Author Archives: Ian Muehlenhaus

International Body Painting Day (189/365)

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Personally, I’ve never been one for body painting. But alas, there is a day for it. And it was a good excuse to do something a little more lighthearted. Plus, there weren’t many other options on this day, as I recall.

I live in a pine forest. We have lots of birds flying about – and a lot of very large wild turkeys hammering on our windows at their own reflections. If you don’t believe turkeys and windows don’t mix well, check out what they did to the entryway at Science Hall in Madison, Wisconsin, when I worked there.

So as I was walking to my garage and I saw my dog pounce at a robin which, rightfully, freaked out and flew right above my head, a thought entered my brain… remember, thoughts and ideas are just datasets in the quantum verse that use humans as their medium for diffusion in my world-view…

I thought: what about a bird’s-eye view of a human head painted with a stereographic projection? (I opted out of placing a target on it; though, a bird has targeted me in the past with some success.)

The image would presumably be a male, I figured. Though I know female-pattern baldness is increasing in western countries, fewer women have shaved heads to paint, and the ones that don’t are a bit sensitive about it – ask Chris Rock! I also asked for a caucasian male, because I am white and understand the issues with painting and racism broadly.

And already, one of the easiest, most mundane daily maps was turning into a social faux-pas summersault. When imagining a bird crapping on a map on the top of my head, I had no idea there were so many human-constructed, non-tangible, things to consider about the design, worry about getting in trouble for, and consider. So much for a one-off, silly-a** map for International Body Painting Day?!

I didn’t, but I do now. I’ll tell you right now: this is the last map I ever make for this day. Full-stop.

So the “easiest” map I created this week, using a simple ChatGPT Image generator, was also the most difficult in many ways.

I attempted to steel myself for any potential trolling and cancelling by asking my kids to look at the image and try to rip me for anything they can find. Alas, they only gave it a half-hearted effort; they don’t like the brown shoes and said I have a much larger nose and hairier ears than the LLM-generated dude. Fair enough.

Fortunately for the anonymous troll that keeps peppering Ken every day we post a map, my kids don’t critique maps – because they don’t care about cartography as much as I – or apparently the anonymous online troll – do.

So anonymous troll, please let Ken know what’s just a little wrong with this map. I know it’s missing at least one country. Can you find it?! 🙂 I hope it makes you feel better, even though it reminds me of darkroom cartographers ridiculing early, dot-matrix print maps, saying:

“See! Hahaha, digital cartography is not the future. I will not replace, skilled hand-drawn cartography work.”

 

I don’t know if any actually thought this, but if they did, I’m pretty sure it didn’t bode well for their future careers.

So without further ado, happy International Body Painting Day!

View the map image full-size here.

ChatGPT Image Creator Prompt

I would like to create a map image to celebrate world body-painting day. I’m imagining a photo-realistic image top-down on a caucasion’s man’s bald head oval. It should be painted like a stereographic world map using six unique colors. It should look well done and quite accurate (though generalized). Each major country should be colored differently from its neighbors. Oceans should be NC Tar Heel blue. The map should be centered on the north pole. Antarctica and arctic ice should be white. In the upper left, put a prevalent but non-dominant H3 or H4 style heading title, sans-serif font (e.g., Helvetica), from left-to-right: “Bird’s-eye view” In the lower-right, in small and subtle font place a label: CC: 2026, #365DaysOfMaps Include the person’s shoulders, neck, maybe the tip of his shoes or whatever would be in a photo taken directly above a bald person’s head. The background should be completely white – as though the photo were taken in a professional studio. The person should be wearing a white, polo-knit shirt and blue jeans, which shouldn’t be very visible, obviously, but for the parts viewable that is what it should be. Brown shoes like Born or Danskos if any part of the shoes are available. Thank you!

World Kiswahili Language Day (188/365)

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My good friend, Fuad, from middle school in Beijing was from Tanzania (with Omani citizenship). He spoke Swahili, as did another friend of mine, Evelyn, from Uganda.

