I love maps.
I love them more the older I get.
It’s possible that’s because maps give perspective and wisdom comes from perspective that I have a hankering for them. We are are supposed to get more wise as we get older.
And I am definitely getting older.
Or maybe I just like them for the story they can tell.
For instance looks at this one: What do you call the night before Halloween?
I didn’t know anyone in the US had a name for the night before Halloween but apparently something is going on New Jersey, New York and Michigan on that night. Who knew.
(A stat student at North Carolina, Joshua Katz, came up with this as well as a whole series of maps that display regional dialect variation in the United States. Among Joshua’s maps you can also find a lot of other really interesting visual depictions at VisSys that have nothing to do with whether you say coke or soda.)
How about this one? See this map (from MapMuse)? The little blue square