From C. F. Beautemps-Beaupré, Reconnoissance hydrographique des ports du Royaume d’Italie situés sur les côtes du Golphe de Venise (1806). NSK. An online exhibition by the National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) focuses on an atlas of Adriatic sea ports commissioned by Napoleon after the French Empire’s annexation of Italy in 1805. The Library’s English-language announcement: Commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte himself and marked by exceptional scientific and artistic value, the 1806 atlas consists of charts and topographical views of the eastern part of Croatia’s Adriatic coastline, w ..read more

An exhibition of maps from the personal collection of our friend Alejandro Polanca Masa is taking place at the municipal auditorium of his home town of Guardo, Spain. Free admission, runs until September 15. Alejandro writes (link in Spanish): “Quien pase por allí, puede disfrutarlo gratuitamente. Y mola, porque he seleccionado mapas desde el siglo XVIII hasta 1960, todos originales, que se pueden ver y tocar, incluyendo atlas y libros sobre cartografía. ¿Te lo vas a perder ..read more

Porto Alegre on 8 May 2024 (Landsat 8/OLI) Devastating floods in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, have killed at least 95 people and displaced 150,000 more. NASA Earth Observatory posted the above Landsat 8 image of downtown Porto Alegre (population: 1.5 million), as well as MODIS images of the overflowing Jacuí River. CNN has before-and-after Maxar imagery of Porto Alegre ..read more

Carl Sack, activist, cartographer, professor and NACIS stalwart, died last week of a sudden cardiac arrest at the age of 41. Here is his memorial page. On Mastodon, Daniel Huffman wrote: “I will have more words about him later on, but for now I will say that Carl was a beloved educator and member of the NACIS community, and a valued friend. It’s still pretty hard to believe he’s gone ..read more

Earlier this year my ad revenue increased nearly tenfold. This obviously led me to conclude that it’s probably time to stop relying on ad revenue, and try moving to a model based on reader support. If you’d like to understand how I came to that contradictory conclusion, read on; otherwise the tl;dr is that you can now support The Map Room via monthly payments at both Ko-fi and Patreon. When monthly payments reach a certain level (see below), I will discontinue ads on this site. In March my ad revenue basically quadrupled, and in April it nearly doubled again ..read more

BBC News: “Russia is causing disruption to satellite navigation systems affecting thousands of civilian flights, experts say. […] The persistent disruption led Finland’s flag carrier Finnair to suspend daily flights to Estonia’s second largest city, Tartu, for a month, after two of its aircraft had to return to Helsinki due to GPS interference. ¶ Tartu Airport relies solely on GPS, unlike most larger airports which have alternative navigation systems that allow aircraft to land even if the signal is lost ..read more

North Yorkshire council announced that apostrophes would be removed from street signs to avoid running into problems with geographical systems; as the Grauniad reports, this move has “provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike.” Okay, several things. One, the standard being cited, BS 7666, from what I can gather (I can’t actually find BS 7666 online, just several guides to it), doesn’t ban apostrophes and other punctuation marks, it just deprecates them as a best practice. Two, removing apostrophes breaks Irish names—no O’Reilly Street, for example—and as such in an English context is ..read more

Some Pokémon Go players are apparently adding fake beaches to OpenStreetMap in order to improve their chances of catching a new pokémon. The pokémon in question was added to the game last month and only spawns in beach areas. Pokémon Go uses OpenStreetMap as its base map. It’s not hard to see how players can cheat by adding natural=beach nodes where no actual beaches exist, and indeed beaches started turning up in odd places in the game—and in the real-world map as well, because the game uses real-world map data, and that’s what gamers have been messing with. Receipts at the OSM community foru ..read more

Custom route creation and topographic maps are rumored to be coming to Apple Maps in the next iOS release, iOS 18. Google Maps has had custom routes since approximately forever; on Apple Maps we’ve had to choose between Apple’s generated routes without being able to edit them. Google Maps announced updates focusing on EVs (EV charger search, nearby chargers in the in-car map, suggested charging stops, forecast energy consumption) and sustainability (lower-carbon travel options rolling out in 15 cities, estimated flight emissions). Also, Street View came to Kazakhstan last month. Meanwhile, Ben ..read more

It used a vector display and cassette tapes for data storage. It was too early for GPS; instead it invented a process called “augmented dead reckoning” that snapped the car’s position back to the known road grid whenever you made a turn. It was the Etak Navigator, and it launched back in 1985. James Killick explores its history in the ninth installment of his series, “12 Map Happenings that Rocked our World,” with some surprises in how it influenced later GPS-based navigation systems (among other things, Etak eventually ended up in the hands of Tele Atlas). See also this 2015 article in Fast C ..read more