Swahili is the best sounding language I’ve yet heard. (Yes, personal preference, but the intonation, word sounds, and cadence are absolutely beautiful to my ears.) Part of me has always wanted to start learning it just for fun. I realize, however, that I probably won’t – too many mapping tools to make, digital board games to design, and baseball to watch. Besides, they should have nano-chip implants before I die that automatically allow me to interpret any language as I hear it – I’m excited for this day!

Even if I don’t learn the language, I was happy to see there is a day for Kiswahili, which translates to “language Swahili”, and hence the name “Swahili” is typically used in English to avoid any Rio Grande River quirkiness.

I decided to create a dataset of where it is spoken natively, where the diaspora is (e.g., Oman), etc. I used Spatial Data Doctor to create the spatial dataset, including CSV and geojson of the countries.

I then asked Web Mapper to create a map with the datasets.

Finally, for fun, I had a new tool I’ve been working on and will release in the near future, a map design schema creator, create a Kiswahili design schema. It’s now available at the Prompt Cartography website.

View map here

Web Mapper Prompt

# Kiswahili Language Day Map

Hi. I would like to make a very stylish and respectful map showing the location and prevelance of the Kiswahili Language in Africa and the Middle East, etc.

I am attaching some datasets I have created regarding the language. Please take a look at them and the Readme file to come up with some good ideas about how best to represent these datasets.

We will iterate from there. Thanks!

I am also creating a new true LLM agent – very early stages – that I will create for others to download and embed in their own workflows and run with their own LLMs at some point. I’ve given it a really inspiring prototype name: Web Mapper 2.0 Beta. 🙂

This one chose to use a stereographic project, which was cool, but the layout and aesthetic direction still need a lot of work in my mind. Always something to do. I include a snapshot of the result below, though, just for fun.

Malawi Independence Day (187/365)

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Today is Malawi Independence Day. On July 6, 1964, Malawi became an independent country. Before this it was a British protectorate referred to as Nyasaland.

I thought it would be nice to make an app celebrating a country who far more recently broke free from British colonial tyranny than another country that did several days ago.

I learned a lot producing this map. I hope others do too. It’s a map of historic and important figures in the Malawi independence movement and the independent state post-independence. Though the list is not exhaustive, and omissions are inevitable, the dataset includes 60 important people over the past 60 or so years.

I created the dataset with Spatial Dataset Doctor GPT. Then designed the map with Web Mapper.

Happy Independence Day, Malawi!

 

View Map Here

Dataset Doctor Prompt (www.webmapgpt.com)

I would like to make a dataset of important and famous individuals in the history of independent Malawi and/or in the history of traditional, indigenous Malawi, and/or as a leader in the independence movement.

Continue reading →

Isle of Man Tynwald Day (186/365)

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As a continuous government, the country that celebrated its independence yesterday is fairly old. But not as old as Isle of Man! Not even close.

Tynwald Day is July 5th. Tynwald Day is the Isle of Man’s national day, marking the annual open-air sitting of the Manx Parliament at Tynwald Hill in St. John’s.

It’s a centuries-old tradition rooted in Norse custom, making it the site of the longest unbroken parliament in the world.

Admittedly, I did not know much about it before I saw it on the list this week, but I thought it would be good to spread the love among the different independence days this week. And this one is epic – over 1000 continuous years of parliament and going!

I used the Sanborn Fire Insurance map design schema from the Prompt Cartography website for this map.

I also had GIS Data Doctor write a turbooverpass-eu query to grab all the non-residential building footprints on the island to see how it would style them. You can turn those on in the Layers panel. Admittedly, this map is a little simple. It was more about experimenting a bit with data hunting and scraping while I hide in my garage under a barrage of fireworks going off. 🙂

Happy Tynwald Day, Isle of Man! And enjoy the long weekend when you get Monday off from work, which is the official day-off for the holiday this year, because it falls on Sunday.

Click to view map

Initial WebMapGPT Prompt

Hi. Please take a look at the attached datasets.

Please create a map using the web_mapper_directive.json schema and the attached Sanborn-style design-schema.

The map should be mobile friendly (phones first) but can use different CSS to provide a view with more whitespace on a laptop if it will enhance communication in those contexts. Thank you. Please stop and let me know if you have any questions before you proceed with making the map but after you have read the map plan and looked at the available datasets. Appreciate it!

