Safe Driving Directions

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/03/2026 à 09:29

Americans are very poor drivers. On average, there are 42,109 traffic fatalities each year in the United States - roughly one death every 12 minutes. If the U.S. had the same road safety record as the United Kingdom, you would expect around 8,170 deaths annually. The fact that there were 42,109 suggests that drivers in the U.S. are roughly five times more likely to die on the roads than drivers

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Simulating American Air Traffic During the 2026 World Cup

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/03/2026 à 10:02

Simulating Private Jet Traffic for the 2026 World Cup The aviation software company AirPlx has published an interactive map that simulates private aircraft traffic between North American airports during the 2026 FIFA World Cup.The map, titled Can Private Aviation Handle the World Cup?, models thousands of private aviation flights connecting airports in the 16 host cities across the United

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Streetonomics - All Roads Lead to Men

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/03/2026 à 08:57

If you’re a regular reader of Maps Mania, you know we love a good Streetonomics project - especially those that visualize the deep-seated gender gaps in our urban landscapes.The latest contribution to this field comes from Málaga, where the local newspaper Diario Sur has published a fascinating interactive map titled Only one in ten streets in Malaga has a woman's name. Using a mix of open data

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Where in the World?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/03/2026 à 09:05

Where in the World…? A GeoGuessr-Style Game for History Buffs Fans of GeoGuessr will be familiar with the addictive game-play of Where in the World: click on an interactive map to guess a location as accurately as possible. But what if, instead of deciphering road signs and landscapes, you had to rely on your knowledge of world history? That’s the premise behind Where in the World…, a simple but

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Automatic Small Multiples

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/03/2026 à 09:28

US Football StadiumI’ve been having a lot of fun playing with the XofY OSM Geometry Viewer. The viewer is a specialized web tool created by Matt Whilden that visualizes the geometries of OpenStreetMap (OSM) features in a “small multiples” layout. It allows you to compare the shapes and outlines of specific objects without the distraction of a background map. For example, above you can see the

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Archive Movie Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/03/2026 à 09:41

The Irish Film Institute has launched a fascinating interactive map exploring one of Ireland’s most distinctive cinematic time capsules: the Amharc Éireann cinema newsreels. The Archive Player Map plots 250 stories from the series across the island of Ireland, allowing users to browse the films geographically and discover how different towns, cities and landscapes appeared on cinema screens

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No Flock Cam Driving Routes

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/03/2026 à 09:04

DeFlock Flock cameras are AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. The cameras have sparked strong debate because they create a large network that records people’s movements.They:Photograph every passing vehicleRead the license plate number automaticallyIdentify vehicle details (color, make, model)Record the time and locationUpload the data to a shared cloud databaseYou

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A Small War with Global Consequences

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/03/2026 à 09:02

Ship traffic grinding to a halt in the Strait of Hormuz Real-time maps of global shipping and flight traffic have featured prominently in news coverage since the United States & Israel decided to go to war with Iran.Visualisations based on data from MarineTraffic have been widely used to show the growing number of fuel tankers anchored in the Strait of Hormuz. Following threats from

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The Trains' Bedtimes Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/03/2026 à 09:51

We all need our beauty sleep. Apparently, that includes trains.The delightfully nerdy Trains' Bedtimes Map visualizes the moment each part of Europe tucks its railways in for the night. Using colored hexbins, the map shows the first time after 5pm when service levels drop below 50% of peak frequency. Think of it as a continental curfew clock for trains.I think I can spot the familiar arc of the

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The Iranian Missiles Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/03/2026 à 09:03

The Iranian Missiles Map Modern missile warfare is framed as precise, calculated, and technologically controlled. But “precision” in military terms does not mean what most people think it means. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Saturday, Tehran retaliated by striking Israel and U.S.-linked military sites across the region, including in Gulf states that host American forces.

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This is London Calling - Discover Global Radio Mapping

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/02/2026 à 09:16

In a world where streaming platforms increasingly dominate how we discover new music, TuneJourney brings back the magic of live radio - and places it on a spinning, interactive globe.At first glance, TuneJourney feels familiar. The idea of mapping radio stations geographically isn’t new - maps like Radio Garden, TuneIn Explorer, and Radio Browser have explored similar territory. However,

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How to Create an Interactive Conceptual Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/02/2026 à 10:21

The 2026 Gorton and Denton Byelection Map In The Map of Human Happiness I reviewed a conceptual interactive map created by The Pudding to visualize the results of a 2017 research project. Here is how you can create your own conceptual maps using the Azgaar Fantasy Map Generator with the MapLibre mapping library.This project combines world-building tools with modern web mapping to create a

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The Map of Human Happiness

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/02/2026 à 08:43

The Pudding has taken the results of a 2017 research project and turned them into something much more engaging: a map of human happiness. In the original study, 10,000 people were asked to share their “happy moments.” The Happy Map transforms those responses into a visual landscape, where each moment is represented by a small person-shaped marker and grouped with similar experiences.The map is

