Here’s a really interesting photo, an intern from Facebook wanted to examine the locality of friendships, pulling some data from Facebook he created this image. What’s incredible is that lines don’t represent coasts or rivers or political borders, but real human relationships. Each line is a friendship between two people, and with enough information these friendships give us a surprisingly accurate map of the world, minus Russia, apparently Facebook isn’t too big over there.
You can read more about how it was made here. Also here is the High Res Version.
The second longest river in New Zealand.
Vive le tweet! A ma of twitter’s languages
“What a joy these maps are to behold. It’s as if someone took one of those composite satellite maps - you know, impossibly showing the whole world at night, the darkness broken by hubs and strings of artificial light (1) - and gave it the power of speech.
For the riot of colours on these maps correspond to the diversity of languages spoken, or rather: typed, on Twitter.
The fun really begins in Europe, where some of countries just vanish off the map: Belgium tweets in Dutch and French, Switzerland in mainly in German, with a French bit west of the Röstigraben (3). And other countries emerge out of nowhere: Catalans twitter in their own language, not Spanish. German dominates Central Europe, but a surprisingly large chunk of Austria appears to be tweeting in Italian - as do a lot of dots inside France.
Those are the really fascinating bits of this map of Twitter’s languages: the ones that show a divergent reality to the one we find on most other maps - even ‘proper’ linguistic ones: is that blue dot south of Amman really a Danish oasis in the Jordanian desert? Does nobody tweet in Lithuanian? And is that Spanish being tweeted in Bermuda?”
Click through for full article
Use Google maps to create a personalized envelope. Read the comments for details on how to orient the map in order to get this to work even if your letter is traveling from east to west or south to north.
(via Craziest Gadgets)
(via craftdiscoveries)
San Francisco Bay looks like something else…
My flatmate pointed this out, San Francisco bay looks like a monster. I am reminded of the space worm from Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back.
Lycanthropography: Howling at the Map
Another map which looks like something else, this one has been slightly altered to fit the movie. Look at the Irish Sea, think about the title of this post: lycanthropy meets cartography. See it yet? Click through for more information.
So I’ve already talked about how Pakistan looks like a dinosaur, today I am noting how South Africa looks like an animal. It’s your choice, either a hippo or a rhino. Both are cool animals.
Is that a run, a kill or a fork? Or is it actually just a regular old stream? When it comes to naming waterways, it all seems to depend on your geography.
This map, created by designer Derek Watkins, color-codes the waterways of the U.S. by names they’re given. As Watkins explains, these names have their own name: toponyms, which are general descriptions of geographic features. The degree of geographical concentration of certain name types is pretty striking. Brooks tend to stay in New England, and bayous are primarily in the Louisiana-Mississippi area. Cañadas, rios and arroyos are concentrated in the Southwest. Branches seem to have the widest territory, covering much of the southeastern corner of the country.
(via ilovecharts)
