Thirty Day Map Challenge 2022 - Days 4 - 9

 

Yes, November is the month when I get to be self-indulgent and show off my #30DayMapChallenge maps so here come some more. The daily theme is listed after each day.

Day 4 - Green

For green day I made a map of Greenville, the one in South Carolina, giving it the 1980’s computer screen look. I brought down the resolution a bit for the pixellated feel and found a font from that era.

Day 5 - Ukraine

Locations of sunflower fields in Ukraine were taken from this Wikimedia Commons page. Most of the photos have location coordinates listed deep in their metadata. I used a caricatured country outline from Project Linework, except for Russia (not included in their data) which I drew my own coastline for.

Day 6 - Network

This was not my most successful idea but I’d been working on overlaying transit maps onto a cartogram (so the large urban areas have space). To be as objective as possible and keep this project from blowing up, I only used the “heavy rail” systems as listed by Wikipedia. The page lists 15 systems covering 12 metropolitan areas. I did not include San Juan, Puerto Rico because it’s not part of this cartogram. If I started including cities with “light rail” systems, I might need to add various suburban commuter systems and it would be a large slippery slope that I might never get up from. The cartogram was modified to remove some of the large empty area between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Day 7 - Raster

I may have “mailed this one in” a bit but I wanted to play with some color manipulations in GIMP. The original image came from this page from University of Michigan. I like the perspective.

Day 8 - OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of geodata. I grabbed some ice cream places and mapped the Ísbíltúr - Iceland’s ice cream road trip tradition. All data including the coastlines and parks are from OpenStreetMap.

Day 9 - Space
 

I’ve never been to the Maine Solar System in Aroostook County but I hope to see it some day. Here is a map showing where the planet models are located. More on the system here. The picture of Saturn in situ was taken from Google, user Amy Doucette.

Thirty Day Map Challenge 2022 - Days 1-3

November is back and that means another #30DayMapChallenge, making a map each day based on a given theme, For more background on the challenge see this post from last year. Here are the first three days as posted on my Twitter.

Day 1 - Points

The original points came from the Maine Geodata Library. However, these only included towns with “point” in the name which are not many. For example, there is no town called "Pemaquid Point" so it was missing. I got some additional names from various web searches. The inland points were particularly difficult to find-most of these are on lakes. In the final map some of the points got dropped by the auto-label function to reduce clutter, so this is not a complete list.

Day 2 - Lines

This is the most wordy map I’ve ever made. I’m not a huge fan of the overly information-dense National Geographic style maps because it’s just way too much to take in, but this map needs some explanation. I’ve been fascinated by the Haskell Free Library and how it straddles the US-Canada border. A few years ago I finally had a chance to visit it. I took the photos of the black line marking the border and generated the data myself as most of it did not exist from what I could find.

I had to drop my accuracy hangups to make the map more legible. Originally I had all 9 flower pots in their exact right locations. It was unreadable so I spread them out a bit but eventually found that I needed to get rid of a few to keep the map from being a messy jumble.

Day 3 - Polygons

While Lawnstarter is not necessarily the world’s foremost data site, sometimes you have to go where the data is. I was trying out this leaf coloring scheme with its random colors and angles so I looked for a fall foliage by state guide. I found a best “fall scenery” ranking by State from Lawnstarter 2022’s Best States to Visit This Fall  There’s an overall ranking but there is also one specific to fall scenery.

I had trouble coming up with an ideal density function in limited time so some of the larger states look a bit more sparse to the benefit of states like Delaware.

I’ll have many more of these to post throughout November.

Maine's Fire Tower Panorama Maps

The State of Maine's Forest Service commissioned a series of 360-degree maps centered on mountaintop fire towers throughout the state. They are available from the digitalMaine repository.

For example here is Mt Ararat in the town of Topsham, near the coast.

Here is some detail - the fire tower is marked by the black dot in the center.

Another example from near the Quebec border  - Green Mountain.

Here you can see the title block, map and panoramic details along the rim of each map.

