Maps On The Brain

A selection of recent publications with maps on the cover:

A book:

The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain by George Lakoff

The author attempts to explain why a great number of Americans actually vote against their own interests.



Some magazines:





The cover of this issue of The New Yorker (June 23, 2008) features cover art, “Summer Job”, by Bruce McCall.

If you cannot make out the detail, it fancifully depicts bears checking in and out of the "Employees Entrance" at a National Park, while the tourist are reminded, "No picnicing in Buffalo Wallows."

If you look very closely, you can see that, yes indeed, there is a map! A "You Are Here" map of the park for the tourists.

This cover reminds me of the old Warner Brothers Cartoon where Ralph the wolf and Sam the sheepdog clock in, as buddies, before battling over the sheep.



“Subway Man”, by Roz Chast, graces the June 30 issue of The New Yorker. A stressed out commuter IS the transit map of Manhattan.

Finally, the June 21, 2008, issue of the New Scientist magazine features a very hot looking planet Earth, for a cover story on global warming.


#207

Great Salt Lake

In his book, How to Lie with Maps, Mark Monmonier discusses "cartographic agendas", and how, in the 1960s, the United States Geological Survey finally started removing racial slurs from place names (such as "Nigger Creek"). Almost as an aside, he mentions this little quirk about USGS topographic maps:

While liberals wring their hands over the mapmaker's do-it-by-the-book intransigence over racial slurs, fiscal conservatives might object with equal vigor to the perfectly executed, largely blue maps of wholly inundated quadrangles in the middle of the Great Salt Lake. A case in point is the Rozel Point SW, Utah, 7.5-minute quadrangle, which derives its name from a land feature on the next row up, one sheet to the right. Except for the titles, grid lines, and marginal notations similar to those on maps of Fresno and Kalamazoo, the 1:24,000 Rozel Point SW sheet is a featureless light-blue rectangle adorned only by a note at the center

Utah: Index to topographic and other Map Coverage, USGS, National Mapping Program

At my library, we are a Federal Document Depository and we have a complete collection of United States 1:24,000 scale topographic maps. As you can see by the index example above, the entire nation is divided into a grid. Each grid rectangle is a named map. Intrigued by Monmonier's story, I had to see for myself. I pulled out the Rozel Point SW sheet and here it is (right). A big blue blank. The only information to be found on this map is the name of the body of water, and its elevation (below).
(Sorry for the poor image... I need a better camera.)

Bureacracy beats commons sense every time...

But, I wonder... does the USGS know something we don't know? Perhaps Rozel Point SW is a place holder for a future map... After global warming...

The graphic to the right, from Commonly Asked Questions About Utah's Great Salt Lake (Utah Geological Survey), illustrates how the water level of the Great Salt Lake has fluctuated over the years.

Perhaps the USGS has topographic maps of the "Rozel Point Salt Flats" ready for the day that the Great Salt Lake dries up...

UPDATE 2/6: "jesssse" reminds me that the earthwork sculpture "Spriral Jetty" is located at the actual Rozel Point (grid coordinate D6). Constructed in 1970, it was built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water. The Spriral Jetty has been in the news lately; threatened by a wildcat oil operation on the Great Salt Lake.

Maps on Magazine Covers

An assortment of maps on magazine covers from my collection:

If you want to demonstrate your "global reach"... put a globe on your cover...











While I suppose it is not suprising to find a map on the cover of the Journal of Geography... I particularly liked this "melting Earth" image... (see global warming).



If you want to tell your readers "we're covering the news" put a map on the cover:



Map in an editorial cartoon on a cover:



Like the recent Time magazine cover, here is a map on the body to imply how "widespread" a disease can be:

Here Comes the Flood

In honor of the flood in my basement last night, I share this worst-case-scenario map of global warming:


From Bits & Pieces

Not relevant to maps, but still funny, in a dark way, these are the Christmas cards we're sending out this year.
From The Onion: Merry Second-To-Last Christmas