The triumphant arrival of the Libyan rebels in Tripoli does not necessarily mean the end to the fighting in that country, and the final political settlement is nowhere near certain. Here’s a post from bookofjoe.com from back in March, just as the rebellion was beginning to find some success and material support from NATO, that features some political, ethnic, and resource maps (HINT: IT’S ABOUT THE OIL) which may have a lot of influence on the way things finally end up in the post-Gaddafi era.

Also worth a look is this roundup of links by Sam Smith at Progressive Review, several of which look a lot more closely at just how much the U.S. has been involved over the last six months and why (HINT: IT’S ABOUT THE OIL).

There may be no words more poetic in the English language than “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal..”, but for his “felicity with words”, ol’ Thomas Jefferson didn’t have much of a way with names. Exhibit #1: this map he created divvying up the Northwest Territory into 10 new states with such mellifluous names as “Assenispia”, “Chersonesus” and “Metropotamia”.

Big Map Blog has been doing an ongoing series of “birdseye” maps of American cities created in the late 1800s, and yesterday was Boston’s turn. The amount of detail included by the original mapmakers is simply incredible. Here, for example, is the State House:

Recently, Foreign Policy magazine ran its 2011 edition of their “Failed States Index”. It’s rather interesting to see China in the same category as Egypt, which experienced a weird and still-unresolved change of government earlier in 2011, but equally intriguing to see the U.S., Japan, and virtually ALL of Europe except for Scandinavia as a full step short of “Most Stable”. And this was published BEFORE the debt ceiling fiasco really came to the forefront. Right now I wonder if it might not be more honest to put us in with China and Egypt.

Using maps to find out more than directions:

This recent post at The Society Pages looks at a website called Mapping The Measure Of America, which uses a variety of census data combined with interactive maps that let you slice-and-dice the United States by a number of different measures and see the results in several infographic styles. The post is a bit critical of using maps as a way to represent some of this information, but the project website itself is very interesting to poke around with. (I discovered the hard way that the Measure Of America site isn’t compatible with Chrome, so if you visit, be sure to use a browser other than Chrome).

Back in June at the height of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, I posted about a site called If It Were My Home that superimposed the outline of the dimensions of the oil slick onto your Google Map coordinates to help illustrate the size of the spill in terms anyone could relate to. The BBC now has a site called “Dimensions” that does sort of the same thing, but with a variety of historical events and places: here, for example, is the Great Wall Of China superimposed over a map of New England, with Boston at the center. The wall would stretch from somewhere near Indianapolis, IN all the way to Newfoundland, Canada.

Via Eric Fisher, the guy who did those racial diversity maps of American cities, here’s a brand new blog called Bostonography by a pair of map/information design guys with ties to Our Fair City. One of their very first posts is a consideration of how we locals make mental maps of the Hub Of The Universe based on landmarks (including things long gone from the local landscape — a sure sign of being a REAL local is knowing where you are based on where things used to be), as inspired by the seminal work of urban planner Kevin Lynch. I’m watching this blog with keen interest to see what else they have to offer about the unique geography of Boston.

(Click here for full-size image)

A photographer/urban planner named Neil Freeman (and there’s a career combo you don’t hear too often) offers this map of the United States with the existing state borders replaced by borders that balance out population densities into 50 equal territories, with the idea being that the reapportionment would eliminate the iniquities in Electoral College votes. It would also shift House districts, though he doesn’t explicitly mention that. I think it’s kind of interesting to see where the borders change and how they do or do not match other groupings based on demographics, political divisions, cultural distinctions, or quirks of history. For example, he splits up New England and Upstate New York into three territories instead of seven states, but if the same region were carved up based on economic influence, one might expect to see the Boston territory extend more northward and southward, but contract a bit eastward, and you might have to cede some bits of New York, Vermont and Maine to Canada.

Via Fast Company comes a link to some infographics over at New Scientist including a map which shows the interconnectedness of the modern world in terms of proximity to urban centers and availability of transportation networks (the actual NS article, which appeared in April ’09, is only available online to magazine subscribers, but you can read a brief summary here)

The picture above is a closeup from their global map and shows what is the remotest place on Earth: Central Tibet. The lack of populated areas or even roads in this region means that if you’re stuck there it’s a three-week walk to the nearest ANYTHING.

