maps

It is easy — thanks to various map projections or just lack of knowledge — to never have a real sense of the true size of places. Here are a couple of maps (via Dark Roasted Blend, "Unusual and Marvelous Maps, Part 2") that give much better looks at how big Africa and Australia are.

Bikehugger has a cool video showing the basics of Google's new bicycling directions for Google Maps. Biggest thing to keep in mind is that, with it being a beta, be sure to sanity-check the directions before sallying forth.

Taking a more local example to me, going from downtown Redlands to downtown Riverside:

View Larger Map

It's cool to start with, heading out Barton Road, and it's making for the Santa Ana River Trail like it should, but it makes a right turn on Waterman and heads north to the cycling path trailhead off Hospitality Lane in San Bernardino. What it should do in this case is just keep going west and get onto the SART in the Cooley Ranch/Colton area.

Still, it's exciting to see Cycling get its (preliminary) due on Google Maps, along with "Walking" and "Public Transit."

Now we just need "Hiking." :D

UPDATE May 24 2010: After submitting a report, I heard from a member of the Google Maps team, who indicated they have updated and fixed the route issue mentioned above. Yay Internet! ;)

The ever-awesome Internet Archive is hosting a collection of 50,000 USGS maps! How cool is that? And they're nice resolution TIFF files that you could crop or print for your hikes as desired.

• Collections index of the 50 states
• California index
• All California items, sorted by date added (2,800+ items, 50 items per page)

One tip -- use the string "collection:usgs_ca" (minus the quotes) in the search form, and then add any other terms, like say san gorgonio to look for individual maps.

Via the IA collections team's post "Mapmaker, Mapmaker, Make Me a Map".

The always-entertaining Strange Maps posted a spiffy entry about a 2005 map that shows how to duplicate Phileas Fogg's [Around the World](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days_(book)) feat in only 42 days. Jules Verne would be thrilled, I bet.

It’s still possible to travel around the world without airborne transportation, of course. And here also the travel times have greatly diminished since Phileas Fogg’s era. This map is a proposal for a round the world trip, only travelling by boat and train (as Fogg did), starting at and ending in New York. The trip would only take 42 days.

See "309 - Around the World at Twice the Speed of Fogg".

Also, a belated happy birthday to HG Wells, who turned 142 on Sunday.

Wikipedia - California

Wikipedia - Portal:California

Wikinews - Portal:California

Wikitionary - California

Wikimedia Commons - California

• OmniFocus: Marching slowly but surely towards beta
• Bash Shell Keyboard Shortcuts
• iPhotoToGoogleEarth
  iPhotoToGoogleEarth is a plugin for iPhoto 6 that will export photos for viewing in Google Earth. To make the most of iPhotoToGoogleEarth you'll need to have GPS infomation stored in the Exif tags.

• Where Be "Here Be Dragons" on Old Maps?
  Ubi sunt "Hic sunt dracones"?
• WmWms: You have won second prize in a beauty contest; collect $10
  Monopoly doesn't take three hours to play if you play by the rules.