An Australian demographic researcher has a fun side gig that has accumulated 225k followers on Facebook.
“Simon Shows You Maps” is a simple page that sprinkles your social media with all kinds of tiny eureka moments, all put together and carefully explained by Simon Kuestenmacher.
Co-Founder and Director at The Demographics Group, Simon posts a map of a continent, the world, a country, or a city, with all sorts of curious details, every 5 hours or so.
For example, Simon shared this map 4 days ago to help those being eaten to know if they’re being eaten by a crocodile or an alligator, based on the ranges of the animals!
In this map, he shows his native Australia divided by vegetation.
There are more offerings every day, and they aren’t all about the natural world—many involve business trends and demographic details as well—all expressed through maps.
For hundreds of years, maps have deeply influenced how we perceive the world, mostly because the concept of the continents layered over a sphere is difficult to express in two dimensions.
But the challenge of depicting vast territories on small spaces goes way beyond just the standard (and deeply flawed) Mercator Projection maps that we all recognize from our elementary school classrooms. Indeed people have been struggling with this problem since Roman times.
The Tabula Peutingeriana, a map of the cursus publicus, or public Roman road network, was copied by monks in the early Medieval Period onto a 6.75-yard-long scroll, on which essentially the entire world from Spain to India is depicted as simply going east.
Maps are exceptional tools for learning and discovery, and looking at those overlayed by geological forces or topographical features, compared to political boundaries, can reveal so much more about the world.
Simon shares all this and more and is worth a follow
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