via Mark Weavers flickr

All the potholes fixed in the last month, from January 16 to February 15

the daily pothole features daily counts of potholes fixed and lots of action shots of potholes getting repaired. potholes.

French artist Armelle Caron deconstructs city maps and reorganizes them into neat and tidy rows.

8-bit City is an awesome Kickstarter funded project by Brett Camper. Videogame graphic inspired slippy maps built on top of Openstreetmap data.

The 8-Bit Cities project, which started with 8-Bit NYC, is an attempt to make the city feel foreign yet familiar, smashing together two culturally common models of space: the lo-fi overhead world maps of 1980s role-playing and adventure games, and the geographically accurate data that drives today’s web maps and GPS navigation. I hope to evoke the same urge for exploration, abstract sense of scale, and perhaps most importantly unbounded excitement that many of us remember experiencing on the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Commodore 64, or any other number of 8-bit microcomputers. Maps offer us visual architectures of the world, encouraging us to think about and interact with space in particularly constrained ways. Take some time to think about your surroundings a little differently. Set out on a quest. Be an adventurer

Check out that sweet ‘other’ view option window in the upper right.

via 41 latitude

Untitled Map #3 by Luis Douradro

Google map showing all areas covered by Street View

BLDGBLOG posits some possible futures of trap rooms which are the architectural equivalent of a trap street in the context of in the of interior mapping of shopping malls and the like. A trap street (examples) is a

deliberate cartographic error introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms.

So you put deliberately false information into your cartographic work and then monitor the maps created by competitors and watch for your honeypot cartographic features to show up on work they claim to be their own. As mentioned in the post, as the mapping of interior space becomes more widespread the introduction of trap rooms, trap corridors, trap stair etc will become commonplace as firm seek to protect their work and the deals they have made for the interior geo-data. In turn, people we be left wondering how to occupy the spaces they see in some of their maps, but not others. The best bit comes at the end,

But I’m also curious about less practical things, such as what cultural, even psychological, effects the presence of trap rooms might actually have. Games could be launched, the purpose of which is to find and occupy as many trap rooms as possible. New paranoias emerge, that the room featured above your apartment on that new app you just downloaded is not really there at all; it’s a trap room, and you can’t sleep at night, worried that you actually have no neighbors, that you’re the last person on earth and every building around you is a dream. There are panic attacks by people walking home alone at 3am when they become overwhelmed with the suspicion that they are actually walking inside a trap hall—a corridor that has never been real—losing consciousness and falling to the ground as irrational fears become too much for them.

Approximately 1,376 Silos, Water Towers, and other Cylindrical-Industrial Buildings

by Jenny Odell

Be sure to check out the other satellite collections as well the ministry of approximate travel

what is approximate traveling? In order to travel approximately, I made use of any source of information I could find online, relying especially on Google Street View, photo databases (Panoramio, Picasa, Flickr), review sites (Yelp, TripAdvisor, CitySearch, Insider Pages), and virtual tours of monuments, restaurants, hotels, etc. I transported myself into one place after another, both by writing a travel narrative and by superimposing myself onto photos I found online. The people I “met” were disgruntled hotel reviewers, restaurant ravers, and anyone who took the time to upload their story in one form or another to a site like Google Maps.

Fata Morgana by Damon Zucconi

Trackable Beverages This tap water “isoscape” map shows how hydrogen and oxygen isotopes vary throughout the country. Geographic factors like latitude, altitude and proximity to coasts all play a role in this isotopic variation. The cities on the map show where the researchers tested tap water along with bottled water, soda and beer. ACS/Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry

These geographically specific signatures show up in human hair making a record of you travels a real possibility.

To test this theory, the scientists analyzed tap water from 33 cities and looked at isotope patterns in Dasani bottled water, Coca-Cola Classic and Budweiser. They found the beverage isotope pattern from those cities matched the tap water pattern — which makes sense, because many beverage companies produce their drinks regionally instead of in one main location. For example, if you drink a Bud in Utah, it probably came from the Anheuser-Busch plant in Fort Collins, Colo., not St. Louis.

via fresser

Senex Prime on flickr

The Hand Drawn Map Association is an ongoing archive of user submitted maps and other interesting diagrams created by hand. There are 150 maps submitted already including some lovely map collections.

Our current collection features a set of maps created by John Hutchison exploring his relationship to the 50 states in the US. The collection starts with a map representing all of the US states. Each successive map in the collection reveals a different set of states based on increasingly limiting criteria until we are left with only 1 state (his least favorite).

Image Credit: John Hutchinson April 29th – “US state I have Visited”

Mike Frumin’s map that show New York City subway ridership between 1905 to 2006 with sparklines for each station. Its great to see sparklines in use on a map, where the detail given by the sparkline is a kind of cartographic detail you can get lost in when looking at a map.

The general idea it that the history of subway ridership tells a story about the history of a neighborhood that is much richer than the overall trend.

NPR has some very nice visualizations of the United States electrical grid, including views for solar power and wind sources, including the the below which shows the realationship between where the good wind is, darker colors, and where the power grid is, not usually all that nearby.

Very nice animation showing the activity on the maps at OpenStreetMap.org

If you look closely you can see the edits I made in Jersey City last year.

Virtual Cable technology that draws route information in an augmented reality display. The 3 dimensional display is created with lasers and mirrors (didn’t fully read that section) and is generated from standard route information output by numerous GPS and SatNav systems available today. The remarkable part about it is the simplicity of the system. “Follow the red line around until we tell you to stop.” The danger may be, as we have seen before, that the information is followed blindly, although keeping ones eyes on the road, and slightly above it, may be better for safety than trying to focus on small map screens, or to decipher the robo-voice directions to bear left in point-five-two miles.