More urban locations like Mt Ararat will show details like oil tanks and standpipes.

There's also an interactive map so you can search for your favorite mountain.

One more example, just because I am enjoying looking at these!

SUPER IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: I noticed that the Stockholm Mountain map includes some major details about property owners and their land.

Vacation Post 2020

I am on vacation this week so I don't really have anything except this important puzzle I'm working on.

Here it is in situ.

The dog is whining so I better take him down to the water. See you next week!

The Top 100 Private Land Owners in the USA

The United States Government owns 640 Million acres of land (about 28% of the country's land mass). Of the privately held lands, 40 million acres (about the size of Florida) are owned by 100 individuals. This map from Bloomberg shows who these people are and where (most of) their land is.

A zoom in shows you who these people are - a combination of investors, energy company owners, ranchers, media moguls, heirs and various other wealthy people. Here is the Texas Panhandle and northeastern New Mexico,

and southwestern Texas-the blue piece furthest west is owned by Jeff Bezos where one of his companies tests a reusable rocket.

Here are the top 10 landowners with the acreage (in the millions) they own.

Most of this land is in the western half of the country. Here are some holdings surrounding Yellowstone National Park.

There is not much action in the east, except for in Georgia, Florida and Maine where seven families collectively control a quarter of the state's land, including Subway (the restaurant, not the transportation option) co-founder Peter Buck.

Look North

Going through my recently acquired road maps, I was intrigued by the many different north arrows. Many are gas stations maps-the work contracted out to map publishing companies such as Rand McNally and H.M. Gousha. Oil companies put their names on the map and often their logo on the north arrow.

Here's an example from the Gulf "Richmond Tourgide" - their cutesy misspelling, not mine. Rand McNally produced this map. Here are some more:

Flying A Service Metro D.C. Street Map- Gousha.

Cities Service - I don't know who they were and it was hard to get a clear picture of their logo. This is from their Maine map (Bangor inset). You can see the H. M. G. Co. (Gousha) text.

Before Arco, there was Atlantic - From a Tampa-St Petersburg map-Rand McNally










American - Greater Miami Street Map and Mobil Travel Map of the San Fernando Valley, California - Rand McNally

Two Gousha's - one from the Hertz/American Express Chicago map and one from their own branded New Orleans city map.

AAA's maps used this globe north arrow. They liked to put them in the water.









Here is one from Rand McNally's Los Angeles map. It appears on the LAX airport inset. This map looks very different stylistically from the rest of the map and the Thomas Brothers north arrow explains why.

The other sections of the map all have this dull, understated e.e. cummings- style "n"










Some state tourist agencies.

Maryland - I don't love Maryland's schizophrenic flag, but I like how they incorporated it into their north arrow.

Virginia - very detailed.

Montana-now that's a quality north arrow!





















Best of all - South Dakota with its compass ring showing where the needle would point at the center of the state. Two rings, one for true distance and one for magnetic variation, plus the state seal!

 Here are some more

More Map Acquisitions

Map Acquistions - Part Two

Central Leningrad from a city guide by Intourist,  travel service of the U.S.S.R, circa 1976.

Another view of Leningrad, Falk plans, Hamburg, Germany, 1976.

A very schematic map of Moscow from Intourist.

Tourist map of Milan - the eye watering color scheme and overly fussy level of detail make it a treat to try and read.

Bus guide-Barnet, North London

A "Parking Disc" for North Yorkshire - set the time of arrival and display on your windscreen. Fail to display the disc and you have "committed an offence."

Hughes Airwest map of Guadalajara,

and Puerto Vallarta

Here's something I haven't come across before - an uncredited map. There is no publishing info but here's the cover.

There are some nice details on it,

 with this odd inset - I guess showing the extent of streets in 1947. Except where they masked them under "San Francisco"

Finally, a personal favorite since I vacation here, "Damariscotta Boxes the Compass" a map with a ridiculously prominent compass.

The houses and churches are drawn so large you can't tell where they're located. This is from the Damariscotta Information Bureau - we still use their maps but they are much more legible these days.