person:frank jacobs

Welcome to Planet Voronoi, a Capital Place | Big Think
▻http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/657-welcome-to-planet-voronoi-a-capital-place

http://assets4.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/55099/primary/CROPPED_VORONOI.png

Planet Voronoi looks almost exactly like our own Earth. The continents are all in the same place. The number of countries hasn’t changed, nor has the location of their capitals. But the international borders are all wrong. Interestingly wrong.

(images de Jason Davies, texte de Frank Jacobs)

#cartographie_étrange #frontières #capitales

An imaginary town becomes real, then not - true story

▻http://n.pr/1jwYIVi

In the 1930s (I learned from Frank Jacobs’ excellent blog, Strange Maps), there was no town on that stretch between Rockland and nearby Beaverkill — just a dirt road. This wasn’t an important or often visited place, which made it a perfect spot for what’s called a “paper town,” or a map “trap.”

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/03/14/agloe164-highlight_wide-4423f805f479575f6d4d388ba0d53241ed1fed08-s800-c85.jpg

#cartographie #maps #easter_eggs #map_trap

Strange Maps Posts, Cartographic curiosities

About Strange Maps
by Frank Jacobs
Frank Jacobs loves maps, but finds most atlases too predictable. He collects and comments on all kinds of intriguing maps—real, fictional, and what-if ones—and has been writing the Strange Maps blog since 2006, first on WordPress and now for Big Think. His map “US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs” has been viewed more than 587,000 times. An anthology of maps from this blog was published by Penguin in 2009 and can be purchased from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

▻http://assets1.bigthink.com/system/idea_thumbnails/52015/standard/inlandsea4.jpg?1375320533

►http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps

#cartographie #carte #Frank_Jacobs #blog

Cartographie Histoire Brésil

Posted on Strange Map’s blog

The Phantom Island of Brazil | Strange Maps | Big Think

►http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/572-the-phantom-island-of-brazil

Frank Jacobs on July 3, 2012

Map-readers knew about Brazil long before America was discovered; but they didn’t think of it as a giant country on a distant continent. Brazil, also known by the name Hy-Brasil [1], was a small, mist-shrouded island in the North Atlantic, not too far off Ireland’s west coast.

Only, Hy-Brasil never existed. Shown here on a Mercator map dating from 1623, it was one of many phantom islands that haunted marine cartography, sometimes for centuries, before more accurate observational techniques (and ultimately satellite photography) eliminated them all.

Can A Town Divided Against Itself Stand ? - NYTimes.com

By FRANK JACOBS

►http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/can-a-town-divided-against-itself-stand

Abraham Lincoln, what does he know? A house divided against itself can stand, and will do so for decades, no sweat. Berlin, Nicosia, Jerusalem — heck, even Kansas City: all are cities that have been split in two by borders. All are still around. But if being split down the middle doesn’t mean the end of the world, it ain’t fun either. A house divided is a house of pain, with degrees of inconvenience varying from administrative annoyance to frequent lethality.

Frontière Urban Villes Conflits

#frontières #murs

►http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/in-praise-of-borders/?hp

In Praise of Borders

October 24, 2011, 8:45 pm

By FRANK JACOBS

Borderlines

Borderlines explores the global map, one line at a time.

This is the first installment of Borderlines, a series devoted to the history, appearance and significance of borders.

As a teenager, I was delighted to discover on the map of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth the name of the city where I was born. Not the same town, of course, but another, fantastical place with the same name. Nevertheless, the map gave me options. I could be a native of Bree, a small, unremarkable town in northeastern Belgium [1]. Or I could hail from that other Bree, equally small and unremarkable, but at least located in a world brimming with magic, danger and adventure — not to mention some spectacular scenery. In contrast, my home province of Limburg, in Belgium’s northeast, is generally flat, and on the whole bereft of elves, orcs, hobbits and wizards [2]. So I spent many hours exploring Tolkien’s world, dreaming up adventures of my own in the far corners of that map.