The literal meanings of places in the U.S., mapped.
from the article:
It's easy to think of words such as California or Texas or New York as just the places on the map, but those words actually meant something, once, and those meanings offer a little glimpse into history. The...map, designed by cartographers Stephan Hormes and Silke Peust, labels states, cities, and landmarks with the literal meanings of their official names.
The data includes "all of the geo-tagged Tweets since 2009." The resulting maps are pretty spectacular...
A Fantastic Map of 500 Years of Meteorites Hitting Earth
from the site:
The interactive map is only a partial sampling of the 45,716 meteorites on record with the Meteoritical Society. "The vast majority of those are fragments found in Antarctica and other remote locations like Western Australia and the Sahara," he says. "Only about 1,107 have a recorded sighting associated with them and of those I was able to find pictures for 605. Since the map is intended for the public and not professionals, I chose to show only the 605 with the most information associated with them."
Had the Cookie Crumbled Differently: East and West Dakota
from the site:
Lurking beneath the surface of what on the face of the map looks like a perfectly non-suspect pair of cartographic personae is an intriguing allohistorical question: What is the Dakota Split had never happened? Or: What if it had happened differently?
A Collection of Very Strange Maps
from the site:
You've seen city maps, but what about city maps that show where each gang has its headquarters? Or a map of the globe without water? Here are a few of our favorite randomly bizarre maps.
Maps related to the likelihood of attending or watching college basketball games...
Article from The Atlantic: Mapping the Census: A Dot for Every Person
View the map: Census Dotmap
Pronounce Wisconsin is an interactive map showing how to pronounce town names...
Map: http://maps.sco.wisc.edu/pronouncewi/
Information: http://www.sco.wisc.edu/pronounce-wisconsin/about-pw.html
The United States of Starbucks
Maps of Starbucks-owned locations connected using a Delaunay triangulation and a Voronoi diagram.
The latter shows that the furthest possible distance you can be from a Starbucks in the continental U.S. is 170 miles. Also, further analysis shows that more than 80% of the U.S. population lives within 20 miles of a Starbucks...
Where Do Twitter F-Bombs Come From? Heat Map Shows Rudest Places
from the site: "A new project called "Twitter Heatmap" shows where the U.S.'s most polite and rudest Twitter users are"
Eye-Catching Map Visualizes 150 Years Of Hurricanes
As Isaac barrels down on the Gulf Coast, take a look at this map of every hurricane on the planet since 1851 to give some sense of how these forces of nature have been battering us for the last century and a half. A pulled back view of all the storms comes close to resembling a giant hurricane; a bit of visual wordplay from nature itself.
A map of American state stereotypes, generated by Google autocomplete.
from the site:
The map is generated from an archive of all the geo-located articles for a number of languages.