molly.com
Monday 24 March 2008
For the Love of Maps (where to go from here)
Since childhood, maps have captured me. It’s not a unique conquest - many of us love to study maps.
Maybe it was my father beside me, driving along and asking where next? I was always the best at maps, and my dad liked me for it.
It could be that travel is so important to me for my love of maps, but I know so many other people who’ve expressed this same passion.
For the Love of Maps!
Now we should figure out where we go from here.
Filed under: faith(less), pop culture, poetry & fiction, nmby
Posted by: Molly | 3:32 pm |
March 24th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
the quadrants of space?
March 24th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
And I’m lucky enough to have these people near me and to consider them friends: http://www.oldmapgallery.com - jealous everyone?
March 24th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
I’ve always been a big map person too. As a kid, I used to spin my globe on its axis and stop it to look at where my finger was. Sometimes I’d just study Europe and Asia to see where cities and countries were for no reason.
Old maps still fascinate me to this day. One of my friends in DC was in a strange little shop in London not too long ago (wish I remembered what the name was) and found a huge collection of old maps for sale, a couple of which were priced in the thousands of dollars. I’d love to find something like that here in Boston and buy an old map of this city. That’d be “wicked pissah awesome.”
March 24th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
oh yeah — addict — see: http://tinyurl.com/2m4eon
March 24th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
I’ve always had a special place for the map in my heart. Just like Patrick, I used to spin globes and stop it to see where my finger was. I’d play the geography games they had that the Discovery Channel Store to see how well I knew my countries, and even some cities. I could spend hours looking through atlases, seeing where mountains, time zones, country borders, rivers and cities lie.
The maps that would always grab my attention were the highway maps, especially when I was young. I remember when I moved to Silicon Valley that I couldn’t stop being excited about the fact that San Francisco was at one side of Interstate 80, when I had lived along the same interstate on the other side of the country (New Jersey) almost a decade prior.
March 24th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
@Mary - definitely jealous, though they aren’t cheap and I definitely don’t consider myself a collector, just a map nerd.
I have no idea where my map obsession came from, I just know I’ve been accumulating maps for years
- Neil.
March 24th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
California map nerds: http://archive.casil.ucdavis.edu/casil/maps/drg/
March 24th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Me too. It’s oddly pleasing opening a map and wondering what it looks like, who lives there and what’s going on. The mapping sites on the Internet have made this a great way to waste time. Try http://www.freemaptools.com/tunnel-to-other-side-of-the-earth.htm and http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/.
March 24th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
I can’t recommend http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ highly enough– it’s just what it URL implies, and ranges from the hilarious to the thought-provoking to the just plain cool.
March 24th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
I love maps. As a military history buff, especially of the Napoleonic Wars, I think Captain W. Siborne’s maps of The Battle of Waterloo are really cool. Railroad Tycoon, Alpha Centauri, (US) county topographic maps, (UK) Ordanance Survey maps, and Google maps. I’m a kidadult. I love maps.
March 24th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
I started reading your blog, Molly, because of the journey. I’m quite happy to remain a passenger on the trip. Where you take us all is just so interesting!
But any direction you take has to be your decision - because if you don’t believe in it, you’ll never get there.
Follow that yellow brick road, because we’re not where anyone thinks they are, anymore!
Carolyn Ann
March 24th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
I have to love maps really, my 9-5 since I graduated in 2000 has been heavily involved with making maps and training other people to make more maps!!
Plus my degree in ‘Remote Sensing and GIS’ had quite a lot of mapping in it. Should I also admit I own books about maps and the history of maps too?!
In truth though: working with maps most of the time means that I rarely talk about them outside of the workplace. More likely to find me talking about a whole bunch of other stuff of course - as you know! hehe
March 25th, 2008 at 1:42 am
when i see the title , I think whereboutz suddenly, enjoy https://register.facebook.com/r.php?referrer=112&app_id=18226799896
March 25th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Yeah, I’ve got a thing for maps too. I liked this book on the design of subway maps from the early days up to now: Transit Maps of the World by Mark Ovenden. Not your standard map, but probably the most used ones!
March 25th, 2008 at 2:12 am
I’m not one for reading maps myself - though as maps go I rather like this one for the story behind it…..
http://www.flickr.com/photos/thecssdiv/284789686/
Probably not the best map ever made either…
March 25th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
Topo map? Compass? The wind at your back?
March 26th, 2008 at 4:19 am
Since I’ve bought my GPS-Navi I’ve never used maps, but the good old Maps-Time is still on my mind
March 26th, 2008 at 9:14 am
Hi Molly
Have you ever traveled a city of the with a map that is over 100 years old. It seems quite popular among a few travelers. I am in utter disgrace of the code of the site and I sort of outing myself here (I once was a poor coder, you know retro) but here I go.
http://contueor.com/baedeker/
March 26th, 2008 at 10:32 am
I’m still trying to get to Europe. I have some friends living in the Netherlands that I’d like to visit.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
You must see the interactive ‘Turning the Pages’ version of the first Mercator Atlas of Europe at the British Library website:
http://portico.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html
March 27th, 2008 at 6:31 am
What I love about maps presently relates to the advance of easily accessible knowledge over time.
When I was about 10 or 12, I recall my grandparents giving me a thick atlas with a few pages for every country in the world, containing dozens of the top cities in moderate detail, and ofcourse, a preface with information on geology, the atmosphere, population, economic and socio-economic country differences, and so on.
That one book gave me a lot about how I understand and operate in this world.
So, my daughter is 3 and she can already competently navigate Google Earth before she truely grasps what she’s doing. By the time she is 10 or 12, the quality of Google Earth and the competitors at that time will have jumped an additional order of magnitude from my atlas, and she won’t be any more surprised about the detail than I was when I got my atlas. It’ll seem totally ordinary to her.
And to think, a few hundred years ago we were circumnavigating much of the world.
Oh, and we’re more and more hitting ethical rather than technical “boundaries” with our innovation. Do we really want Google Earth mashed up with the Wayback Machine, a kind of global truman show tape recorder going on, so I can look for Molly, or you, or me, getting in and out of our car every day? Perhaps not when you can zoom in to 1:1 scale. I only worry because of companies and the media taking unethical roads from time to time…
March 28th, 2008 at 10:06 am
If someone said to me “You will take only one book to read” that would be atlas
March 30th, 2008 at 8:28 am
My pride and joy are a few reproductions of old maps.
The oldest is a reproduction of the Harmonia Macrocosmica (astronomical maps) by Andreas Cellarius of the year 1660.
Then there is the part of the Atlas Maior about The Netherlands by Joan Blaeus of 1665.
One of more resent times are the military maps of Noord Brabant, a province of Holland, from the year 1900.
You can learn allot about the history and culture of an area by study these maps.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:50 pm
Yeah, I’ve got a thing for maps too
April 25th, 2008 at 11:02 am
it is easy to find it, i think u just search on google or yahoo
April 25th, 2008 at 11:42 am
but, i think it is another thing which you have
April 25th, 2008 at 11:55 am
i like it
April 25th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
interesting, thanks
April 25th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
do you know everything about css?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
how can i find everything about css?
April 25th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
what do you want to learn about css? we can help easily
April 25th, 2008 at 12:35 pm
i want learn too, i want start at the beginning of css
April 25th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
it is good t see u
April 25th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
thats the matter i want to learn
April 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
ok,thanks
April 25th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
hi, umit. how is going on