GOAAAAAAAAAAAL

The football world cup is on at the moment so what better way to provide a beautiful insight into the beautiful game than with some choice interactive mapping visualisations (Cool if you're into soccer, probably lame if you're not)

And...

Next time you're watching a game of football perhaps you could ponder the supposed pinnacle of human acheivement...  in 1969, two astronauts landed on the moon and managed a light jog around their own half!
click here to look at this map in more depth

CRAPPY MAPPY

Ok, dont ask what inspired this week's theme...
Oxfam's poo mapping project is a simple little idea that is directly helping local people.  I like this tangible humanitarian story - maps helping people, thats what this mapping malarky is all about really.

Penguins need help too, and if you're into monitoring penguin habitats (like your hero Mogan Freeman) but you're not into actually braving the sub-zero temperatures to do it, you may want to consider remote sensing poo mapping.

And, in much lighter news... Some say these particular crop circles were created by aliens, marking good spots in the galaxy to 'touch down' others say its a hoax - but if its on google maps its worthy of inclusion here.

By the way, this has nothing to do with maps but did you know in Mexico City they have sewer divers?!  Crap-ola!!!

SCRIBBLEY DOODLEY

I'm not too sure what to say about these really..are they valid? are they maps?  I don't know! but the website Fake is the new real is putting them down so I'm picking them up.

These three links are probably my favourite bits from the site:

Click on this link to see subways from around the world all presented at the same scale.  They remind me of spiderwebs or perhaps even aliens.






The elegant doodle to your left is the result of tracing one year's worth of cycling and walking around New York.  Pretty simple, but who needs complicated?!













And if you're still with me (good for you!), these selected cities have had their streets split out and then piled on top of each other at their centroid points - creating star-like oddities.

FUNNY - HA HA

If someone from the future had come back in time and told me that quite a few of the maps featured on ChoiceMapTuesday would turn out to be humourous, I would have laughed (ironically) at them. Yet, for some reason that I cant fully explain, the seemingly vapid cartographic form can quite often be.. funny ha ha.  These fanciful maps created by Christoph Niemann conveniently back me up. 

PS If there is anyone from the future out there, I'm also hoping you could tell me where I left my Swiss Army knife?!  I really miss it!  Though I  guess you could probably only tell me that its still lost?!  rats!!

THE REAL OIL

Aghast and somewhat ignorant at the specific extent and impact of the current Gulf of Mexico oil-spill, I took to fossicking around on the internet for answers.  In this quest, I rummaged through a plethora of emotive photos (like these) until I honed in on this relatively unassuming photo of protective oil-spill booms that surround a few small islands off the coast of Louisiana.

The photo seemed to me to be eerily similar to an iconic work of art from the early 1980s whereby a couple of industrious artists created amazing large-scale sculptural installations.  These bright pink installations were intended as a sort of a visual metaphor for the way in which we live between the ocean and the land. The seemingly abstract work conceptualised a very real conservation desideratum (thank you thesaurus!)

(sorry if all this is boring, my interest in buffer zones is possibly more piqued than most through my work in GIS where I mundanely buffer objects on a computer screen - to see them in the wild, so to speak, is nerdishly exciting for me)

If all this arty rhetoric is too obscure for you, just play with this interactive oil-spill model. It maps potential spill events near Vancouver, but in general terms it helps visualise fluid movement (and the black plague of human destruction upon this fair planet)

Lastly, I don't want to overload you, but you really should check out this little Google WebApp that overlays the oil slick with a location of your choosing.