According to the Fast Company post (they obviously paid to read the actual article), less than 10% of the Earth’s surface is more than 48 hours’ travel from an urban center (defined as a city with a population of 500,000 or more). Even 80% of the depths of the Amazon rainforest are within two days of a city due to river transportation AND the increasing encroachment of development into the rainforest itself.

A couple of months ago, there were murmurs that the cheapskate airline Ryanair thought they might be able to get away with removing the seats from airplanes altogether and making passengers stand up like they do on buses and subway cars. That hasn’t happened…yet…but today’s Daily Mail features a mock-up of a design for an aircraft with little jumpseats all crammed together that could very well find its way into service for short-hop flights. As the article points out, the military already uses similar seating to maximize passenger space in troop planes, so it’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Even the designers admit, though, that such seating wouldn’t be comfortable for more than an hour or two. I have to say that I myself would be okay with this for such quickie flights as the Boston-New York shuttles, as long as there was a related price decrease to go along with the inconvenience, but I can also imagine some of the more marginal American airline companies trying to get away with this for longer flights, too.

This story got posted to MetaFilter yesterday and now it’s all over the place: The BBC Magazine features this story of the only woman to ever serve in the French Foreign Legion. Susan Travers was a typical British socialite who wanted to “do her bit” when the Second World War began and became an ambulance driver for French troops fighting against the Russians in Finland. From there, she wound up in North Africa, and when the regular French Army wouldn’t have her, she talked her way into being a driver for the French Foreign Legion. Read the article for the rest of the amazing, romantic, and true story. Or, better yet, read the book. Personally, I can’t wait to see this turned into a movie.

The insanely small sculptures of artist Willard Wigan are not unfamiliar to people who spend any amount of time on the web, but I was very impressed with this tiny replica of Michelangelo’s “David” shown here on the head of a pin with a housefly for size comparison. This post at Laughing Squid also links to a presentation by Wigan at the TED conference, and tells us that Wigan’s art is presently being shown at the Nicole Gallery in Chicago.

This infographic shows a map of the United States represented by the proximity of McDonald’s restaurants. It’s a bit more impressive in its full size, which you can see at its original posting location here. Most Americans live no more than 2 miles from a McDonald’s, it turns out, except whomever it is that might live in this remote corner of South Dakota, which is 145 miles by road to the nearest MickeyD’s. (I suspect that, in fact, nobody lives in that spot, it’s just the one farthest to any McD’s in the U.S.)

Henry Jenkins is a noted academic in the media studies program at MIT and well-known for his interest in videogames and other elements of new media. I skim his blog fairly regularly, though since I long ago forgot how to read and write in academese I don’t always get too far. He’s had a couple of posts recently, though, that caught my eye: last week, in the excitement over the Inauguration and its fortuitious coincidence with Martin Luther King Day, Jenkins wrote this post about finding his own grandfather in a famous photo of King being arrested. His grandfather, it turns out, was the arresting police officer, and it made him think about having to reconcile one’s personal memories of a loved one with their place in history. I especially like his observation about how people throughout the South have had to deal with this cognitive dissonance about loved ones who played unfortunate roles in the racist violence of past years.

Today, Jenkins has a guest post from a graduate student named Colleen Kaman who writes about her childhood fascinations with globes and the maps and pages of National Geographic magazine, and how they shaped her imagined vision of the world around her in a way that turned out quite a bit differently than the real-world changes at the end of the Soviet Era. She talks about the arbitrariness of international boundaries and the fact that what seems so immutable is almost always in flux. She also hits on a key idea about the underlying raison d’etre of the magazine and the National Geographic Society and similar institutions that were so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries — the Victorian ideals of categorization and cataloguing everything in the world as a way to understand and systematize our understanding…and by extesion to demonstrate the superiority of Western Civilization over the savage world around us. As it happens, her post more or less coincides with the 121st anniversary of the National Geographic Society, so it’s worth reading this before you move on to my next link…

…which is this October 2008 National Geographic article called “Last of the Neanderthals”. Recent scholarship has determined that Neanderthals and “modern humans” co-existed for centuries. While closely related, DNA analysis says that they were distinct species. This article says that as late as 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals lived throughout the Eurasian landmass, though their population dwindled to as few as 15,000 indviduals near the end of that era. Modern humans migrated out of Africa about 45,000 years ago, so there were thousands of years of co-existence and the inevitable collision as modern humans migrated north and east. “Clan Of The Cave Bear” and such notwithstanding, researchers do not believe that there was much interbreeding between the two disparate species, since there is no trace of Neanderthal DNA in modern populations. And despite some miscomprehension on the part of the media, which led to stories in 2007 asserting that redheads were descendants of Neanderthals, what they actually found was that both species of humans had genotypes for fair skin and red hair, NOT that some Cro-Magnon dude was getting it on with a Scottish Neanderthal babe 50,000 years ago.

