Making Sense Of The World, One Map At A Time
The map above is a 1920 New Oxford Map of Australia created by by geographer Thomas Griffith Taylor and Beckit, H. O showing where you can and can’t find sheep.
The categories are very helpfully divided into either no sheep or some sheep. No categories are listed for wheat.
All has a very Settlers of Catan feel to it don’t you think?
They also created the following maps in the same series:
The video above shows 24 hours worth of flights between Europe and the US from a pre-pandemic 2018.
You can very clearly see the jet stream effects with almost all the flights to Europe following the jet stream and those to the United States either going north or south of it.
The video above shows the top trending search term by state for each day in the United States from January 7th, 2010 all the way to July 5th, 2020.
It’s interesting because it’s surprisingly rare for the top trending search term to be the same across all 50 states.
Here’s a sped up version:
The map above shows how four of the world’s most important domesticated cereals spread across Europe, Asia and Africa between 7,000 and 3,500 years ago.
The video above was created by reddit user donatso and shows 100 years of plane crashes.
I’ve made a sped up version of it below:
Canada’s Hudson Bay is the world’s second largest Bay after the Bay of Bengal.
It is 1,230,000 km2 (470,000 sq mi) about the same size as South Africa or almost twice the size of Texas.
But given it’s unique shape, I wondered what countries and/or US states you could fit inside it.
So here below is a bit of a random selection of places that I found fit inside.
The map above shows which countries are richer or poorer than the US based on GDP per capita in PPP $ dollars.
PPP $ account for the local cost of goods and services in a country rather than official exchange rates. The data comes from the IMF and is for 2025.
Below is a list both using $PPP and official exchange rates.
The map above shows which countries are richer and which are poorer than Kazakhstan’s GDP per capita of $44,446 in PPP $ dollars.
PPP $ dollars measure how far your money goes in a given country rather than official exchange rates.
Here is a list of all countries richer than Kazakhstan based on that measure:
Chris Durso and his 8 year-old son have created a punny series maps collectively titled The Foodnited States of America.
Each map takes one food item that can be worked into the name of the state.
So far they’ve created 25 maps with new ones being released regularly via the Foodiggity.com instagram account.
They’ve completed all the states and better yet you can buy them all on their website here.
While not all the states are created from a food item you’d associate with them, they’re all quite clever.
Below are the ones for each state:
The map above shows the Photosynthesis of the US Corn Crop which amazingly at the peak of the growing season it produces more oxygen than the Amazon Rain Forest!