Tagged: maps

All candy should come with technical cross-section diagrams

While snagging a fresh Mozart Kugel from the snack table at the office I noticed this informative diagram inside the box. Behold the majesty of two different kinds of marzipan on one chocolate ball.  What really drove the Salieri Kugel to madness was how easy the Mozart Kugel made it look.

Inside the Mozart Kugel

Now that’s my kind of infographic. It’s too bad you typically only get this sort of diagram with German or Japanese candy. To my mind, it should be as required as the nutrition information or the candy guide for the perplexed. Via Steve Almond’s CandyFreak, you can also test your ability to identify candy bars by their cross sections, and there’s a whole load of cross-sectional chocolate fun at Edible Cartography. It should go without saying that I really like that name.

The most uptowniest Starbucks in Manhattan is not on the island of Manhattan

I thought I was so edgy, I checked in at the Starbucks on 181st street in Washington Heights and noted that I was at the northernmost Starbucks in the borough of Manhattan. How wrong I was, by two coffee shops and an interesting carto-historical technicality.

Like many Manhattanites, I was guilty of conflating the island of Manhattan, the borough of Manhattan, and the civilized world. Understandable, I’m sure you’ll agree.  But what gives about the most uptowniest Starbucks? Well, it turns out there are two Starbucks establishments in Marble Hill, a chunk of political Manhattan physically embedded in the Bronx thanks to the motion of history and the Harlem river.

If you look at maps closely, you’ll see the border line. Marble Hill has a Bronx zip code and Bronx school district, but Manhattan representation. It used to be part of the island of Manhattan but was made an island by a canal and later joined to the Bronx by the infilling of the original course of the Harlem river. The more you know.

For extra credit, check out the excellently named Spuyten Duyvil Creek, anagrammed subway station maps (Damn Tyck Trees!), and Vanshnookenraggen’s excellent subway map poster showing the Marble Hill stop on the 1.

The law of Boston infrastructure: build five to keep four

Staring at the MBTA map and letting my mind wander while waiting for the train, I noticed a repeated pattern of 4/5.

There were five Green line branches, but only four survive today with the obvious gap at the start of the sequence B, C, D, E.  I guess if the E line had been cut, it wouldn’t have been so obvious.  OK, the E line has been cut back, but not cut out.

More recently, there were five terminals at Logan, but Terminal D was absorbed into C and E in 2006 leaving A, B, C, E.  It was decided that renaming Terminal E to Terminal D overnight to close the gap would cause too much confusion.

Also in more recent memory, the Silver Line now has only four line but numbering for five.  It acquired a gap with the demise of the SL3 in 2008 and the appearance of SL4 and the renaming of the SL5 in 2009 making the list of Silver Lines a gappy SL1, SL2, SL4, SL5.  The fact that the Silver Line still exists as two unconnected parts (SL1/SL2 and SL4/SL5) makes it a little less odd that there’s a gap in numbering. Although there were never five Silver Line routes in operation at the same time, we still have the 4/5 gap in numbering.

You can witness the changes of the Green and Silver lines in Andrew Lynch’s estimable Animated History of the MBTA, with a hearty hat tip to Universal Hub.  If you squint real hard at the airport loop in the last two slides you might or might not see the end of Terminal D.

What’s going on here?  Do the planners have spooky Mickey Mouse hands? Does Boston overbuild then scale back? Shrinkage?  I have no idea, I’m probably just making connections because there’s no bubble wrap to keep me busy while I wait for the T.  In any case, it’s interesting to think of the transit system as organic and changing, even if that means both growth and decay.

For extra credit, check out Cameron Booth’s upgrade to the official MBTA map.

Mappy diversion: the 40th parallel, Ana Ng’s Peruvian lover, and globe-spanning sandwiches

I’m back from a trip almost halfway around the world in terms of longitude, but a pretty short hop in latitude. A weather diversion on the way over brought me to Oklahoma City airport, what would have been my second time ever setting foot on Oklahoma soil, but as you may have the misfortune to know, a “diversion” means you don’t get off the plane, at least not until the passenger bill of rights two hour limit expires.

That’s the long way around to say, I thought perhaps I was near the 40th parallel, the subject of the estimable Bruce Myren’s photo project and kickstarter campaign, which is widgetized at right. I was off by at least five degrees of latitude, which shows my level of familiarity with the middle of this country.

Which brings us back to maps. (Bet you didn’t see that coming) Here’s another clip from the Great Circle Mapper, which I touted some time ago. They’ve made some spiffy improvements. I often think of flights to Asia from the central USA as going “over the pole” but it seems that this one didn’t even break the arctic circle. Of course, the great circles mapped are the most direct routes, not necessarily the actual flight paths.

That’s a good 15,000 miles and will likely leave me soulless for almost two weeks. Thoughts of global mapping also bring me back to a vintage limeduck post where I wondered about the places alluded to in TMBG’s Ana Ng:

Make a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town in a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Showing the home of the one this was written for

These places, I’ve learned, are called antipodes, and it turns out that it’s pretty unlikely that any town in the continental USA has a dry land antipode. If we assume that Ana Ng is in Vietnam, then the song’s narrator could be in Peru. Locating Ana in various other parts of Asia can put the singer in other parts of South America, but with more than 2/3 the globe covered in water, there just aren’t that many inhabitable antipodes. So you don’t have to shoot your globe. Kudos to the smarties at Free Map Tools and Antipode Map for making this sort of cutting-edge research so easy, and also to the ever-alert Strange Maps blog.

In case anybody is still reading, I’ve got to bring up one more map-related wonder, the Earth Sandwich. According to Ze Frank, the creator (discoverer?) of the Earth Sandwich, “An EARTH SANDWICH is created when two slices of bread are simultaneously placed on opposite sides of the EARTH.” An excellent bookend to TMBG’s ballistic approach to antipodes, I think. If you happen to be reading this on a boat in the Indian Ocean Southwest of Australia and have bread and cheese, I propose we create the first Earth Grilled Cheese Sandwich.

120,000 blocks to Samarkand

In places like New York City, you can easily measure distance in blocks and people generally know how far that is in miles or minutes. In New York City, everybody knows that Manhattan street blocks are about 20 to the mile, and most New Yorkers can walk about one such block per minute.  Tourists travel a fraction of that rate and really should have their own lanes.  Avenue blocks are less reliably spaced but they run about 1/4 mile each.

In less griddy places like London or Boston, a block is not always a block, so it’s less of a useful measure.

If you’re getting sick of my New York City centric pondering, you’re really going to hate this next bit.  The estimable Harold Cooper has created a marvelous map mashup that extends the Manhattan street grid to “every point on earth.” It’s called extendNY, of course, and I think it’s awesome. Of course.

Now I can always know how many blocks away something is, using my beloved standard Manhattan blocks, even when not in Manhattan.  I must say, I never thought I’d be spending so much time on the Upper East Side.  I shall henceforth refer to the MBTA 1 bus as the 3,524th street crosstown, or the M3524.

For extra cartogeeky credit, check out what happens to the grid in Uzbekistan, which I shall henceforth call the North Manhattan Pole.  That’ll teach you to slap a rectangular grid on a round thing.