Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above is Francis Galton’s earliest known isochronic map, published in 1881 for the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society, illustrates travel times from London, United Kingdom, to various parts of the world, measured in days.
The map assumes favorable travel conditions, prearranged land transport, and the use of contemporary travel methods within a reasonable cost.
From the map itself:
The underlying data comes from Slave Voyages, which has more detailed maps, from the Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade a couple of which you can see below:
From the map:
Cats may be highly independent creatures, but their language is quite similar throughout the world.
The majority of cat sounds begin with an ‘m,’ including the familiar Meow (Australia, Kenya and Micronesia, to name but a few).
There’s Miau in Nicaragua, Myaco in Nepal, and Miu Miu in Bangladesh.
True to form, however, some felines will just do their own thing, including those in North and South Korea (Yaong) and Malaysia (Ngiau).
Here are the sounds in various languages around the world according to Language Pro.
Also see: Dog Bark Sounds: How Different Countries & Languages Represent Dog Sounds in Words
How do you say it?
The map above is based off of a Q4 2024 Yougov Survey asking British adults if they’d ever heard of the country and if they had, whether or not they had a positive opinion about it.
Now just because a country has a positive low score doesn’t necessarily mean British adults dislike a country, but could simply mean they have no opinion about it one way or another.
Personally, I don’t have strong views on Palau, Comoros or Nauru.
You can see the full survey results below.
In 1947 the term Soda, Pop and Coke (which confusingly refers to all soft drinks, not just Coca Cola) were all fairly even distributed in the United States.
The map above shows the modern remnants of the Central Pangean Mountain Range in Scandinavia, Scotland, Greenland, the United States and Africa.
More about them below:
These 3 wonderful maps are all the work of Alex at Vividmaps (you can see an integrative version on his site).
They show the lone islands of voting support for Harris, Biden and Clinton in their respective US Presidential elections against Donald Trump visualised as topography maps rather than standard election maps.
Here are the ones for Biden in 2020 and Clinton in 2016:
Here are some notable observations and trends based on such maps:
I’m a bit unclear who created the original map, but whoever they are I am really impressed with the work and would love to give them the proper credit they deserve.
More about Japanese loses: