Saturday, April 26, 2014

Still Life With Robin: Map Porn

by Peggy Robin

Everyone, stop wasting your time with “What Disney PrincessAre You?”  and "What City Should You Actually Live In?"  and all those other ridiculous Buzzfeed quizzes! I have a much, much better way for you to procrastinate from productive things you could be doing with your valuable time: it’s Map Porn https://www.facebook.com/mapporn.

For anyone who enjoys the way maps display information about obscure corners of the globe or reveal little-known factoids about places as familiar as our own backyards, Map Porn will deliver some odd delights…or maybe just oddities. A few salient examples:

Here’s one for current events - Map Showing Border Between Russia and Ukraine:

And at the opposite of current events, a map of every spot in the world ever mentioned in a Bob Dylan song:

Subway maps - if each was made according to the same formula for readability:
Quick, somebody take this to the Metro board!

Linguistic maps showing the words used for particular words [bear, rose, beer, tea, orange] all across Europe:

Map showing the weirdest thing each country is known for:

Most awesome thing about each state:

The Atlas of National Stereotypes:
(Warning: This site lives up to the “porn” aspect of “map porn” in that much of what is found here is bound to offend a lot of people -- although different people will be offended by different aspects of the site. On the other hand, you might just get a big kick out of parts, or maybe most of it. Hard to say until you see it!)  

And finally, a map showing the highest densities of the name Kevin:
…which, unfortunately, turns out to be a fake map….but if you are going to waste your time looking at funny maps, a fake funny map is as good as a real one, I guess.

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Still Life With Robin is published on the Cleveland ParkListserv and on All Life Is Local on Saturdays.



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