This is a NASA-created map, showing the moonwalk plotted over a soccer field. There's one plotted over a baseball diamond, as well.

I found these as part of an NPR story on communicating the scale of things (e.g. floods in Pakistan, the true size of Africa) through design. It's worth a look.

Here’s a much abbreviated version of the scenario:

Imagine receiving a little wooden box that looks like it holds a treasure. The box cannot be opened. There is a button on top and an LCD display. You press the button and the display reads, "This is attempt 1 of 50. Distance: 55km. *Access Denied* Powering off...". The next time you press the button, in a different location: "Attempt 2 of 50" and a different "Distance" reading. And so on, until you’ve figured out that the box, equipped with a GPS inside, is leading you to one specific location where the box can be opened and the treasure inside it claimed.

His full writeup is here.

Via Cultureby

Check out this minimalist USA map by Patrick Mahoney.

Nifty.

Thanks to Zero Hedge and Megan for altering us to some funny info design by Yanko Tsvetkov. Check out this sample of Tsvetkov's maps of Europe, and then don't fail to check out the rest.

Europe according to America

Europe according to France

Europe according to Italy

Europe according to Britain

Each dot represents where 25 people of the same race live. Caucasians are shown in red; African Americans, blue; Hispanics, orange; and Asians, green.

New York City

Detroit, Michigan

Thanks to Coolhunting for pointing out an interesting new book "Cartographies of Time", by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, which "dissect[s] and track[s] the methods people used when attempting to record the passage of time."

Some examples:

"Relying on symbolism rather than scholastic precision to recreate a moment in time, Johannes Buno helped redesign and redefine the timeline."

Katie Lewis, 201 Days (2007).

"Lewis used pushpins to represent significant 'sense events' and connected them together with red thread. The result is a precise yet jumbled representation of Lewis' bodily experiences. "

The following map shows the flow of carbon emissions in traded goods, and which countries are major exporters and importers of carbon emissions.

As GOOD reports: “When someone in the States buys shoes that were made in China, the carbon emitted in their production gets added to China's tally, despite the fact that the shoes get exported.”

The visualization and study shows that looking only at domestic emissions is pretty misleading and doesn’t capture the true emissions caused by particular country’s total activity. It also makes a case for changing the way we think about allocating responsibility for products to consumers. Read the full story.