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A Crowd Driven Journey Around the World

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/02/2026 à 09:18

PinTheEarth is a "collaborative digital project built by the world, one pin at a time." At its core, the site features a digital globe that connects visitors via a single, continuous string. Every time a user drops a pin, the line extends, weaving a collective journey that currently spans 3.8 million kilometers across 617 individual locations.When you share your location, a red pin is

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Isometric NYC Snow

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/02/2026 à 08:44

Isometric NYC Snow In January, a massive isometric map of New York was released. Isometric NYC is a sprawling pixel art tribute to the city, visualizing every block - from iconic skyscrapers to tucked-away corners - from a unique isometric perspective.Of course, one of the primary hurdles for any cartographer is that the world never stops moving. No sooner is a "definitive" map

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Blimp-tastic Maps

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/02/2026 à 09:35

Last week, I released a three.js blimp map game - The Hunt for Red Octangles. In response, over the weekend, Map Channels sent me links to two fascinating projects he recently stumbled upon.mrdoob's Three.js Tokyo City Generator This vibe-coded three.js pan across a generated night-time cityscape was created using Gemini Canvas. If you want to improve the scene (or change the "

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Mapping the Carbon Footprint of the Global Grid

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/02/2026 à 10:26

In August 2025, France had a carbon intensity of 25 gCO₂eq/kWh, while Missouri was 688 gCO₂eq/kWh. In other words, Missouri has a carbon intensity about 2,652% higher than France.You can compare the carbon intensity of different regions and countries of the world for yourself using Electricity Maps. Electricity Maps is a sophisticated live visualization that tracks where your electricity comes

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Explore Your Neighborhood in Tron

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/02/2026 à 09:14

Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood would look like inside The Grid - the neon digital frontier of Tron? I decided to find out. By combining OpenStreetMap data with three.js, I transformed my local streets into a fully explorable, 3D neon world. The process was so rewarding that I integrated the Overpass API, allowing anyone to teleport to their own corner

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Explore the World with Open Sourced Street Views

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/02/2026 à 09:57

Nono’s Odyssey: A Lo-Fi Journey Through Open-Source Imagery Nono’s Odyssey is a refreshing map game that prioritizes exploration and discovery over direct competition. It’s an interactive tool that blends open-source street imagery with the addictive mechanics of a digital treasure hunt. As a "geo-game," it successfully shifts the objective away from the traditional "Where am I?" (the 

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Real-Time Flight Tracking is now 3D

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/02/2026 à 09:01

The next generation of flight-tracking maps has arrived! I am a huge fan of live flight-tracking maps like Flightradar24, ADS-B Exchange and FlightAware. These popular websites all show planes moving in real time on top of a 2D map. Recently Air Loom introduced the concept of a 3D air-traffic map to bring a whole new level of immersion to flight tracking. Unlike traditional flight maps, Air Loom

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Mapping the World’s Largest Human Migration

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/02/2026 à 15:08

Today, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026, marks the first day of the Lunar New Year. As we enter the Year of the Fire Horse, hundreds of millions of people across China are sitting down for reunion dinners, lighting fireworks, and celebrating the most significant date on the lunar calendar.For the Chinese people, the Spring Festival (Chunyun) isn't just a holiday; it is a cultural imperative to

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From Bargain to Bank-Breaking: The NYC Rent Heat Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/02/2026 à 09:40

New York City has never been a bargain for renters - but the latest data shows just how wide the gap has become between the city’s most and least expensive neighborhoods.At the very top of the market sits Lower Manhattan, where the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is a staggering $4,928. Not far behind is North Brooklyn at $4,029, while West Queens commands an average of $3,489. Even

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The Rename the World Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/02/2026 à 08:54

The President has decided that the United States of America will henceforth be known as ‘Trumpland.’ If you were in charge of the world, what names would you give to your favorite locations?A couple of years ago, I released OpenPlacesMap (blog post link, as the map is no longer live) - an editable world map that let anyone rename locations with a click. The map was hosted on Glitch, so

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Adding a Dolly Zoom to Your Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/02/2026 à 09:54

This week, Andrew Sepic of Mapbox published a fascinating article on Unlocking Mapbox GL JS's Hidden Field of View Control - a technique that can dramatically change how a map feels without moving the camera at all.By manipulating the camera’s internal FOV parameter, developers can:Create a telephoto effect (narrow FOV) for architectural visualizationProduce a dramatic wide-angle

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The Most Googled Bird in America is ...

