The United Nations Environment Program has just launched this Google map-enabled site with before/after satellite images showing environmental change over the past few decades: cities grow, forests are converted to farmland, glaciers shrink. We’re making something of the world, both for better and for worse.
Posts tagged maps
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They vote by night
They vote by night
Composite image by Nate Barksdale from NOAA and UM sources linked below, 9 November 2008
Among all the fascinating maps that've been made of the US voting patterns for the 2008 presidential election, I couldn't find the one I really wanted to see: a map showing both voter percentages and population density on an undistorted projection. With fancy databases it wouldn't be hard to do, but I did come up with a way to Photoshop an approximation, combining the red-blue-purple county-percentage map from the University of Michigan with the famous satellite image of nighttime illumination. It's not a total match for population—gas flares get counted as voters, for instance—but it comes closer than anything I'd found.
Nate: 
image Geography of longing
Geography of longing
"Missed Connections: Where, Exactly," by very small array, 14 July, 2008.
Here's an alternative to the state-by-state maps we're being bombarded with in these latter electoral days: "Of the latest fifty craigslist missed connections posts per state, as beginning on midnight of the most recent Sunday, not including spam, responses or miscategorized posts."
Nate:
from "Globes," a segment on the Discovery Channel's How It's Made :: via kottke.org
OK, so it's not exactly what Peter Berger had in mind when he said "All human society is an enterprise of world-building," but could I resist the charms of this video of the inside of a cardboard-globe factory? I could not. (A video about the manufacture of the clay globe that is the Culture Making logo would, presumably, be a bit simpler.)
Nate:
repost 
The trouble with online maps
The trouble with online maps
I think the Cartographic Society's argument only carries so far—first, because any map-making is by its nature an act of editing, simplification, stylization, and erasure; and second, because as the technology improves, we'll start to see more ways of accessing the info included on the old maps as well as the new.
Nate: 
The president of the British Cartographic Society says Internet mapping (Google Maps etc.) is wiping away the richness of Britain’s geography and history. She says “corporate cartographers” are leaving off landmarks like churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes. And history out of sight is history out of memory. [BBC]
Northern Lights Blvd, Anchorage, Alaska, Google Street View
The Google Street View car in Alaska seems to have had its camera rained on—but it does make for a nice abstract picture of a rather ordinary retail boulevard in Anchorage (just up the street from an aging strip-mall called the Valhalla Center).
Nate:
repost Skyscrapers not to scale
Skyscrapers not to scale
Of course in this rendering, Asia -- where the real population-concentration action's happening -- is just a bunch of spikes on the horizon.
Nate:
I recently came across these amazing data driven globes from Yale’s G-Econ group. The one above represents population density, but their tool allows for all kinds of data to drive the topology from average rainfall to distance from coastlines.
"The World as Reported by the New York Times", very small array, 21 July 2008 :: via kottke.org
With the exception of Mongolia, contries near the interior of ther respective continents seem to get a lot less coverage: Paraguay, Hungary, Congo and Niger.
Nate: