It's not uncommon to compare the writing of a story to the mapping of a world, but no one has so fully, or so seductively and rewardingly, performed as extended a meditation on this illuminating metaphor as Turchi. A fiction writer, anthologist, and the director of the MFA writing program at Warren Wilson College, Turchi parses with equal insight, knowledge, and elan the making of maps and the writing of fiction. Both involve purposeful omission; both require compression; both are subjective in their perspective, orientation, and emphasis; and both create illusions. Turchi's lively, idiosyncratic, and marvelously well-illustrated history of mapmaking (many cartographic quests are as quixotic as any in literature) is matched by reverie-inducing selections from Melville, Stevenson, Nabokov, Calvino, and Carver, as well as priceless musings on the Marx Brothers and the Road Runner. Ultimately, Turchi contrasts realistic and postrealistic approaches to storytelling

Most 2D-maps are used to represent topographic metrics: distances and areas measured on the map (multiplied by the map scale) give traveling distances and land surfaces. In some cases, this information is irrelevant or even misleading [see an example]. As a cartographer, you may wish to use map metrics to represent other data, such as human populations or amounts of produced resources. This is what ScapeToad is for.

The Haversine formula ‘remains particularly well-conditioned for numerical computation even at small distances’ – unlike calculations based on the spherical law of cosines. (It was published by R W Sinnott in Sky and Telescope, 1984, though has been known about for much longer; the ‘half-versed-sine’ is (1-cosθ)/2, or sin²(θ/2) – don’t ask, I’m not a mathematician).

In fact, when Sinnott devised the Haversine formula, computational precision was limited. Nowadays, JavaScript (and most modern computers) use IEEE 754 64-bit floating-point numbers, which provide 15 significant figures of precision. With this precision, the simple spherical law of cosines formula gives well-conditioned results down to distances as small as around 1 metre. In view of this it is probably worth, in most situations, using either the simpler law of cosines or the more accurate ellipsoidal Vincenty formula in preference to Haversine! (See notes below on the limitations in accuracy of the spherical model).

simple michigan test look for the ratio of "Maki" to "Hill"

She said: "Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history - not to mention Britain's remarkable geography - at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day. "We're in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we've never been there." Projects such as Open Street Map, through which thousands of Britons have contributed their local knowledge to map pubs, landmarks and even post boxes online, are the first step in the fight back against "corporate blankwash", she added.

The Journal of Transport and Land Usepublishes original interdisciplinary papers on the interaction of transport and land use. Domains include: engineering, planning, modeling, behavior, economics, geography, regional science, sociology, architecture and design, network science, and complex systems.

Papers reporting innovative methodologies, original data, and new empirical findings are especially encouraged.

maps, drawn by hand, collected

excellent blog for the "making maps" book

tremendous collection of heuristics and rules of thumb for deciding how to visualize data on a map; many different ways to put the same data into a color or texture scheme, and depending on what you are doing you get various levels of truthiness

OneGeology is an international initiative of the geological surveys of the world and a flagship project of the 'International Year of Planet Earth'. Its aim is to create dynamic geological map data of the world available via the web.

michigan state boundary has changed a bunch of times, swapping land or water w/ohio, wisconsin, minnesota and ontario.

"the kind of people who want to live where the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather"

What is the real definition of a mountain? Sure, we all know one when we see one - or do we? Go ahead - try and define this concept in a rigourous way...

Michael Goodchild, a professor of Geography at UC Santa Barbara, explores the historical and current trends of collaborative geographic data creation in what he terms “volunteered geography” in an article published in GeoJournal.

history of the maps of michigan

Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. [Tobler, 1970, p.236]

screen saver with weather and moon status and day/night, very lovely

map shows news aggregated by continent and country and state; default front page africa

Five ways of mapping the world. One story about people who make maps the traditional way—by drawing things we can see. And other stories about people who map the world using smell, sound, touch, and taste. The world redrawn by the five senses.

Nine homes have major damage from Wednesday morning's landslide. Some appear to have been swallowed up by the shifting ground. Another eight are unliveable for now. The landslide swept out a section of Soledad Mountain Road. In just one hour, a sinkhole e

wunderground severe weather (hurricanes typhoons tropical storms and the like)

excel to kml

I conducted my search via somewhat less-than-scientific means, but am fairly comfortable with the accuracy of the results. I did several keyword searches, the most successful of which was “town tucky -ken.” This resulted in thousands of returned hits,

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They're the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

'Non-place urban realm\' was a term bandied around by American urban geographers of the 1970s to describe the city of the future in which motor car-based personal mobility would make place-of-residence immaterial.

nice global real time earthquake overview; visualization shows both current activity and enough history that you can pick out the plates of the earth's crust.

which could be good for say bus routes or other urban geographies

The high-price trend is further exaggerated by the large concentrations of "trustafarians," or those with large amounts of inherited capital, in these areas.

art project cell phones + geolocation in chicago

my uncle and aunt are professors at cornell geology

maps of the globe with the south at the top, not the north. no peters projections, though, sadly.

review of wikimapia

While the discipline of geography has traditionally embraced and contributed to the humanities, there has been a remarkable recent resurgence of intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors

3d atlas of ann arbor w/flood plain, building data

note the software for these amazing maps is from mark newman @ umich physics

rob goodspeed has some interesting dc maps based on this in his pages on flickr

reading list

notes the sad example of Michigan's "cool cities" promotion

a special selection of Ann Arbor geography projects