And you are here why?

via Drew Roos The Mercator projection is infamous for its distortion at high latitudes. This distortion gets exponentially worse as you approach the poles. It is in fact impossible to show the poles on a Mercator map — they are infinitely far away. Any Mercator map you've ever seen must cut off the top and bottom edges at some arbitrary point. The map stops short hundreds, if not thousands of miles away from the poles. His solution - redo the Mercator, centered on wherever you want (e.g., where you live), and reduce the cutoff to make it somewhat mind-boggingly tall To make things actually interesting, we must artifically shift the pole of the project to a more interesting place. Imagine the earth encased by a rigid cage of latitude and longitude lines. We rotate the earth while leaving the cage fixed until a new point of interest has taken the place of the North Pole. This is called an   oblique Mercator , and is normally used to shift an area of interest onto the e...

Check it out! They're cool! They're revolutionary! They're portable! Maps!

Particularly fascinating - note how Portugal and Switzerland pretty much just don't change... (video below, screenshot above)

Courtesy Thrillist , we have this awesome map of the highest profile beer/liquor companies in each state (by profile, not  by quality :-)  ) Click to embiggen - or go to the original to see it it in it's full glory

Ok, only if your city is London, Paris, or Berlin, but still! This comes to you via WatchDogs , a game (not yet out) by UbiSoft , where, apparently, your character gets to control Chicago via some sort of centralized data-access mechanism. Anyhow, as a teaser, the folks at UbiSoft have created a 3-D interactive map of London, Paris, and Berlin, and you get to check it out. Its quite neat actually, go take a look ! (The above is just a screen-cap.   Go to the original ...)

From Fèorag NicBhrìde comes this map of Europe, or at least, a map of Europe based on how one sez. "Beer". Important stuff! hat-tip Nathan Yau

From Maps on the Web .

Planefinder.net , surely one of the cooler mashups out there.  I particularly like the way you can see flight patterns change during the day (e.g., in the middle of the night, there are no flights over India - contrast that w/ the US!)

Via Don's Notes , we have this collection of NJ Cultural/Ethnic stereotypes in one map... (click to embiggen quite a bit)  

From Bostonography.com , we have this excellent near real-time take on bus speeds in Boston , based on GPS data.  Well, technically  speaking, its either GPS data from the past 3 hours, or the full 24 hours of data from the previous day. From the description This map is based only on the discrete location reports from buses, which occur at regular intervals. This means that speeds are calculated based on straight-line distances between those points, not on the actual distance traveled by the buses. In some areas, therefore, speed is a little underestimated because the bus followed actual crazy Boston streets, not that straight shortest-distance path. Note also that the speeds are overall averages that include stops, not solely moving speed. The below is just a screen-grab, go to the original for the live version .

via io9.com , (and possibly Massimo Pietrobon )we have this gorgeous map of Pangaea , w/ all the current countries mapped on to it. (Click to embiggen - a lot)

Blame the Mercator projection , blame the lack of geographical knowledge, heck, blame the full moon, but regardless you can pretty much assume that most people don't quite realize how absolutely huge Africa is.. This - from Kai Krause - should set you right (click to embiggen monstrously)

Neil Freeman at Fake Is The New Real takes on Electoral College Reform by redoing the state boundaries to make sure that they are all equi-populous (if that is a real word...)  From the post Advantages of this proposal Preserves the historic structure and function of the Electoral College. Ends the over-representation of small states and under-representation of large states in presidential voting and in the US Senate by eliminating small and large states. Political boundaries more closely follow economic patterns, since many states are more centered on one or two metro areas. Ends varying representation in the House. Currently, the population of House districts ranges from 528,000 to 924,000. After this reform, every House seat would represent districts of the same size. (Since the current size of the House isn't divisible by 50, the numbers of seats should be increased to 450 or 500.) States could be redistricted after each census - just like House seats are distrib...

The standard (Red vs Blue) map that you always see ( via Newman ) The US map squished around to make the state sizes proportional to the population ( still via Newman ) A pointillist take from Nelson . Click to embiggen (a lot !)   To quote "a pointillist look at the 2012 election results, which does a fairer job of illustrating where, how many, and how people voted in the election than the more typical full-color generalization." And my favorite - the map based on political Ad spending   using dollars per Voter as the metric

The fine folks at Stamen Design are at it again, w/ a brilliant HTML5 version of their hurricane tracker , now visible on the Weather Channel . (You need to go their to see it, its not embeddable) As the Stamen folks put it The client is the   Weather Channel   (previous work for them   here ), and we're working directly with meteorologists to ensure that the representations meet their standards. It's in HTML5, so you can view it on an iPad. Which is good! We've made some improvements to the interaction that I never got to take care of in the previous version. The entire histogram (chart at the top) is an active thing you can roll over, for example; the previous version only popped the rollover when you were over the lines. The histogram and the map have a much tighter relationship now. If the whole hurricane path is visible on the map, you'll see the whole thing on the histogram, and visey versey. Conversely, if you change the map so that 1/2 the hurricane i...

From the genii at Stamen Design , we have these embeddable / usable watercolor maps As they put it “Reminiscent of hand drawn maps, Stamen’s new watercolor tiles apply area washes and organic edges over a paper texture to add warm pop to any map. We’ve added more Photoshop-style raster effects to TileStache to render OSM tiles like you’ve never seen them before.” There is a post on their blog here describing how these maps are generated - check it ou t... (The image below is not interactive...)