US Independence Day (185/365)

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The United States of America (USA) is 250-years old today. The country is now nearly post-geriatric (joining only a few other countries for sticking around this long, such as the Swiss). I would argue its foundational institutions are showing some joint wear recently; others might be forgiven if they opined the country has not entered terminal dementia status.

I would argue… but that’s not why I’m here today. Today I’m posting a map for US Independence Day.

If there are two things I’ve noticed observing teenage Americans, it’s that many are completely naive to the larger world around them aside from what they see on formerly PRC-controlled TikTok or tech-bro-controlled US social-media feeds, which means… they have a more warped and bias perspective of the world than LLM you’ll meet. And they often don’t know much about the US either – more on that toward the end.

But first, because I can’t help but digress… It truly vexes me that in all the discussions I see online about the dangers of LLMs increasing and promoting hidden biases, few if anyone has had the guts to confess that their children and many citizens are no different than the LLMs.

Our kids consume our biases – heck, they are essentially preprogrammed by us through mimicry at a young age and are then funneled institutional and corporate bias non-stop as soon as they are exposed to any type of media. (And yes, that includes Sesame Street. Puppet idolatry is a real thing!) Once teenagers are exposed to social media, your kids essentially turn into sponges soaking up a surfeit of garbage data and all the inherent biases gazzillionaires and pseudo-intellectuals provide. In turn, like trusty LLM agents, they spread a ton of their teen hallucinations to their peers.

I guess what I’m saying is: it may behoove all of us to think a bit more critically before we go around criticizing LLMs for doing things we have been doing ourselves as a species since the beginning of time. Hallucinating… you should listen to my niece spread rumors about Bill Gates dropping poisonous ticks from airplanes at a family reunion… After all, she “researched it” on YouTube.

So let’s “stop othering LLMs!”

(Very tempting to create t-shirts to hand out at conferences.)

LLMs are a silicone reflection of us as a species – based on a very large, though not complete, sample size. And we our species offers us a lot of warts to look at.

Now that this is out of the way…

Alas, fortunately today is US independence day, not national reflection day.

And to celebrate, today I have two things to share – one a map app and one a geography/fact trivia game!

Why two?

Well, at first, I thought I’d make a quiz app about the US and its ranking in the world. I did create it, actually. That was the initial post and I’m retaining it below – a US trivia by guessing sort of game.

But then I realized, there wasn’t even a real map in the game. I had asked for a simple animated one in the original prompt and I could have spent several more prompts updating it, but I was trying a new tool instead of WebMapGPT, and well… if you see the map, you’ll understand why I thought: this isn’t going to cut it.

So instead… I created another web app – one hopefully useful for the teenagers I come across naive to the world and US. (Though, I really do think the kids will be alright; their thinking is just alien to me.)

Exhibit A: one of my daughters is really NOT into geography. (I kind of applaud her for being different from her parents. That’s not easy!)

So she hasn’t even bothered learning all the states and capitals yet. (I swear this is partially to terrorize her parents.)

It’s summer; it’s independence day. After seeing the map in the first app, I figured:

Why not create an app and game where she can learn them by the end of the summer?

So today, I also produced a video game map called, wait for it… “The US States and Capitals Game.”

I know… the title?! I’m running out of steam, though. I have to get some sleep before I make tomorrow’s map! 🙂  I an add a new name in the future.

The US States and Capitals Game

Play the game here

States and Capitals Original Prompt

I have created a dataset with state facts. I would like to create a map-based game for grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers called: “50 Nifty”. The goal is to teach students facts (very low on Bloom’s Taxonomy, but that’s okay) about different states.

There will be different games they can pick from. I would like you to look at the dataset and come up with some ideas that I may have missed, and no matter what, I’d like this app to built so it’s scalable.

Mandatory Game PoC:
– States and Capitals: a state is highlighted on an Albers equal area projection of the coterminous US with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left under CA, AZ, and NM. After a second for contextualization, the map will zoom to the state so it fills much of the display. Six state names are shown on buttons at the bottom of the screen in random order, with one being the state being shown. The student must guess.

