Literary San Francisco

From the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle's book review section in July:

A nub of 47 square miles, much of it punctuated by vertigo-inducing hills, most of it surrounded by ocean water - half of it the open, not-so-tranquil Pacific, the other half the calm, protected currents of a gray-blue bay.

Just as San Francisco has been shaped by its dramatic earthquake-scarred, coastal setting, the city, despite its relative youth, has also been defined by legions of writers whose words have brought it to life. Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Alice Adams, Amy Tan, Michelle Tea - they have all etched the landscape for us.

UPDATE 8/20: Illustration by Ian Huebert.

HT to Orange

Yuppie Locator

Jessica at TownMe.com has sent me this amusing tool to mash up Google maps with Census data to rank city neighborhoods based on different factors - e.g. Yuppieness, cougars, baby mommas etc. You're able to see which neighborhoods are more concentrated with these different factors. Below is a the Yuppie Locator for San Francisco:



You can do a search for other major cities. They also rank the city with an index, on a scale from 0-100, for a certain factor. The index is located to the right of the map. If you click the 'read more' panel, you're able to see how they defined and described the index and exactly which pieces of census data they used.

UPDATE: Moments after posting this map, I visited The Map Scroll. Chachy has also featured this site... AND used San Francisco for his example. LOL... great minds think alike. I think Chachy may live out there... I only chose SF because the data map for Dayton was pretty boring...

Flight of Manhattan

Fun with MapQuest and Google Maps.

First it was Bill Renken's Errant Isle of Manhattan, on Radical Cartography: "What would happen if Manhattan itself decided to take a tour of the oceans, stopping at other cities to refuel and have a good time."

First stop: Chicago



Jason Kottke speculates on a visit to San Francisco



Seth Holladay takes the island to Boston



However, the first thing I thought of, after viewing these fantastical maps, was the series of science fiction books by James Blish; Cities in Flight. Centuries into the future, the invention of massive antigravity devices allow entire cities, including New York, to get up and leave the planet. These "Okies", as they come to be known, struggle to get by as they offer their services to less industrialized planets.






UPDATE 6/10: Just came across this entry in the Worth1000.com B2B: Miniature Worlds contest: Colony City By funkwood