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/02/2026 à 09:25

Searching for Birds is a hugely impressive data exploration into which bird species are searched for the most on Google. By combining search data with citizen-science observations from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and eBird, the project reveals that visually striking or culturally iconic birds often dominate public curiosity. The analysis also highlights strong seasonal rhythms, with searches

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Mapping Every Ancient Site in Greece

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/02/2026 à 09:01

Whether you are planning a trip to Greece, researching ancient civilizations, or simply exploring the geography of the classical world, you should enjoy the Archaeological Atlas of Greece.I have a huge soft spot for historical cartography, especially when it involves rescuing data from “old-school” interfaces and making it more accessible. Which is why I’m drawn to the Archaeological Atlas

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How Indo-European Shaped Half the World

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/02/2026 à 09:13

Thousands of years ago, a community of people began to spread across vast stretches of Eurasia, carrying their language with them. Around 8,000 years ago, from a homeland likely located on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black and Caspian Seas, these migrants moved west into Europe, east toward Central Asia, and south toward the Indian subcontinent.They spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a

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Pinning Photo History to the Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/02/2026 à 10:11

You are about to become a digital time-traveler with OpenMediaMap. There’s an undeniable nostalgic thrill in stumbling upon a century-old photograph of your own neighborhood - spotting the ghosts of buildings long gone or recognizing the outlines of streets that still exist today. By mapping vintage images, OpenMediaMap makes it possible to explore these moments geographically and experience the

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Here Grows New York

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/02/2026 à 10:04

Here Grows New York is a short film by Myles Zhang that visualizes the development of New York City’s infrastructure and street system from 1609 to the present day. The nine-minute animated film draws on geo-referenced historic maps to trace the growth of the five boroughs from the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam through the Industrial Revolution and into the modern era.The animated film shows

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The Flight Sim Globe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/02/2026 à 09:49

Flight Tracker Demo | Source on GitHub Flight Tracker is an impressive Three.js project that simulates global air traffic in real time. While the visualization is currently powered by simulated flight data, the developer has indicated plans to integrate real-time feeds in the future. For now, if you are interested in real-time flight tracking maps you can view Flightradar24 and

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Polygon Map Effects

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/02/2026 à 17:39

I'm not sure how useful this is - but I had a lot of fun creating it.Polygon Effects is an interactive 3D map that brings simple extruded polygons to life with a variety of visual effects. The map shows a single building made of stacked floors, each represented as a polygon. As you watch, each floor can light up, oscillate, or change color to create different animated effects.The animations are

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The Fallout - Vault-Tec Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/02/2026 à 10:17

Step Inside the Wasteland with Amazon’s Fallout Explorer To promote the latest season of Fallout, Amazon has released a beautifully designed interactive map that invites fans to explore the world of the show. Presented in the franchise’s distinctive retro-futuristic aesthetic, the map feels like it has been lifted straight from a Vault-Tec terminal.The map is not really a geographical

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Fallout - Would You Survive a Nuclear War?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/02/2026 à 09:31

In response to a full-scale nuclear attack, America's policy is to spare more populated cities at the expense of the American Heartland. USA Today has published a new interactive map to show you whether you are likely to survive the fallout of such a war.USA Today’s massive investigative project, The Nuclear Sponge, explores a grim strategic reality: how 450 nuclear missile silos scattered

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Introducing GeoCards – A Wiki Labeled Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/02/2026 à 09:47

GeoCards I’ve seen many 'vibe-coded' wiki maps lately. Most follow the same blueprint: they use your location to surface nearby Wikipedia markers. While that works, I wanted a wiki map where the map itself is the gateway. So I built my own wiki map. On GeoCards, every label - from cities and rivers to roads and landmarks - is interactive. Instead of asking 'What’s near me?', GeoCards answers

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Drive Anywhere on Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 31/01/2026 à 09:48

Glenn Explore is a 3D open-world driving game that lets you drive a virtual car anywhere on the planet.Back in the early days of the Google Maps API - when we still called digital mapping "neogeography" - there was a massive craze for building driving games on top of real-world maps. Glenn Explore feels like a love letter to those early days of online mapping.Admittedly, the tech here is a

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American Food Deserts

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/01/2026 à 11:15

Millions of Americans live in communities that are both low-income and far from a grocery store. The Institute for Local Self Reliance’s new interactive map shows where grocery access is missing across the United States - and how decades of consolidation in the grocery industry have helped create today’s food deserts.The Grocery Deserts map layers USDA-designated food deserts with the locations

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You can fit 21 Vaticans in San Francisco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/01/2026 à 11:06

According to MarcoAI, San Francisco is roughly 1.8 San Marinos in size. In other words, San Marino would fit approximately 1.8 times into San Francisco’s land area. MarcoAI is the latest “map with an AI” to hit the market. Over the past two to three years, there’s been a noticeable surge in these tools, including Smartmap, Aino AI, and MapsGPT. Together, they form a

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Meet Language Explorer: Google’s New Open-Source Linguistic Atlas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/01/2026 à 09:23

