Map Heaven

Okay, right up front: I love maps! I guess I've always been fond of maps, but my fondness turned to fanaticism when I read The Mapmakers. It's a wonderful example of history mixed with adventure -- at least that's how this nerd read it. Anyway, I love maps.

That's why I am so enthralled by Google Maps -- an amazing mapping tool. You can do almost anything with Google Maps if you have the patience. Unfortunately I don't have that attribute in sufficient quantities, so I've mostly mooched off the work of others. Now I find that mooching may be a whole lot easier than I would have imagined. Yep, there's a Google Maps blog! The blog itself doesn't interest me that much, but down the right side of the blog is a list of all kinds of things others have asked Google Maps to do:

Geology.com has a clickable map showing meteor impact craters around the world. [Should that be meteorite impact craters? Hey, I won't pick a fight with a site called geology.com.]

Someone has a map of the results of a 5-week study on whale sounds. You can see where the sample was collected and click on the balloon to listen. Cool idea, though I couldn't really hear many whales.

The Ontario Beer Hunter has a real-time map that shows open stores in various cities/towns where you can buy alcohol RIGHT NOW. As of 3:17 today, there are 172 open retail booze outlets in Toronto.

Of course there's at least one site that claims to show baseball teams across America, though they omit my favorite league. The coolest map of all, though, may be this one. You can type in a zip code and see a blue/red breakdown of folks who contributed to the 2000 Presidential campaigns. There are limitations, but it's still amazing. Not only does the site provide a blue/red breakdown, it shows where individual contributors' locations. Further, you can click on an individual balloon and see who it is, who he/she contributed to, and how much the contribution was. Now that amount of info being available freaks me out a little, but it's still a cool feature. Hey, Vol, I checked L'burg but I didn't see any radical contributions from the VolMom. What's up with that? I did, though, see that a current neighbor (just one block down the street) gave $2000 to John Kerry.

Anyway, poke around on the blog and I guarantee you'll find something that makes you go wow.

Oh, update from yesterday, I think my cheap digital camera has come back to life. So it looks like I got a good story out of the trip and I'm not even going to have to replace my camera. I'm on a roll.