30 April 2014
Platypus 30 April 2014
This map shows European languages grouped by the etymology of their word for the platypus.
This particular map shows several trends. The United Kingdom was the first European nation to discover the platypus, around 1800. As zoologists across the continent became more aware of this curious animal, an interesting combination of political and linguistic factors began to affect its nomenclature. As expected, Romance languages tended to use the Latinized Greek term Ornithorhynchus, meaning “bird snout”.
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20 February 2014
America’s GDP Split 20 February 2014
America’s gross domestic product split geographically, 50-50.
The map shows a 50-50 split of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States. The GDP of the cyan area is equal to the GDP of the orange area. This would equate to $8.10 trillion for each colored half in the above map.
The orange areas are the 23 largest metro areas (technically MSA’s) by GDP.
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20 February 2014
How big is the Arctic Circle? 10 October 2016
The Map Porn subreddit has a requests page now, which is pretty awesome. User Mjager asked what the Arctic Circle would look like projected near the equator, to get a sense of scale. I decided to just go ahead and do it.
The radius of the Arctic Circle varies minutely with each year. Also, “projecting” is onto the Equator is tricky because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, yet the Circle is defined in terms of latitude.
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29 January 2014
Snow Days 29 January 2014
Notes: The lightest green says “any snow” but also includes merely the prediction of snow. Also, this is snow accumulation over 24 hours/overnight. In much of the Midwest and Great Plains, school closing often depends more on wind chill and temperature than on snow accumulation (“cold days”). Thus, this map may be misleading in those areas. Many jurisdictions in California and other western states have significantly varied snowfall, depending on elevation.
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