Google Research's Language Explorer, is a new interactive map that anyone can use to explore the world's languages.Mapping the World’s TonguesThe interface of the Language Explorer is built around a highly responsive interactive map. Users can dive into the data in several ways:Spatial Discovery: You can use the map to zoom into a specific region - like the Highlands of Papua New Guinea or the

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The World's Oldest Globe

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/01/2026 à 10:10

Today, Reddit user u/Brooklyn_University posted an animated GIF of Martin Behaim’s Erdapfel, the world’s oldest surviving terrestrial globe, dating to 1492. As the globe turns, you’ll notice a striking absence: the Americas are nowhere to be found. Sail west from Europe on this map and the first landmass you would expect to encounter is “Cipangu” (Japan).Made in the same year

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The Giant Pixel Art Map of New York

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/01/2026 à 09:16

Isometric NYC is a huge pixel art map of New York City - and I mean huge. Anyone who lives in, or knows NYC can spend hours exploring this map, zooming in on their favorite neighborhoods, streets, and landmarks, all reimagined in a classic old-school pixel art style. From iconic skyscrapers to tucked-away corners, Isometric NYC has captured the city block by block in isometric perspective.Of

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Subways Built by Slime Mold

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/01/2026 à 10:00

Subway Sim: Watching a City Think In 2010, researchers in Tokyo ran a slime mold experiment on a map of the city.They placed oat flakes on a map of the Greater Tokyo Area, positioning each flake over a metropolitan center. Then they released a slime mould - Physarum polycephalum - at the location of Tokyo itself.Slime moulds are single-celled organisms with no brain, no nervous system,

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Where is Trump Still Popular?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/01/2026 à 09:19

One year into his presidency, Donald Trump is again breaking records. He is now even more unpopular than at any point in his political career. To mark the first anniversary of his second term, a number of new polls have been released evaluating the president’s popularity across the United States. The Economist's Approval Tracker shows the president's net approval rating at -19%. Using YouGov

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How Big is Big?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/01/2026 à 09:25

META is building a massive (AI)-focused data centre in northeast Louisiana. The site footprint is 2,250 acres of land - making the Hyperion Data Center one of the largest data-center construction sites ever attempted in the United States. It is a nearly five-mile-long, one-mile-wide tract of land that is being developed to power Meta’s AI ambitions.It is hard to understand the true scale of a

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Drunk Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/01/2026 à 14:58

With inflation making a night out increasingly expensive, getting drunk can cost a small fortune. To save your wallet, I created Drunk Map - a way to experience the dizzying effect of looking at a map while inebriated, without spending a cent on today’s sky-high alcohol prices.There’s no practical purpose to Drunk Map, but it serves as a neat demonstration of how you can access and

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Mapping U.S. Military Interventions

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/01/2026 à 09:12

Since the United States’ controversial military operation in Venezuela - including the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro - and in light of recent threats by Donald Trump to invade a NATO ally, there has been renewed interest in the long history of U.S. military interventions around the world.American Empire: A Century of Global Military Presence is a new interactive atlas that visualizes

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Make a Map Poster

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/01/2026 à 07:30

Ankur Gupta has created an impressive Map Poster Generator. The code for which is available on GitHub.While the original repository is fantastic for developers, it also requires a local Python setup, terminal commands, and the installation of geospatial libraries like OSMnx and GDAL - which can be intimidating if you aren't a coder.I’ve therefore adapted the core logic into a Google Colab

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The Bovine Brands Browser

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/01/2026 à 10:03

One of the biggest problems I face when riding across the prairie is identifying the cattle ranching owners of lost steers. Which is when I turn to Ranch Brand Search!Ranch Brand Search is an interactive map that brings one of the most distinctive traditions of the American West into the digital age. Instead of leafing through dusty brand books or wrestling with outdated state websites, users

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Did You Win the Global Lottery?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/01/2026 à 09:02

Are you feeling lucky? You probably should be. Based on where most Maps Mania readers are located, there’s a good chance you’ve already won the birth lottery.The Birth Lottery map makes global inequality tangible by illustrating how much our quality of life depends on chance. With a single spin, the map randomly “re-births” you somewhere in the world based on real statistics. It poses a simple

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The Last Train Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/01/2026 à 09:41

I really love this Tokyo Last Train Map, which is designed to visualize the times of the last train from every Tokyo station. If you’ve ever stayed out too late in Tokyo, you’ll know that missing the last train can be an expensive mistake. The Tokyo Last Train Map turns this anxiety into something beautiful — and strangely mesmerizing.On this transit map, the city’s rail network is reframed

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The World on Fire

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 14/01/2026 à 09:16

The Guardian has Mapped: how the world is losing its forests to wildfires and, in the process, managed to transform abstract climate statistics into clear, spatial comparisons.The story opens with an interactive 3D globe that is used to reveal the sheer scale of forest lost to wildfires around the world. By panning and zooming the globe to recognisable areas, the article provides

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War Atlas: Mapping 3,500 Years of Conflict

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/01/2026 à 09:25

War Atlas is an interactive, web-based map that visualizes 8,500+ historical battles spanning from around 1500 BC to the present day - providing users with a guided historical tour of human conflict.At its core, War Atlas is an interactive timeline-driven map. Users can select a specific war, explore through time using a slide control or through inputting a specific year, and see battles

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Mapping ICE Activity

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/01/2026 à 10:14

People Over Papers is a community-driven map showing reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity. People Over Papers lets anyone submit sightings of possible ICE operations and view recent reports near them. The project’s stated objective is to “collect community-submitted information about possible ICE activity to help inform the public and raise awareness,” with every

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Where are the Most Expensive Houses?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/01/2026 à 09:38

Homes Are Expensive is an interactive map that can help you find the cheapest and most expensive places to buy a property in the United States. The house prices are based on data from Zillow listings.The map visualizes property prices across the USA using data scraped via hasdata.com in November 2025, and provides a comprehensive look at the 1.85 million homes currently on the market. What makes

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12 Million Bike Rides on One Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/01/2026 à 10:32

bikemap.nyc is an interactive visualization of the entire history of New York City’s Citi Bike system. Every animated arrow you see on the map represents a real bike ride, taken by a real person somewhere in New York City.And there are a lot of them.The map visualizes 291 million Citi Bike trips, spanning more than 12 years, from June 2013 through December 2025. If you want, you can simply sit

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A Map of Personal Memories

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/01/2026 à 11:28

AMOU (A Map of Us) describes itself as “a shared map of our memories.” In essence, the map allows people to pin their own personal stories, memories, and emotional milestones to specific locations around the world. The result is a global atlas of deeply personal landmarks.Each marker on the map - called a mou - is a short note anchored to a location. Some are deeply personal reflections,

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A New Year’s Flight Around Planet Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 07/01/2026 à 09:48

On New Year’s Day, I released a small virtual fireworks show to celebrate the start of the year. The Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung then put my effort to shame by publishing an impressive orbital tour of the entire planet on the same day - recorded by the International Space Station.Illuminated Cities and Northern Lights: A New Year's Flight around the World around the World is a guided

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The United States on Mars

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/01/2026 à 08:44

I think we would all like to banish the United States to Mars. Well now you can thanks to a new size comparison map. There have been a lot of (what are probably mostly vibe-coded) 'true-size of' maps lately. The True Size of Countries definitely has the AI-map template aesthetic often associated with large language model–designed maps, however it also offers a fresh twist on a familiar

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Estimating Population with OpenStreetMap

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/01/2026 à 09:21

Estimating how many people live within a specific area is a recurring challenge in public health, urban planning, and humanitarian work. Census data is often outdated, too coarse, or unavailable at the scale decision-makers need. A new open-source map created by Carlos Felipe Castillo shows how far you can get using nothing more than OpenStreetMap data and lightweight analytics.Carlos has built

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Mapping Global Migration Patterns

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/01/2026 à 09:29

Where do people around the world live today - and where were they born?The new Global Migration Map lets you explore international migration patterns using the United Nations’ International Migrant Stock 2024 dataset. By clicking on any country, you can discover where people living there originally came from, or where people born there now live - and how many people moved between each pair of

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When Climate Data Speaks: Letters From The Earth

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/01/2026 à 09:19

Imagine the Earth could write to you. What would it say?Letters from The Earth is an attempt to visualize global climate data not as charts or forecasts, but as daily first-person letters written by the Earth itself. It is an experiment to see whether data can be translated through narrative and emotion to convey a broader, more intuitive form of understanding than by raw numbers

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The Virtual Fireworks Show

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/01/2026 à 10:48

I couldn't get tickets for London's very popular New Year's Eve fireworks display, so I had to make my own virtual version.My 3D Fireworks Map displays colorful bursts of fireworks exploding above the City of London. The map starts by loading real-world buildings from the Global Building Atlas, a massive dataset of city structures from around the world.The real magic happens with the fireworks.

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What-3-Songlines

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 31/12/2025 à 09:40

Earthsounds I’m guessing you’ve heard of - and perhaps even used - the popular location-addressing system, what3words. You may even know the three-word address for your home. But do you know your home’s personal songline? Aboriginal songlines are ancient pathways that crisscross the land, created and sung into existence by Ancestral beings during the Dreaming. Each songline is a living map:

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The Restaurant Map Your Gut Needs

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 30/12/2025 à 09:42

Most restaurant maps are designed to answer one question: what looks good right now? The dreadfully named Shittr answers a very different one - what won’t ruin my digestive system for the next 48 hours? Shittr is an interactive map that assigns restaurants a “Shit Score” - a 1 to 5 🚽 risk rating - based on real government health inspection data from the US and UK.💩💩💩At its core, Shittr uses

