealing real property.

• The Economist has a chart of the number of recorded pirate attacks by geographic region. While Asia as a whole improved considerably, there were still 263 attacks in 2007.
• In a recent Op-Ed, John Burnett argued for harsher laws against pirates.
• Passport found a map (PDF) from the Operational Satellite Applications Program of the UN Institute for Training and Research that shows the location and nature of pirate attacks around Somalia.

It’s interesting to see that the whole eastern half of the country, which looks like the worst culprit on the unadjusted version, looks pretty average on the per-capita version.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

Google’s satellite picture of Broomfield, New Jersey (near Newark) was clearly taken at three different times of year. One bit’s a lush green, another’s a solid white, and the last bit is distinctly brown. Isn’t technology grand?

(via BBGadgets)