ATLAS IN WONDERLAND

No that's not Tom Thumb standing over there doing the mid-life-crisis 'Robot' dance - what we've got here is the world's largest atlas.  It's pretty massive, and unless you're lying to yourself and you're of the size-isn't-everything opinion, it's pretty impressive! Even in today's modern age, only a few printers in the world can even contemplate this mammoth task. However, with all that being said, I still think that the previous record holder's atlas is much more amazing, as their map was created over 350 years ago without the aid of modern technology.

THE NOTHING

For everything that we perceive, there lays hidden a a mysterious shadow nothing. Explorers of olde actually feared this nothing, they feared that they would fall into a void if they sailed off the map, or get consumed by it (like Fantasia in The Never-Ending Story). Yet, in the modern mapping era not much thought is given to nothing - or to put it simply; we're obsessed with stuff.  Some have alluded to this concept with their cut-out maps but they only half succeed - they still map something to demonstrate the nothing. Even I foolishly attempted to create a map of pure nothing to show you (see left), but i failed miserably - I confused white-space with void! There are after all; electrons, ones and zeros and your perceptions. Allow me to illustrate the conundrum further; the respected composer John Cage once famously sat at his piano on a stage in front of a packed auditorium for four minutes & thirty three seconds without a playing a sound - he attempted to portray nothing, in effect though he wasn't playing nothing - the compositional piece became the sounds of the audience shuffling in their seats, murmuring low and coughing anxiously. The map of nothing is an elusive prey, but if you train your mind you may just catch a glimpse - or in the words of Samuel Beckett: "White planes no trace shining white one only shining white infinite but that known not, always there but that known not."

HAPPY NOW?!

It occurs to me now as I sip my morning coffee that I was very grumpy about 10 minutes ago. It also occurs to me that our global society united together in infrastructure and diplomacy enabled the delivery of this wondrous product; dedicated solely to that one minuscule moment of happiness. But what of the rest of the day? What other spatial correlations are influenced by happiness flux? This Twitter map of 'a day in the life of American happiness' shows that whilst happiness is a personal feeling, it is also very much a spatial pattern.

STATISTICALLY COOL

If you're stuck in a paying job where all they seem to talk about is projections over time and blah, blah, blah... geographic distribution - you may be able to spice up your otherwise lame scatter-plot graphs by using geographic shapes instead of dots and thus create: geo-graphics (ha, I just made that up). Louisa Bufardeci has already created a few, and in case you don't want to sift through her entire oeuvre, here are what I think are her three best: Governing Values,  Equality,  Landscapes

MUSIC CLIP

Somebody went to the trouble of making a music-clip using Google Earth as an evolving landscape backdrop, so I suppose I had better show it. It may not be what you'd listen to every day (and it's not as cool as the Arcade Fire clip), but shes worth a listen (despite starting off a bit spacey, it does get better) click here to listen