If they click the correct state, a “ta-da” sound plays, the state fills with a solid “completed” color and a small star symbol appears on the map where the state capital is (this is probably best achieved with a state capitals point dataset?), and four capital city names are shown on the bottom of the screen in random order (one being correct). When they click the correct one a “ta-da” sound plays – all the ta-da sounds should be the same and should roughly mimic the energy and tone of the Duolingo sound when you get something right, please –  the star fills in with a prominent dark color (the same for all completed capitals) and the map zooms out to show the entire US again. Then, after a one or two second pause, the map zooms in to a state that has not yet been passed.

When a user guesses the wrong state name, play an empathetic bouncy noise that grade schoolers and middle-schoolers would like, not a buzz or anything… we want positive reinforcement! 🙂

Then show the state name and a random fact about it (not about the prison, though): e.g., the state bird, state flower, or perhaps the name of the largest city, or the state’s total population… etc. Random every time. Then zoom back out to the US and pause a second or two before zooming in on another random state. When a student misses a state, unless there are no other states left to randomly select, do not select that state again until at least six other states have been shown.

Once a state is filled in, the student is half done with the state. If they miss the capital city name, they aren’t completely done, however. You will eventually need to return to the state, and the student will have to pick the correct name again, and then they can be shown the capital city star again and try to answer that correctly.

Once the student has solved both a state’s name and its capital name, the state is considered completed and will never be randomly selected again. It is filled in. States that have not yet been identified remain a lighter color (pick a cool, modern, and kid friendly color aesthetic for this game). States where the student has successfully solved the state name but not the capital should be a color value between the lighter (not passed) and (passed states).

When the student completes all 50 states and capitals, I would like applause to and cheering to play and a big “Congratulations! You now know all the 50 Nifty States and Capitals!”

Add a share button and when clicked pop up a modal with the following share links to Instagram | Facebook | Snap | X | Bsky | LinkedIN | Copy. Also add a Cancel button. Once they close this modal or hit Cancel, show the opening splash screen (described below) again, please.

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Be sure to use a state geometry set that exludes the great lakes, please.

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Please design the game to look like a modern, mobile game. It should work on mobile devices first and foremost, as that is what kids use, as well as on Chromebooks without stuff going below the fold in teh browser window. Portrait mode is a must.

The capitals should only appear on the map when the states are zoomed in on, not on the national map.

Give the app an opening splash screen 50 Nifty (in a Day) and a subtitle “Ace that states and capitals test tomorrow morning!”

Underneath, have a button “How to Play” that opens a modal (wiht a close button in the upper-right) that explains how to play the game and how it works with a button to start the game at the bottom that will start it.

Next to the “How to Play” on the Splash Screen have a button that says “Play”, which will remove the splash screen and begin the game by showing the US and zooming in on a random state.

Add a third button called “Race the States”. When a user clicks this button, the game plays almost as normal, but instead they have 150 seconds to race through all the states and capitals. This version does not zoom across the map but instantly shows a zoomed in on state with its capital already showing. They must select the correct state, then capital, and then another random state (that they haven’t yet solved the state name and capital name for) is shown. They don’t have to wait for the zoom in and out. It’s a speed game. If they don’t solve it within 150 seconds, they get some optimistic, try again short music bit and they are shown the splash screen again.

Include an About modal and mention the game was created using WebMapGPT by Copyright 2026, Ian Muehlenhaus. Provide links to both webmapgpt.com and muehlenhaus.com.

In here please provide a list to the dataset CSV (for educators) and mention that the map used whatever geojson files were found and used to create the map, as well as D3, etc. Do not mention aything else that you normallyl do This will be an app for school kids to learn from, not a bonafide map.

Thank you! If you have any additional questions before you begin, please let me know!

Completed with two prompts total. Original and revision. Done. Woohoo! I love prompt cartography! 

 

USA Facts Game

If you have ever played any of the Wits & Wagers board games, it should feel familiar to you.

