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

SWEET DESIGN

I know what you're thinking about this map - it's a little reminiscent of a childhood collage and possibly even a touch on the girlie side, but there is something I think everyone can appreciate about these water-colour maps. They have a deceptively simple design aesthetic that works so well that; hating them, is the equilivent of pretending to hate candy-floss - and what souless ghoul could possibly hate candy-floss?!

LOST MARBLE

Since we live in a perpetually changing world, it's something of an aphorism that a map is out-of-date a soon as its printed. It would seem then, a futile task to make any moment in time, indelible. However, there are those great happenings in history that will always be remembered - for example, whilst looking at a marble bust of Julius Caesar; regal yet doomed, do we recall his betrayal. Likewise, what will future generations make of this marble map of Manhattan Island, New York - perhaps the map will stir up memories of September 11 or indeed the Great Zombie Apocalypse of 2012?! Whilst all other fragile map-formats perish by the wayside, the map literally set-in-stone becomes a lone survivor of a bygone era.

INSANE IN THE MAP-BRAIN

Where do we go to when our mind wanders? Where do our thoughts come from? - these seem like geographical questions just as much as psychological questions, wouldn't you agree? Yaron Steinburg certainly does. Using cardboard as a cartographic medium Yaron has mapped his brain. As a Being John Malkovich fan, this way of looking at the human mind as if it's a structured city that you can visit rather than a chaotic collection of neurons, makes a lot of sense to me.

OCEANS DEEP

You may not be aware of it, but, this communication has travelled vast distances through the great oceans of our world, from one side of the planet to the other - through schools of depleted tuna stocks, around fleeing whales and narrowly avoiding the giant squid! If only those cables could talk - for the time being though I'll settle for a map of submarine cables

SPACE BALLS

Even if you haven't seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey you'll probably be aware of the booming drums & the building tension of the epic musical score - many have tried to unravel the mysterious captivation of this sound-scape work, citing it as a clue in Nietzche's world-riddle and even as a hint to the meaning of life itself! Those people may have been smoking too much Pot, but it's also true that we don't understand music entirely either. Perhaps there is a correlation between the patterns of music and the patterns of the universe? Take this animated minimalist map of the celestial bodies of our solar system for example, I'm not saying its going to spawn an evolutionary leap in human existence but it could be a small piece in the puzzle. [By the way, you'll be needing your headphones]

SPACE, THE FINAL FRONTIER

You'd think that with the entirety of Space at our disposal we wouldn't ever need to worry about polluting our pitiful pocket of the universe. However, with an insatiable appetite for global telecommunications and (sigh) Global Positioning Systems (GPS), we are now piling up so much techno-trash in our orbit that we now ironically require a comprehensive mapping project to save us from our own mapping! ''Mappetite for destruction'' is what I'm calling it, and Space Fence is what the US Air Force is calling their network of ground-based S-band radars that will detect, track and catalog thousands of objects in low-Earth orbit. And if you think its not such a problem at the moment; take a quick look at this Google Earth YouTube visualisation of all the satellites up there right now!

SIMCITY

China has made their own version of Google Maps, and it's called Edushi. It looks like the game SimCity, but it's all real baby! It's also all in Mandarin. Don't be discouraged though - all you need to do, after all, is pan and zoom. Go on, try it out (or some of the other Chinese cities). If you really like this sort of thing (?);  here are a few more wacky artistic SimCity interpretations (they're not interactive maps like Edushi but they're quite fun). Enjoy!