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Car Parks or Play Parks?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/12/2025 à 08:52

How much of Berlin is designed for cars - and how much for children and nature?Hans Hack has released an interactive map that offers a clear view of how urban space is allocated in Berlin. The tool compares the amount of urban space taken up by parking lots with that devoted to children’s playgrounds and other green spaces across Germany's capital.By centering the map on any point in the city,&

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HOT Export Tool

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/12/2025 à 10:17

The HOT Export Tool from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is an online service for creating custom extracts of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data.The tool allows users to select an area of interest and produce custom OSM data extracts. You can choose which map features and tags to include (e.g., roads, buildings, amenities, boundaries) and then download the data in multiple file formats (including

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Tracking Santa for Christmas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/12/2025 à 08:44

🎅 Santa’s Big Adventure: Follow Him Around the World! 🌍It’s Christmas Eve - the most magical night of the year - and guess what? Santa is already zooming around the world, delivering gifts to kids just like YOU! 🎁 This year, why not join in the fun by following Santa’s incredible journey around the world? 🎄✨ 🦌 NORAD Santa Tracker: Powered by Rudolph’s NoseDo you know how NORAD tracks

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How Christmas Lights Up America

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 23/12/2025 à 09:14

According to NASA, Christmas lights up the winter. Using nighttime satellite imagery of American cities, NASA discovered that nighttime lights in American cities shine 20 to 50 percent brighter during the Christmas season than at other times of the year. In Even from Space, Holidays Shine Brightly NASA explains that nighttime lights start getting brighter on the day after Thanksgiving. You

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True-Size Geography Games

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/12/2025 à 10:09

True-Size.com has become a go-to destination for anyone curious about the real dimensions of our world. It is best known for its interactive map that lets you compare the true size of countries. The site allows users to drag countries around the globe and make direct comparisons with other countries and regions around the world. It’s a simple idea with a powerful impact, often reshaping

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Fuzzy Neighborhoods

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/12/2025 à 09:36

City neighborhoods rarely have crisp, universally agreed-upon boundaries. Unlike political jurisdictions, neighborhood borders are shaped by lived experience: where people shop, who they identify as neighbors, and shifting social and cultural trends. These boundaries are often fluid, overlapping, and contested, changing over time and varying from person to person. As a result, neighborhood

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The Global Building Atlas Downloader

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/12/2025 à 07:00

Easily Download 3D Building Data from the Global Building AtlasThe Global Building Atlas is one of the most ambitious open mapping projects to date: a global, high-resolution dataset describing 2.75 billion buildings worldwide, including their footprints, heights, and simple 3D (LoD1) geometry. Developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the dataset offers an

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Welcome to My Garden

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 18/12/2025 à 09:05

If you’re planning a long hike or bike trip, then you should definitely bookmark Welcome to My Garden. This interactive map shows the locations of gardens that offer free camping spots for slow travellers.If you’re travelling on a low budget and want to keep your journey low-impact, Welcome to My Garden is the ideal companion. The concept is refreshingly simple: find somewhere to stay, book your

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I ❤️ San Francisco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 17/12/2025 à 08:54

Today I ran a 33 km heart-shaped route around San Francisco to demonstrate my love for the city1. If you are interested in creating your own GPS art - or you just want to make your daily walk, jog or bike ride a little more fun - you can now use Routista to help you plan a pictorial route.Have you ever seen a bike ride that traces a heart, a star, or even a dinosaur on a map? That’s GPS art

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The Flat Earth Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 16/12/2025 à 09:48

In 1892 Alexander Gleason, author of Is the Bible from Heaven? Is the Earth a Globe?, published his New Standard Map of the World. The map includes the subheading ‘As it is,’ reflecting Gleason’s belief that the map showed a world that was flat - and not round.The map actually uses an azimuthal equidistant projection (which the map's subheading indicates was borrowed from an English cartographer

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The Freedom to Pollute

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 15/12/2025 à 09:46

4.6 million Americans live within two miles of a facility that has been given permission by President Trump to pollute the air. In March, the Trump administration initiated a process allowing industries to apply for up to two-years of compliance exemptions under the Clean Air Act. More than 180 facilities, including coal plants, chemical manufacturing and petrochemical facilities applied and

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The Housing Potential of NYC’s Parking Lots

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 13/12/2025 à 08:55

There are 2,222 surface parking lots in New York City within walking distance of an MTA station. If these sites were redeveloped for housing, they could provide an estimated 62,820 additional homes citywide.This estimate is based on a mapped analysis by Tom Weatherburn. His story map, How Much Housing Could Fit on the Surface Parking Lots of NYC?, visualizes the number of surface parking lots

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The AI Mapper and the AI Map Doctor

