The Decline and Fall of Assorted Empires

A visualization of four European empires over the course of the 19th and 20th Centuries:



The bubbles respresent "the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by [areal] extent"; hence Britain's loss of Canada looks like a more significant bursting of the imperial bubble than its loss of India, even though India is obviously a far more important place than Canada.

Via Andrew Sullivan and 3quarksdaily.

How Americans Carpe Their Diems

This is not reallya map. Or maybe you could say it's a kind of time-map. But whatever, I'm posting it anyways:



From the NY Times, it shows how Americans spend their days. It's based on the American Time Use Survey, which asked thousands of people to record how they spent every minute of the day. It, if interacted with, breaks down into demographic sub-categories for potentially many minutes of data-representational fun. The Times observes some things:

• The average American spends 2/3 of their day sleeping, eating, working, and watching TV
• Unemployed people spend more than two hours a day doing laundry and yard work
• People who aren't in the labor force watch four hours of TV a day
• Hispanics are as likely as whites to be eating at noon, but whites are much more likely than Hispanics to be eating at 6:30

I also notice that at 8:50pm, 39% of Americans are watching TV; at no time are more than 33% working. And at no time are more than 7% of people socializing. That seems low!

H/t to CC.

Ballparks of the Major Leagues

Via Bats Blog at the New York Times, flipflopflyball.com, by graphic designer Craig Robinson, has a bunch of infographics about baseball. Some of them are definitely maps. Some of them, like the following, are arguably maps:



The stadia of the major leagues. I don't know if these are to scale; it looks like they might be. But here's one thing I would like to see, have looked for, and cannot find: major league ballpark dimensions overlaid on each other at scale, so you could make direct comparisons. Maybe Mr. Robinson would be interested in such a project...

By the way, Robinson is also responsible for Atlas, Schmatlas, which I have a feeling many of you might appreciate.

A Map of Global Warming

A team of MIT researchers has just come out with a new projection of climate change over the course of the 21st Century.



Is this a map? I guess it's both a map and a graph. Anyways, it's a little tricky to read it at first, but look at it this way: every point on the map/graph represents a particular latitude and a particular year; the color of that point represents how much warmer it's likely to be at that given place and time. So, for instance, a location at 40 degrees north latitude (e.g., New York, Madrid, Beijing) is forecast to be about 2C warmer in 2050 and about 6C warmer in 2100. No doubt lots of local effects will come into play, but these temperatures would represent the latitudinal average.

What's immediately striking is how much greater warming is forecast to be near the poles, and especially the north pole. Temperatures there could be more than 10C warmer by the end of the century, a mind-boggling number. And a special added bonus effect of a dramatically warmer acrtic is that the melting of tundra could cause even more greenhouse gases to escape into the atmosphere, instigating a vicious cycle.

The projections are warmer than those made using the same model in 2003. As the paper's abstract says:

the median surface warming in 2091 to 2100 is 5.1°C compared to 2.4°C in the earlier study. Many changes contribute to the stronger warming; among the more important ones are taking into account the cooling in the second half of the 20th century due to volcanic eruptions for input parameter estimation and a more sophisticated method for projecting GDP growth which eliminated many low emission scenarios. However, if recently published data, suggesting stronger 20th century ocean warming, are used to determine the input climate parameters, the median projected warning at the end of the 21st century is only 4.1°C. Nevertheless all our simulations have a very small probability of warming less than 2.4°C

And what would a 4-5C rise in temperature look like?

Globally, a 4C temperature rise would have a catastrophic impact.

According to the government's 2006 Stern review on the economics of climate change, between 7 million and 300 million more people would be affected by coastal flooding each year, there would be a 30-50% reduction in water availability in Southern Africa and the Mediterranean, agricultural yields would decline 15 to 35% in Africa and 20 to 50% of animal and plant species would face extinction.

That's one of the somewhat optimistic scenarios in the MIT report. And the image above depicts a middle-of-the-road model for both climate change and economic development. But there's been a tendency for observed changes in climate patterns and sea ice to push the upper bounds of what scientists have been predicting. If that continues to be the case, then a merely catastrophic outcome may be the best that we can hope for.

Tibetan Wheel of Life

And one more from the LOC. This one stretches the definition of 'map' a bit, but it's so beautiful, and just so freakin cool:



It's a 20th Century painting of the Tibetan Wheel of Life. From the Library's description:

In the Tibetan Buddhist world view, the six realms of existence (Gods, demigods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell-beings) are all held in the grasp of the Lord of Death. In the center of the wheel are the three root poisons of desire, hatred, and ignorance symbolized by the cock, snake, and pig, and on the outer rim are the twelve links of dependent origination by which all causes and effects are determined. The ultimate goal, shown by the monks in the left inner circle and the Buddha in the upper right, is to follow a path that frees one from these cycles.

Is this a map? I'm going to say it is. I'm going to say it's a sort of metaphysical map - a representation of metaphysical relations, rather than physical space. And its purpose is the same as that of a physical map: to render, through symbolic representation, a picture of the enmeshing environment within which we find ourselves from a broader perspective than any we could attain through direct sensual perception alone.