Unusual Maps | Hacker News Reader

Unusual Maps

edwardtufte.com

173 pointsapsec11219 comments

This is like lettersofnote.com, but with maps instead of letters - very interesting, feels like something you can dig into repeatedly, with many rabbit holes to follow. For anyone interested in this, you might also want to check out the book "The Writer's Map: An Atlas of Imaginary Lands" which contains maps from various authors for use in their books (mostly sci-fi and fantasy, since those genres are the ones that need a map that doesn't already exist).

today i enjoyed https://www.armellecaron.fr/works/les-villes-rangees/

That’s really cool and perhaps a be little useless, I’ll try to make my own...

My favorite unusual map is probably AuthaGraph:

> This rectangular world map called AuthaGraph World Map is made by equally dividing a spherical surface into 96 triangles, transferring it to a tetrahedron while maintaining areas proportions and unfolding it to be a rectangle.

> The world map can be tiled in any directions without visible seams. From this map-tiling, a new world map with triangular, rectangular or parallelogram’s outline can be framed out with various regions at its center.

http://www.authagraph.com/projects/description/%e3%80%90%e4%...

> It shows there are no "four corners of the earth" by arranging several world maps without visible seams around a world map with color. You can see Antarctica at the right bottom is close to not only South America but also Africa and Australia.

http://www.authagraph.com/products/map/product-article-01/?l...

The Peirce Quincuncial Map can also be seamlessly tiled: [1].

It's a conformal map, meaning that it preserves shapes. But strange things happen at the four corners of each diamond-shaped tile. If you go around one of those points on the map, you've actually gone around the real point on Earth twice. Also at those points, opposite directions on the map are actually the same direction on the Earth. The technical description of those four points is that they're singularities of the map projection (derivatives of the form d(location on Earth)/d(map coordinate) are undefined).

The map looks fine because the four singularities on each tile are in the middle of the ocean. But if you play around with the projection to put any of the singularities inside a landmass, your head will explode.

Looking at the AuthaGraph may you linked, it has at least two singularities on each tile.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peirce_quincuncial_projection#...

Edward Tufte's book "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is a classic that is still relevant today. It was written before Excel charts etc but the key concepts, especially "less ink is better", is something that everyone should subscribe to. It also contains my favourite chart which is Charles Joseph Minard representation of Napleons march (and subsequent retreat) to Russia. It shows the size of the army, relevant to location and temperature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png

I've seen this map several times, but never really looked at it closely. What a devastating march!

Actually, the key point is not that less ink is better -- the idea is that every bit of ink should be as information-dense as possible, in order to communicate the points desired.

"Less ink" leads to people dumbing down plots for bad reasons. Or in the interest of "clean design" making charts that are uninformative.

Charts should be very detailed when they need to be. But the information should reveal and help the reader to draw conclusions visually, not obfuscate.

He gives these examples, which are highly detailed, and dense in information. Every piece of ink is informative, yet at multiple levels of viewer "zoom" there are meaningful takeaways that can be identified:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c8/18/bc/c818bc89caa283bd4307...

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/images/0003Kf-26845/VEp94...

The moon maps reminded me of porkchop plots, which are maps of a sort:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porkchop_plot

Shameless plug: I used Sankey diagram to visualise country budget: https://uk.wikibudgets.org/w/united-kingdom-budget-2015

It's missing the greatest of infographics, by Minard. It's a clever representation of the Grande Armée's campaign in Russia, describing time, battles, temperature and casualties on a single graph.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard#/media...

Tufte definitely has something of a soft spot for Minard. He discusses that particular map on page 40 - 41 of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (in the section "Narrative graphics of space and time"), and his site has a page devoted to it/the sources used to produce it: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard

I'm a big fan of Edward Tufte after attending one of his courses and gaining a new appreciation of data presentation.

Likewise. I attended his seminar last year at the recommendation of a colleague and it was a day well spent. I assume he probably won't be doing such large courses this year, which is a shame. I'd recommend his course to anyone who gets a chance to attend whenever he starts them up again.

Chrome says insecure - is this a professional site?

Firefox says parts of the page are not https (most likely images). The site is the personal site of professor and statistician, Edward Tufte, known for having strong opinions about data visualization and the use of PowerPoint.

yes

This seems to be the offending image: http://ianwojtowicz.com/Red%20Shift/Red-Shift-Earth-6400px.j... which is now a 404 anyway (or rather, it's a 301 followed by a 200 with text explaining it should be a 404).

Working link for the above image: https://ianwojtowicz.com/Earth%20Doppler/Red-Shift-Earth-640...

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