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 12/12/2025 à 10:34

Real-Time Earthquakes Map made by Web Mapper GPT If you’re new to mapmaking, two recently released AI tools can help you create interactive maps with little or no coding or cartographic expertise. These tools - Web-Mapper GPT and Map Doctor GPT - are designed to simplify both the technical and design aspects of map creation, making it easier than ever for beginners to produce professional-looking

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Mapping a Galaxy Far, Far Away

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 11/12/2025 à 09:32

A well-designed star chart is essential for any galactic adventure. The Interactive Star Wars Galaxy for RPGs is a detailed, dynamic map of a galaxy far, far away, built specifically with tabletop roleplaying in mind. Beyond simply charting hyperspace lanes, registered users can unlock integrated features like a dedicated dice-roller and tools for organizing your next gaming party.Even

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Country Recall - How Well Do You Know the World?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 10/12/2025 à 09:01

Country Recall How to PlayIf you enjoy geography quizzes, map challenges, or just perusing a map of the world, then you need to play Country Recall. This brand new interactive geography game asks a deceptively simple question: How many of the world’s countries can you identify on an unlabelled map?Type a country into Country Recall and - if you’re right - it will instantly light up on the world

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New Build Housing in San Francisco

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 09/12/2025 à 09:04

This animated map shows new housing construction in San Francisco by decade- since 1900. The map provides a clear picture of how the number of new homes built in the city has been declining since the 1970s.The orange dots on the map represent the locations of units built in that decade, while the gray dots show the existing housing stock from previous decades.The map is part of San Francisco

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How to Guarantee a White Christmas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 08/12/2025 à 08:59

If you’re determined to experience a white Christmas, I suggest booking a trip to Zermatt, Switzerland. According to White Christmas Forecast 2025, residents there have a 100% chance of snow on Christmas Day. (Disclaimer: I'm not in charge of the weather and previous snowfalls do not guarantee future flurries).Last week I linked to NOAA’s Probability of a White Christmas map. This

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Geo Racers: The Ultimate Travel Game

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 06/12/2025 à 09:14

Race Across the World is a BBC television game show in which contestants must travel from a starting point to a final destination on a low budget - using only land and sea transport. For American readers, think The Amazing Race but on a strictly limited budget and with no flying.Geo Racers is a really fun new game that lets you play Race Across the World style challenges without having to

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Is Your Team an Animal?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 05/12/2025 à 09:19

Lions, tigers, and grey wolves are the most frequently used animals in sport logos. The interactive Wild League Map shows over 700 sports teams around the world that use wild animals in their name, logo or fans' nicknames. It was developed using research from Wildlife Diversity in Global Team Sport Branding and was developed by the Wild League, who aim to leverage the global

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Who's Dreaming of a White Christmas?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 04/12/2025 à 09:34

Coldest Day of the Year If you live in the western United States, then there is a good chance your coldest day of the year is fast approaching.You can find out when your coldest day is likely to occur on NOAA's interactive map, Coldest Day of the Year on Average. On this map, weather stations across the United States are color-coded to show when, on average, they experience their coldest day

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🌍 Introducing the Global Building Atlas

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 03/12/2025 à 11:24

The Global Building Atlas is a new global, high-resolution 3D dataset of the world's 2.75 billion buildings. Developed by a research team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) the Global Building Atlas provides broad coverage of areas historically missing from digital maps, including much of Africa, South America, and rural areas worldwide. All the data is freely available on the project's

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How Russia Smuggles Stolen Ukrainian Grain

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 02/12/2025 à 09:48

Bellingcat has exposed how some Russian cargo ships are managing to circumvent the European Union’s sanctions on the shipment of stolen Ukrainian grain. In its investigation Russia’s Grain Smuggling Fleet Continues Undeterred, the investigative journalism organization tracked and mapped the movements of a Russian-flagged bulk carrier called Irtysh, revealing how it has been smuggling grain

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"I Ain’t Afraid of No Map" - Ghost Mappers

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 01/12/2025 à 09:49

The ghost of the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin is said to visit his uncle’s grave in St Mary the Virgin Church in London. He is just one of three spirits believed to haunt the churchyard, which is also visited by a grey lady searching for her dead husband, and a skeletal figure pushing a cart with an empty coffin - forever hunting for his wife, whose body was stolen by grave robbers.This is

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Mapping the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 29/11/2025 à 09:43

All of us have, at some time or another, fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. You begin with the noble intention of looking up a single topic, only to find yourself tumbling through an unplanned journey of blue hyperlinks.Start with Geradus Mercator, follow a link to Antwerp, hop over to the Tomorrowland festival, and before you know it you’re reading about Metallica. What began

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Back to Black

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/11/2025 à 17:24

Back to Black Today’s #30DayMapChallenge is Black. For this challenge I decided to create a map that makes use of and demonstrates one of MapLibre’s most powerful features: the ability to programmatically restyle map layers in real time. My Back to Black map itself isn’t designed to be practical or analytical in itself - it’s simply an exploration of how to change a map's style in

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Deadly Rivers in the Sky

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 28/11/2025 à 09:51

The Washington Post reports that rising global temperatures are leading to ever more extreme rainfall around the world. Since the 1990s global heating has dramatically increased the amount and movement of water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere , in some regions by more than 15 percent. These “invisible rivers” of vapor act like atmospheric fire hoses: and when they encounter disturbances such as

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The McGritter Tracker is Back!

