[HN Gopher] A cartographer drew a freehand map of North America ...
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A cartographer drew a freehand map of North America (2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 100 points
Date : 2023-12-22 07:32 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| throwup238 wrote:
| I really like this article but I don't know why!
|
| _> Melbourne-based Anton Thomas drew North America by hand_
|
| Why North America instead of Australia, m8? Potential market
| size? That's so American :-)
|
| _> a freelance cartographer_
|
| What the hell is a freelance cartographer, what does he do, and
| who are his colleagues? Buster Bluth and a bunch of Earth
| observation satellites? That's one competitive market.
|
| _> I was working as a cook in the old port of Montreal. And in
| classic Montreal fashion, we had littered the apartment with
| things we found on the side of the road. And one was this big
| fridge. It had all these rusty, brown stains on it. My housemate
| Douglas, from Zimbabwe, had been urging me to draw him something
| as a memento, since he knew I was going to go back to New
| Zealand. He had painted the fridge with white house paint to
| cover up the stains and I thought, "What about the fridge?"_
|
| That's it, I'm moving to Australia.
|
| I only collect maps that predate the steam engine but I would
| love to buy a huge wall size print!
| defrost wrote:
| > Why North America instead of Australia, m8?
|
| * He'd already just completed an Australiasian map,
|
| * There's 23 countries in North America Vs. just the one in
| Australia (especially now that Prince Leonard of the
| Principality of Hutt River and Princess Shirley have passed on)
| .. borders are catnip to some cartographers.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Montreal is in Canada, you know.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Don't tell them that!
| ismokedoinks wrote:
| Same thing that any freelance graphic designer or drafter would
| do. I've made maps for landscape architects and law firms
| before, for instance.
| samstave wrote:
| > _a freelance cartographer_
|
| This guy doesn't fold to Big Map. Fjords his own path, climbs
| his own mountains and is not fenced into you're completely
| plain and flat plateau of mediocrity you call "cartography"
|
| No, this man is a pioneer, finding excitement around every
| butte, jetty and isthmus!
|
| He peaks when you valley, he glades when you marsh, and he is a
| fertile alluvial flood-plain to your cold, damp peat-marsh of a
| life. A bread-basket of agricultural abundance and agrarian
| love-making, the seat of civilization! to your barren Gobi
| desert of a life.
|
| Carter the Cartographer!
|
| Otherwise known as MAP MAN!
| iudqnolq wrote:
| > For Thomas, now--for the first time in his life--a freelance
| cartographer, who tours the world exhibiting the North America
| map, geography is a bit of a homecoming
|
| Seems like the surrounding context answers your question. This
| freelance cartographer is someone who supports himself by
| talking about a cool map he drew.
| matthberg wrote:
| The cartographer's website has a bunch more stuff from him and
| some better photos of the map itself:
|
| https://www.antonthomasart.com/the-north-american-continent....
| mkl wrote:
| Here's his website: https://www.antonthomasart.com/
|
| South Asia and Australasia: https://www.antonthomasart.com/south-
| asia.html
|
| North America: https://www.antonthomasart.com/the-north-american-
| continent....
|
| World: https://www.antonthomasart.com/wild-world.html
| voidfunc wrote:
| Very cool piece of work. Little bit weird that Springfield gets
| to be the other illustrated city in Massachusetts when Worcester
| is the second biggest city in the entire region after Boston.
| interloxia wrote:
| The Simpsons is culturally more relevant for an Aussie, and I
| would assume a Kiwi, than whatever is not Boston.
| constantly wrote:
| There must be at least 40 Springfields in the USA. Given
| Massachusetts's early statehood, I wouldn't be surprised if
| Springfield, MA was the "first" Springfield in USA, but are
| you thinking the artist illustrated all the Springfields
| because of the Simpsons?
| Anechoic wrote:
| It's the first, largest and (unfortunately) poorest
| Springfield.
|
| (I'm writing this from Springfield right now)
| zamadatix wrote:
| Springfield MO is larger. About as poor, but Springfield
| MA ekes that out still.
| Anechoic wrote:
| Yep, you're correct, I was using old numbers -
| Springfield MA lost some population while Springfield MO
| grew. But we still have Dr. Suess!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Suddenly I have an urge to make a Voronoi map of the US
| using each Springfield as the capital of its own state.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| How close are they to other named places? Back in the 1990s my
| father was astonished to see his little hometown in Canada on a
| map of North America but it is in an area with few other
| settlements so even though it isn't a seat of any level of
| government, it's still the "major" population center for the
| area. Meanwhile around Toronto cities 50x larger didn't make
| the map.
