There aren’t too many things to be proud about as a Minnesotan. We are a small state population wise.

There’s Bob Dylan – but he ditched us for the East Coast at a young age. There is Prince, but let’s be honest: few people pulled out Prince albums the decade leading up to his premature death.

There are US ice hockey players, stellar Nordic skiers, Olympic curling champions, but Canada (deservedly) gets more credit for winter sports things – even though its close as to whether a majority of Minnesotans live further north than a majority of Canadians.

So imagine my surprise and glee when I saw National Cellophane Tape Day on my calendar for this week. Cellophane tape was invented, patented, and produced by Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M). (The same company that invented and dispersed forever chemicals around the world, thereby ensuring Minnesota is truly never forgotten!)

Yes, you can still use staples. I met one renowned academic cartographer who still only uses staples to this day. But 3M Scotch tape is so much more practical. (Beware: Amazon Basics cellophane tape does not stand up by comparison in my personal experience. Buy name brand or suffer the consequences. It never pays to be frugal when buying cellophane!)

Today’s map tries to mend the world with cellophane. It was a bit of an experiment. If you unwind the roll (angling it and changing the latitude) you’ll see what happens. The roll lass a full minute. Good luck!

View map here

Web Mapper GPT Prompt

Hi there,

I’d like to make a silly map for National Cellaphane Tape Day.

What I’m picturing:
– an orthographic, 3D globe-like Earth with natural earth-esque hillshading and landcover or similar
– a giant roll of tape that the user can move up and down vertically to the right side of the earth
– an earth that begins to spin and get covered in the tape, which is automatically applied, based on where the user has moved the tape roll vertically. It’s mostly see through, but overlapping layers will make it slightly less transparent. After 20 – 30 seconds of coating, the map spinning stops and the roll runs out of tape.
– Fixing the world’s problems: more tape than there is in the galaxy.
– For everything else, there is 3M Scotch (i.e., Celluphane) Tape (use correct spellings).

Can you come up with a map that does this and an animation and create a simple (barely interactive) tape roll to make my vision become reality?