Science mag Seed has a neat story about a suburb of Minneapolis, MN that stages an annual science fair on their frozen lake instead of the more traditional Minnesota winter pastime of ice fishing. They still build little shacks on the lake, but instead of standing around a hole in the ice, drinking brandy and saying “Jeez, cold enough for ya?”, they get to see exhibits about biology, physics, and even art…while drinking brandy and saying “Jeez, cold enough for ya?” I mean, after all, it is still Minnesota.

Lastly, on a slightly different tack, here’s a post from Patrick McNally at The Daily Undertaker with a letter from an engineer who talks about the issue of “greening” the cremation of human remains. Patrick had earlier posted about a news story about a town in Sweden that uses the heat from its local crematorium to generate electricity, and the engineer wrote to him to explain about using what they call the “combined cycle” to take the waste heat from one combustion system (typically a gas turbine) and use it to run a boiler for a second source of power. It gave me flashbacks to some very unhappy days when I worked for a company that was trying to do something like that, minus the stiffs. **Shudder**

Steven Wright tells a joke about having a map of the entire United States in full scale. “It took me all summer to unfold it,” he says.

Well, this one’s not quite full scale, but it sure is detailed. A designer in Cambridge, MA named Ben Fry (who, as you can see from his “About Me” page is no slouch) created a map of every road in the 48 contiguous United States. The finished product produces a representational map that clearly outlines the country, delinates many specific features such as mountains, lakes, and farms, and does an excellent job of representing population density.

It’s not surprising to learn that he’s written one of those O’Reilly Media books (the ones with the cool drawings of animals on them) called Visualizing Data.

Remember kids, vote early, vote often!

One of my favorite imagination games to play when I am just being inside my own head is to imagine alternate history scenarios. You know, “What if the South won the Civil War?” or “What if the Crusades never happened?”, that sort of thing. I can spend quite a bit of time as I work through all the different possibilities and try to imagine what the world today would be like if things had turned out differently. There is an entire genre of fiction devoted to similar “alternate timeline” stories, too. Some of the books are more serious than others, some are just straight-up genre fiction written with the required alt-history backdrop to make the story more engaging.

Part of this pastime includes reimagining maps to fit the various changes history would have undergone. I can remember taking a map of the world from a copy of National Geographic when I was 12 or 13 and redrawing all the borders to represent a political map of Earth in some future time. As it turns out, I wasn’t too far off in some cases, creating a “United States of Europe” in Western Europe that fits today’s EU pretty well, and granting independence to many of the border republics of the U.S.S.R.

And then there’s a book that I read in college that’s completely non-fiction but also reimagines North America re-divided into nine different countries based on geography, culture and economic bases, “The Nine Nations of North America” by Joel Garreau. The book’s a little dated, and it would be great if he wrote a new edition, but the conceit is a good one and I often consider his ideas when I play these games in my head.

So I picked up on the map you see here right away when it was posted at Strange Maps recently. It might be a little hard to read in this small image, but if you click on the full-sized map, you’ll get it immediately. It’s North America redone to represent some likely changes to the political map if certain events in American, Canadian, and Mexican history had turned out differently. The original website for the map is here and includes a chronology of events that explain how the author imagined the changes to history and their consequences: for example, an early secession of the New England colonies (minus Vermont) from the United States, which in turn allowed the Confederate states to succeed in the Civil War. A Louisiana Purchase that did not include Louisiana, but eventually saw the French colonial Louisiana to declare independence after the re-establishment of the monarchy in France. Very noticeable are the several Native American nations which manage to keep the white settlers out.

I really enjoyed reading through the website (which appears to be dated to 1997!) and the author’s considerations of the vagaries of history, and comparing them to Garreau’s vision, which really does not take many historical events into consideration. It would be interesting as an exercise to see if one could bring them both together into yet another map.