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The newest essays, interviews, and features from Big Think.
At last, the worlds of cartography, vexillology and population statistics meet! This map was inspired by earlier maps of the US, with its states renamed for countries with a similar GDP […]
If there were only 100 people in Ireland, 55 of them would be speaking only English, 39 of them would be speaking mainly English, and occasionally Irish, 2 of them […]
n Fixing her regional loyalty in indelible ink on skin, Julia had a map of Portland, ME tattooed on her shoulder. A comparison with the more conventional map on the […]
How long does it take to travel from London to elsewhere? The answer is provided by this map, showing a set of expanding circles centered on the British capital, each […]
The Bir Tawil Triangle is a desert of sand and rocks on the border between Egypt and the Sudan. It is also officially the most undesired territory in the world. […]
n How would you eliminate almost half the planet by subtracting just 5% from it? This map shows you how: delete the countries that constitute the bottom 5% of global […]
In geopolitical theory, the term ‘Heartland’ refers to the area between the Volga and Yangtze rivers, and between the Himalaya and the Arctic regions. According to H.J. Mackinder’s 1904 article […]
n Safe, neutral, boring Switzerland is a strangely fertile source of curious cartography. Previously, this blog has zoomed in on wartime contingency plans for a Schweizer réduit (#109), Jules Verne’s […]
The king of this country of giants thought of humans as vermin
A decade and a half later, the plan sounds even more improbable than at its inception
The Farto was just one of over three hundred ships to meet its end on this obscure, crescent-shaped wandering sandbank
America's demographic centre of gravity has been moving steadily eastward for over 200 years
Portugal's inferiority complex leads to a very curious comparison
Plato's fabled continent, as depicted by Kircher in the 17th century, looks a bit familiar…
An obscure but ancient branch of loom art, weaving current events into carpets
Some places exert a morbid attraction on the terminally disenchanted – like light pole 69 on the Golden Gate Bridge
Centuries of isolation left the Japanese with limited knowledge of world geography
If extraterrestrials were monitoring American television, here's what they would be watching. In the Fomalhaut system, for example, maybe everybody's crazy about Miami Vice.
n A pene-enclave is almost an enclave in the same way that a peninsula* almost is an island. But only on a strictly lexical level. If we descend from the […]