| Someone wrote:
| Just as deciding what roads to show on a map, deciding what
| labels to place and where on a map is a hard problem. There may
| not be sufficient room for it in the location where you want to
| place it. If so, do you move it 'a bit', maybe also move
| another label, which means having to move another, etc. or do
| you leave it out?
|
| Worcester likely is too close to Boston to have room for it at
| the chosen level of detail.
|
| For what it's worth, when I zoom in on Massachusetts in Apple
| Maps (which seems to have finer grained zoom levels than
| OpenStreetMap.org or maps.Google.com), the order in which
| cities appear is
|
| - Boston
|
| - Springfield
|
| - New Bedford
|
| - Worcester
| jamincan wrote:
| I would love to buy a map like that, but at roughly 4x4 ft, it's
| unfortunately more than I could fit in my apartment.
| marmight wrote:
| It is labeled correctly on his map, but he is recorded as saying
| something incorrect in the article:
|
| > Also Baffin Island in Greenland. So few people have been to
| that part of the world.
|
| Baffin Island is in Canada. Since this would be something silly
| for a cartographer to get wrong, I wonder if he didn't actually
| say "Baffin Island _and_ Greenland " and his response was
| incorrectly transcripted.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Too bad tectonic shifts move about the same speed as the growth
| of a fingernail (some places even more). Land surveyors and will
| never go out of business. GNSS cannot possibly handle the
| resolution of a Multistation and theodolite.
| colineartheta wrote:
| (Current) Geodesist and Professional Land Surveyor (formerly
| employed as; license retained) here chiming in. While I
| appreciate the sentiment that we will never go out of business,
| I'd like to proffer a couple points related to this statement
| and the more technical one that followed (they're integrally
| linked). While tectonic plates do move more than one might
| assume, it is actually those same surveyors who model this
| movement utilizing Continuously Operating Reference Stations
| (CORS) (and other technologies) that are strategically placed
| and constantly collecting positional data - the National
| Geodetic Survey, in my opinion, is one of the most remarkable
| and important scientific agencies the USA maintains. Land
| surveying measurements rely upon the datum's and (soon)
| projections NGS publishes, which indeed does account for these
| movements, provided the user correctly applies the velocity
| movement and temporal changes to the epoch desired. However, it
| is less this movement that keeps surveyors employed and far
| more their legal expertise that does. Land Surveyors are the
| front line maintainers, interpreters, and, in a sense, the
| creators/subdividers of the cadastral system responsible for
| private property. So long as their are (on-the-ground) boundary
| disputes over land and title, a surveyor will be needed.
| Coordinates may one day be the controlling aspect of those
| boundaries, but unfortunately that is not for the land
| surveyors to decide (I digress...a simple comment on this forum
| could never account for the nuances needed in that discussion).
|
| Also, apologies, but a correction: a multi-station DOES
| incorporate GNSS along with a theodolite (and Electronic
| Distance Measurer, which, when all three are combined is
| marketed as a "multi station"). I believe you meant a Total
| Station is more precise, which is a combination theodolite/EDM,
| excluding GNSS, and which does, locally, produce more precise
| standalone measurements though at the cost of being limited to
| direct line of sight. Each plays an integral part of survey
| field work and their application.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Thanks for your high quality response to my mediocre posting.
| I think our current maps are like a patchwork quilt made up
| of patches of high precision / high accuracy data sewn to
| high accuracy / low precision basemaps. Surveyors will use a
| 'Horizontal/Vertical Datum of the day' to keep things
| relevant to maps but in reality, their scope of work ends at
| xy = 5000,5000 and that's it (relative coordinates). Most
| people I've met aren't keeping up with NOAA. But nothing will
| come close to the bearings and distances (error of closure)
| to what a totalstation can generate in their arsenal. In the
| end, a Civil Engineer or GIS tech will be creating that
| mosaic out of the surveyor data and store it in a retrievable
| format for county records. The data is stored but there's
| still a never reconcilable difference between survey data and
| mapping data.
|
| Thus TotalStations with GNSS seem oxymoronic to me just as a
| GPS with a laser range finder is. There is a huge opportunity
| (for those interested) to build a surveyor-grade worldmap.
| addaon wrote:
| If the artist happens to be reading this, and would like a place
| to stay in southern Utah, give a shout.
| cvarjas wrote:
| In my seventh grade history/social sciences class two of our main
| projects were to draw physical maps (no political borders) of
| Africa and North America. They were drawn on blank paper a few
| feet in each direction, and students would generally draw a faint
| grid to help with accuracy.
|
| We were graded on the number of physical features included, and
| how accurately the coasts, rivers, mountains, etc. were drawn.
|
| I wonder if anyone still teaches with similar projects. It was a
| great way to learn in detail about the surface of the Earth.
| xprn wrote:
| Why does the headline read like an Onion article
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(page generated 2023-12-24 23:01 UTC)