The premise is simple and can be played by anyone in the world. You don’t actually need to know facts about the US to play or do well; it’s all about common sense and conventional wisdom.

Turn-by-turn, you will be presented with a statement with a missing phrase or a fact about the US, along with four four (not necessarily correct) “answers” to choose from. Important: these aren’t necessarily the correct answer, just random answers that surveyed people have given.

Example

“The United States is the ______ most visited country in the world by non-domestic tourists.”

Answer options: | second | sixth | thirteenth | twenty-first | 

Your goal is to pick the value, of the four given, that is higher than the actual answer but closest to it.

Again, you want to be higher than the actual answer, because most of the facts are about rankings, and lower rankings are higher numbers.

Once you’ve selected which one you think is closest and higher, the answer will be shown.

Also important to note again: there is a great chance that none of the answers shown are correct. Your goal is to pick the answer closest to the factual answer that is higher.

If the answer to the above question was truthfully “fourth”, then you would score if you had picked “sixth”, because you didn’t overestimate the US ranking and picked the closest answer that is higher.

Keep going until you miss three times.

Every time you get one correct, you will score two points. Every time you get one wrong, you get minus-one point.

Also, please post your scores on social media and share the site to help celebrate and diffuse factual knowledge about the United States of America on its 250th Birthday!

P.S. Cousin Allie: I finally made a game that isn’t so hard it’s impossible to play. I listened to you at the family reunion. 🙂 Thanks for playing!

Important Note

Though this game was tangentially inspired by the board game, this map and all affiliated websites and maps have no affiliation with Wits & Wagers and merely shares a similar game mechanic. This map is not affiliated with that board game in anyway. 

View Geography Quiz Game Here

Codex Agent Prompt (I’m experimenting with agent building in OpenAI Codex… mapmaking is not its strength)

The United States of America (USA) is 250-years old today.

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Plastic Bag Free Day (184/365)

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At first I was worried that this day was sponsored by a plastic bag lobby group to hand out disposable plastic bags. Why did I think that?

The grammar seemed incorrect.

“Plastic Bag Free Day” doesn’t accurately suggest to me what the copywriters think it does. I believe they actually mean “Plastic Bag-Free Day,” or even more strictly… “Plastic-Bag-Free Day.”

Alas, I’ve had to adapt. Hyphens are the car signal/turn indicators of the English language, and just like the #@%* that don’t use blinkers when driving, a lot of people fail to use hyphens. I don’t have to join them, but I have to adapt to them.

Adding to the disappearance of hyphen use in the English language is the fact that many marketers and copywriting editors require they be avoided or removed. (The only place I still see them accurately used on a regular basis, honestly, is in The New Yorker, but I have to wonder how long they can hold out.)

Content written for consumption on the web (i.e., almost everything except, perhaps, The New Yorker) generally caters to lower common denominator of literacy to appeal to the broadest audience possible, generally to persuade people to buy something they don’t really need – in today’s case, not plastic bags; although, you’d be excused to think it was. What?!

Thus, inaccurate grammar is repeated and normalized, which is all fine and dandy when humans are only communicating amongst themselves but has the potential to lead to massive problems when interacting with computers. So prompt carefully, my friends! 🙂

What I’ve found is that prompting requires revisiting your natural language’s grammar rules, because even though you don’t have to always use accurate grammar, if you want to be specific (which good prompt cartographers do) and you want to make sure an LLM will understand what you are asking it to do without a lot of back and forth and iterations (which is always ideal) then grammar is fundamental to your entire workflow. Mark Monmonier was right when he said (I think he said this) that every person should have Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style handy. (Though now you can just have an LLM read a Cliff Notes version to you, I suppose. Blasphemy! :-))

So acting as today’s grammar police isn’t necessarilly a plug for the Prompt Cartography book, which goes into a lot of detail about prompting clearly for mapmaking, naturally.