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 27/11/2025 à 09:44

By 6:00 AM this morning, Skate Bush could already been seen trundling up that hill, and Sled Zeppelin was hard at work sanding the stairway to Leven.Yes, Traffic Scotland’s Gritter Tracker is back in action - your one-stop, salt-powered, pun-splattered window into the heroic world of gritters battling Scotland’s icy roads.The Gritter Tracker map shows the live positions of Scotland's

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The History of the World Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 26/11/2025 à 10:16

It has been a boom week for Wikipedia-sourced history maps. In the last five days I've reviewed Landnotes & Globe of History, and I’ve now stumbled on another Wikipedia based history map - the Time Travel App.Time-Travel App is a world history explorer that uses Mapbox, OpenHistoricalMap, and data from Wikipedia to let you browse historical events, important people, cultural realms, and even

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Blockbusters USA

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/11/2025 à 17:19

Population Paths Day 25 of the #30DayMapChallenge is Hexagons! In response I've created a little hex-map puzzle game. The aim of Population Paths is to create a continuous path from the West Coast to the East Coast, one state at a time by correctly guessing whether each neighboring state has a higher or lower population than the one you’re currently standing on. How to Play You begin

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Mapping the Property Tax Divide

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 25/11/2025 à 09:31

Most U.S. municipalities rely on property taxes to fund public services. This means that the amount of taxable wealth within each city boundary can create stark inequalities - even between neighboring communities. Wealthy municipalities are able to raise far more revenue than places with lower-value property, allowing affluent enclaves to spend generously while less affluent communities -

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A Literal Map of America

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/11/2025 à 18:24

Literal Map of America Today’s #30DayMapChallenge theme is Places and their names. My Literal Map of America reveals the literal meaning behind every U.S. state name (hover over any state on the map and you can reveal its real name). Many of the states have names that reflect physical landscapes, others describe people or tribes, and several are named for royalty. Wisconsin comes from a

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How Much Does it Cost to Live in Every U.S. County?

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 24/11/2025 à 09:23

The Economic Policy Institute has mapped out how much income a typical family of four (two adults and two children) needs to achieve a “modest yet adequate standard of living” in counties across the United States. The EPI's Family Budget Map breaks down costs into seven essential categories: housing, food, child care, transportation, health care, other necessities, and taxes.Load the map, zoom

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The Map of Human History

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 22/11/2025 à 09:01

You wait an age for a historical Wikipedia map and then two come along at once. Hot on the heels of yesterday's post about Landnotes, we can now explore another Wikipedia-sourced map of human history.The Globe of History is an ambitious new interactive map that attempts to visualize the entire sweep of human history - 6,000 years of wars, inventions, discoveries, philosophers, political

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Icons of Tokyo

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/11/2025 à 18:18

Icons of Tokyo I recently visited the Pictograms exhibition at the Japan Center in London. At the heart of this exhibition were a number of icons designed by the Nippon Design Center, Inc., a renowned Tokyo-based design studio.Today's 30DayMapChallenge theme is Icons, and my first thought was: how could I utilize Nippon Design Center's beautiful Tokyo tourism icons? I

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Your Birthday Map

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 21/11/2025 à 10:13

Landnotes I was born on the very first day of the Dominican Civil War (also known as the April Revolution). Meanwhile, on a completely different continent, Luciano Pavarotti was making his La Scala debut in a revival of La Bohème. Not to brag, but it seems the universe scheduled a pretty dramatic day for my arrival.Over the last twenty years of Maps Mania I’ve seen more Wikipedia maps than I

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Time Traveling with Street View

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 20/11/2025 à 10:49

Have you ever wondered what your neighborhood looked like in the 18th century—or even during the Middle Ages? Thanks to Street View and AI, you can now almost find out. TimeJourneyAI is a new application that lets you pick a location in Street View and generate an AI-imagined version of that same spot for any year in history.Liberty 2025rom my limited testing, the historical views

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Mapping the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Maps Mania Par Keir Clarke 19/11/2025 à 10:57

Back in 2021, Slate published a very impressive animated map The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes. The map is an incredibly powerful visualization of the massive scale of the transatlantic slave trade, highlighting the trade routes used and the destinations of slave ships over three centuries.Slate’s map includes an interactive timeline that allows you to skip to any year in the

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