The "Kill Comic Sans" Game

An Image is worth a thousand words. If you are someone how like the phrase in this photo, I am sure you are going to love the “Kill Comic Sans” game. Express your hard feelings for comic sans by shooting the floating word.  

My take on this particular font: I don’t like it because it looks sloppy and informal. As a map designer, I’ve never found it suitable for my projects. It isn’t bad. It is just not for professional use.  

Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude

I came across this impressive song written and sung by Jimmy Buffett. The title is "changes in latitude changes in attitude" which reminds me of Physical Geography lesson on how latitudinal difference affects the climate and regional climate affects agriculture, shelter, clothing and lifestyle in general. Oh no no, the song is not about those lessons. It's a very catchy song and I really liked it!  

Here are the lyrics  (the dialect is kinda hard to understand at first!)


I took off for a weekend last month

Just to try and recall the whole year
All of the faces and all of the places
Wonderin' where they all disappeared
I didn't ponder the question too long
I was hungry and went out for a bite
Ran into a chum with a bottle of rum
And we wound up drinkin all night

Chorus:
It's these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
With all of our running and all of our cunning
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane

Reading departure signs in some big airport
Reminds me of the places I've been
Visions of good times that brought so much pleasure
Makes me want to go back again
If it suddenly ended tomorrow
I could somehow adjust to the fall
Good times and riches and son of a bitches
I've seen more than I can recall

Chorus:
These changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
Through all of the islands and all of the highlands
If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane

I think about Paris when I'm high on red wine
I wish I could jump on a plane
So many nights I just dream of the ocean
God I wish I was sailin' again
Oh, yesterday's over my shoulder
So I can't look back for too long
There's just too much to see waiting in front of me
And I know that I just can't go wrong

Chorus:
With these changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes
Nothing remains quite the same
With all of my running and all of my cunning
If I couldn't laugh I just would go insane
If we couldn't laugh we just would go insane
If we weren't all crazy we would go insane 

How the state got their boundaries?

Now that my both GIS classes are over this weekend was ‘assignments free’ after quite a while. I watched couple of movies, went for shopping, had delicious dinner, spent some time with my husband and played United States Map Puzzle. That’s right, played map puzzle for fun. Contrary to my initial thought it was quite a challenge to recognize the states from their shape. Of all the states, California, Texas, and Florida has easily recognizable shape.

 I wondered how all these states got their boundary. My search for my question gave me a book- How the States got their shape, by Mark Stein. Here is the book’s first introductory page.

Now I really want to know, why West Virginia has a finger creeping up the side of Pennsylvania and why Texas and California are so outsized?!

Mapping urban transition of Ahmedabad

Ahmedabad is the largest city in state Gujarat, India with a city population of about 4 million. It is the seventh largest city and eighth largest metropolitan area of the country. The video below shows the history of the development of the city from its foundation in 1411 AD to present day.

The video contains maps that are scaled models of spatial concepts of the city. Maps depict transition and process of urbanization in city. It also tells history of cartography and achievements in the branch in India. All the maps shown in video are truly admirable.

Animated Maps

Lately, in my GIS classes, I have been working on ArcScene. I am really impressed with its animation tool. Animated map is undoubtedly superior to a plain map on screen or paper. With map animation, we can easily show spatial and temporal changes.

While there are numerous examples of animated map you can find on web, here is one I like to share with you. This is a short video showing American History-Growth of a Nation. Narration and animation gives a different dimension to the maps. Enjoy the video!

World Map Wallpapers

Looking for some cartography theme wallpapers? The wallpaper blog has tons of cool wallpapers. The description for World Map Wallpapers in this blog says that those are almost accurately measured maps. I found few wallpaper really beautiful and best suited for my desktop.

(Notice the Lat-Long on Map)

(All that symbols makes it unique)

Economic Growth of The World.

Here is one of the video from ted.com showing excellent example of projections using maps and multimedia. I have bias against this one because it includes my home country ;)

Map – A piece of Art

Making maps involves as much art as much it involves the science. Making a painting involves multiple aspects like dimension, color choice, element size, proportion, spacing and presentation. Does any of these sound familiar to my fellow cartographers? Yes, these are kind of the same basics we use while making a map. I have passion for canvas painting and I can very well impose the same while I am making a map. I think we won’t be wrong if we call ourselves cartographers and artists!!

What happens when you play with calculations

In any map projection, some distortions are acceptable. But when you purposefully tweak the equations to produce total messed up maps, then the outcome may seem interesting.

Robinson

Bonne

The two above and many other Accidental map are created by Andy Woodruff, Software developer at Indiemapper.

Dose driving make you fat??

I always knew that this could be the reason!! but recently found this map-  Driving is why you are fat! The map shows statewise how people get to work everyday and what is state's obesity ranking. Ranking is done for 50 states plus District of Columbia.

A map analyst inside me couldn’t help noticing a weird ranking system that is #1 in obesity is the place with minimum obese. The other thing I bumped into is some of the states have high drive rank as well as high walk/bike rank (eg: AL, MS, LA, OK), wouldn’t the higher rank for walking and biking mean a lower rank for driving as ranks are given by percentage of total population of state. I even don’t like the dull boring color combination used in the map!


Still, it is a decent map even if the details aren’t completely logical. The idea of block style presentation of statistic is nice for the evenness. This way smaller size state can also be focused similarly. Although the relation between the obesity and mode of communication is very obscure, this kind of map can be made for obesity in relation to food consumed, average Income or general economy. However, this particular map gives good representation of the different modes of transportations.