Flutterby™! : A few cool maps 2004-11-03 17:05:59.854642+00

A few cool maps

2004-11-03 17:05:59.854642+00 by ebradway 3 comments

One of the classes I'm taking this semester is "Issues in Cartography." The class has compiled a great list of online maps. Here are a few of the best:

Poison Fire USA: An animated map showing "nukie-lerr" events in the continimerous USA. Gets pretty busy from 1960 to 1985, slows down for a bit and then picks up again in 2000...

Atlas of US Presidential Elections: An awesome resource Presidential election. I actually subscribed to his site to save some data compilation time for my final project in the Cartography class.

Fool's World Map: Sort of a WikiMap, except that corrections are made only based on readers' poor geographical knowledge. Good for a laugh, but don't use it to aim your ICBMs!

I will try to post some more interesting maps as time goes on.

I've been trying to find a link for a long time to an alternative structure of US states. It proposed breaking up large states like Texas and California into smaller units, and consolidating small states like Delaware and Rhode Island into larger ones. The upshot was we ended up with only about 35 newly named states of roughly equal size, with the principal city of each the new state capital. Thus, Chicago became the capital of Dearborn. Any ideas?

What is the basis for the boundaries of the states? Population? Area? Natural Resources?

Redrawing state boundaries is a highly volatile concept. Just redrawing state congressional districts sparks enourmous lawsuits. And reducing the number of states would remove the sovereignty of the states that would be "swallowed up". While states like South Dakota don't have a big influence on the Presidential elections, they do enjoy the same sovereignty of more populous states like New York. In fact, South Dakota has been very influential during this election cycle because it voted the Senate minority leader, Tom Daschle, out of office. That's pretty damned significant for such a "small" state.

If I remember correctly, the idea was based partially on population, but also on general geographic regions; like following major rivers or mountain ridges. Another factor was finding a major city more or less in the middle. So, for example, the state of Dearborn was northern Illinois and Indiana and southern Wisconsin and Michigan, with Chicago in the middle. Another state set St. Louis as its capital and included chunks of Illinois, Missouri and Iowa. California split across the middle, with LA the capital of everything south of Monteray and Frisco running the rest. This proposal was at least 20 years ago.