Vaguely Vulgar Italians

Gary Gale's Vaguely Rude Places map has been a long time favorite with visitors to Maps Mania Mansions. This week we were extremely fortunate to be visited by an Italian gentlemen, who regaled us all with ribald translations from the Italian edition of Mr Gale's atlas.

For months the Vagamente Volgare has been titillating readers across the continent with its collection of risque Italian place names. Indeed the map has proven so popular that Mr Gale has included the Vagamente Volgare in the latest publication of his own Vaguely Rude Place map.

This second edition of Mr Gale's respected tome now includes both a map of place names which sound rude to those of us who speak English and a map of place names that may appear Rabelaisian to our Italian cousins.

Maps of the Week

Vector Map is an amazing map of the world, complete with 3d extruded buildings and roads with animated traffic. The screenshot above doesn't do this map justice and you really need to view the map yourself in a WebGL enabled browser.

The map was built with Mapzen's Tangram mapping engine. Tangram is a library for creating 2D & 3D maps with WebGL. The Vector Map includes Tangram's extruded 3d building footprints and adds animated traffic to the map's roads.


This interactive map, from Dumpark, reveals the average number of hours of direct sunlight received each day throughout Wellington City in New Zealand.

The number of hours of direct sunlight is affected by topographical features (such as hills) and physical objects (like buildings and trees). To measure the number of hours of direct sunlight Dunpark used data elevation models of Wellington City combined with building footprint data of the city.

The Hours of Direct Sunlight map shows the yearly average number of hours of direct sunlight received each day. It is also possible to view layers showing the average number of hours received in the mornings and in the afternoons.


Divvy Trips is a beautiful animated mapped visualization of bike trips on the Divvy bike sharing network in Chicago. The map includes circular map markers showing the position of bike docking stations and the option to add a street map to the animated visualization.

It also contains a date control which allows you to select the day's rides that you wish to see visualized and a time display informing you of the time of day. Divvy Trips provides a great visualization of how the Divvy bike network is used over the course of a day. It also wouldn't look out of place hanging on the walls of MoMA.

Landsat Satellite Imagery on AWS

The big mapping news this week was the release of Landsat 8 satellite imagery as a data-set on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Landsat on AWS provides free access to Landsat 8 satellite imagery. This is great news for map developers who can now use Landsat 8 imagery without the cost of downloading and storing Landsat data.

Landsat is a partnership between the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and NASA that creates moderate-resolution (30 meter) satellite imagery of the Earth's land surface every 16 days. The imagery has been free to use since 2008. Now, thanks to AWS, developers can also avoid the cost of hosting the data.

An informative CartoDB animated map provides a nice visualization of how Landsat 8 Completes an Entire Picture of the World Every 16 Days. The map uses the new AWS Landsat data-set to show how Landsat captures fresh satellite imagery of the Earth's entire land mass over the course of 16 days.


If you want to explore the latest Landsat imagery in more detail you can view the newest imagery on Mapbox's Landsat-live. Landsat-live uses the latest Landsat 8 satellite imagery to provide a near real-time satellite view of the Earth at 30 meter resolution.

Because the map uses the most recent Landsat 8 satellite imagery many locations around the world will be affected by cloud cover. If you find your town is obscured by clouds you can always return to the map in 16 days time to see if the next pass of Landsat 8 has provided clearer imagery.

The Journey to Outer Space

Earlier this week we took a Journey to the Centre of the Earth with the BBC's interactive visualization of what lies beneath the Earth's surface.

Now it's time to take a journey into outer space with How Big is Space. Using the same scrolling technique How Big is Space takes you on a journey from Earth to the edge of the solar system. As you scroll down the page you will leave Earth's atmosphere, pass the planets and the Kuiper belt before passing Voyager 1 & 2 on your journey to the outer edges of our solar system.

As in the Journey to the Centre of the Earth the How Big is Space visualization uses a shifting scale. A display at the bottom of the screen updates with the current scale and a handy guide to the distance traveled.

Running Around the World

Tom Denniss took just 622 days to run around the world. You can follow Tom's journey on a Google Map, which traces his route from Australia to New Zealand, across North and South America, through Europe, Malaysia, and back to Australia.

The 40 Million Steps map includes photos, videos, audio clips, and blog entries that Tom made on his journey. As you progress through the map the track of Tom's route is added to the map. The categorized markers indicate locations with photos, videos, audio clips or blog entries taken on Tom's epic run across the globe.

Mapping Sunlight

This interactive map, from Dumpark, reveals the average number of hours of direct sunlight received each day throughout Wellington City in New Zealand.

The number of hours of direct sunlight is affected by topographical features, such as hills, and physical objects, such as buildings and trees. To measure the number of hours of direct sunlight Dunpark used data elevation models of Wellington City combined with building footprint data of the city.

The Hours of Direct Sunlight map shows the yearly average number of hours of direct sunlight received each day. It is also possible to view layers showing the average number of hours received in the mornings and in the afternoons.

This Map is a Work of Art

When I first posted about Divvy Trips last Saturday I claimed that it was as much an artistic statement as it was a map. It is now even more of a work of art. It's also now more of a map.

Divvy Trips is a beautiful animated mapped visualization of bike trips on the Divvy bike sharing network in Chicago. The map now includes circular map markers showing the position of bike docking stations and the option to add a street map to the animated visualization.

It also now contains a date control which allows you to select the day's rides that you wish to see visualized and a time display informing you of the time of day. Divvy Trips provides a great visualization of how the Divvy bike network is used over the course of the day. It also wouldn't look out of place hanging on the walls of MoMA.

The Israeli Knesset Election Map

This week the Likud party won a decisive victory in Israel’s general election. You can explore the results of the election at municipality level on this Google Map of the Israeli General Election.

If you select a region on the map you can view the results for each political party in the map sidebar. The map is in Hebrew only but is easy enough to follow. The colors represent the different political parties (blue - Likud, red - Zionist Union, dark green - Joint List, orange - Center Left). Once you select an area on the map you can view a list and pie chart showing the percentage of votes picked up by each of the political parties.

The Singles Map of the World

There seems to have been a bit of a recent trend to map where all the single men & women live in the USA. We now have a map which shows where single men and women live across the world.

The Singles Atlas uses the Google Maps API to visualize where in the world there are more single women and where there are more single men. The map provides a global choropleth view of the number of single men and women. This view includes a slide control which allows you to adjust the age range of the single people displayed on the map.

The map also includes the option to search within cities, to see the neighborhoods which have more single men or single women. The data displayed on the map comes from a wide range of sources, including country censuses and the statistics departments of different countries around the globe.

Mapping Support for Gun Control

ISideWith has created an interesting map showing support for gun control laws across the USA.

ISideWith asks visitors to its website to answer a series of questions to discover which political candidate best matches their personal beliefs. One of the questions visitors to the site are asked is 'Do you support increased gun control. The Support for Gun Control Google Map breaks down the answers given to this question at different administrative levels.

You can view the results at state level. You can also enter a zip-code into the map to view the level of support for gun control at the local level. I haven't examined the results in any depth but it appears at first glance that the results show a general trend of more support for gun control in large cities and less support for gun control in more rural areas.