Rather, I highly recommend everyone who is into prompt cartography buy this affordable guide, which I’ve bought for my daughters and quiz them on every night at dinner… okay, the bit after the last conjunction is a joke. These guides are available in many languages (but all manufactured in China, I noticed… shout out to yesterday’s map!). It may be the most useful $6 you’ll spend on prompting, particularly if you slept through grammar class, didn’t learn grammar in school (as my girls didn’t), or didn’t have a parent like my mum that almost washed my mouth out with soap if I said “I’m doing good.” (Okay, again, she didn’t do that. But she could almost glare the taste of soap into my mouth, I swear.)

However, the main point of today’s map has nothing to do with the anti-plastic-bag movement’s lack of a hyphen. Rather it is to shame Americans into doing something about how massively wasteful we are are when it comes to plastic bag consumption and waste. (Californians, Oregonians, Washingtonians(?), and Coloradans can hold their heads high, however.)

More importantly (from a news perspective), however:

This map presents the latest garage prompt cartography project I’ve been working on. (For one night… but it was still work.)

I realize some people that read this blog or use WebMapGPT, including those perhaps where I work, are under the impression that all of this stuff is part of my and Ken’s “day jobs” or our careers.

But no, this is a passion project. I’m so excited about prompt cartography that this is all done during weeknights, weekends, and vacation time. I spend my free time, outside of playing Euro games with local friends and badminton with my family, writing textbooks, blog posts (that respectfully, but also irrevocably, piss off many of my friends and the people I respect most who have alternative views from my own), and experimenting with LLMs constantly. This obsession includes making these daily maps, which again thanks to our Vice-Chair, Ken Field, I only have to do every day for half the year, not the entire one, as it is stressful squeezing this stuff in many days.

But as usual, I digress…

I forget the people may on occasion actually read  what I write. It’s a problem.

Let’s talk about the main purpose of today’s map. It’s to highlight:

Stylesheet Templates!

During the Mexico-Ecuador World Cup Match last two nights ago, I had a crazy idea. Well, it’s something I’d thought about doing for a long time, but I get tired and don’t always get around to doing what I think about doing. But the football match was a blowout, and I didn’t want to go to bed yet, so I set forth to create stylesheets to guide Web Map GPT, or any map design assistant you have, including human ones, to produce maps that mimic generic tropes or creative/technical styles.

First and foremost: this idea was not mine originally. (As anyone who reads these blogs knows, I don’t believe humans have ideas. I follow the selfish-gene and information physics maxim that everything is data and humans and what we perceive as the physical environment are merely the medium across which thoughts, ideas, knowledge (you name it, hell, why not consciousness too?) flow. So this idea I first heard from Ken Field back in the mid-2010s when I was the Director of the University of Wisconsin – Madison’s GIS Professional Programs. He was wondering if Daniel Huffman and I would be interested in creating design schemas with him for different map styles and types throughout history.

It was a brilliant idea. But I was addicted to Playstation 4 at the time – Star Wars Battlefront I had just come out, as I recall, and it was all I cared about at the time, as it was the first time in my life I didn’t have to worry about tenure service and securing academic promotion – and it sounded like a lot of work. (Yes, like many others, even though I play with AI stuff for fun, I’m inherently lazy and can develop Pavlovian-like fixations on things that really are a waste of time.) Apparently, I was not the only one without the bandwidth – though, admittedly, others probably had more sane reasons – because I never heard about the idea again.

Yes, indeed, the “idea” from an evolutionary theory standpoint appeared to have died out. But it wasn’t extinct… like chickenpox in the spinal cord, it was waiting until…

Two nights ago, when Mexico was up two-nil on Ecuador, it popped into my head! And as though in a feverish dream, I grabbed my laptop on the table next to me in the garage and created a new project in my favorite LLM tool (which is not Claude, honestly). I started creating random design schemas that popped into my head. Today’s map shows several of the early prototypes.

The good news: schemas work!

If you have a design concept based on an era, design-type, or even particular cartographers, you can create a schema that will get you at least halfway there in your first draft.

For today’s map, I asked WebMapGPT to create the map using a 1980s US news magazine style schema. Then in a follow-up prompt, I asked it to recreate the map in three other schemas and add a drop-down in the upper right.

Now, a caveat: you’ll notice all the maps have the same layout. This was done to save tokens. If I were to make each map individually, each would look massively different in arrangement, layout, thematic representation, etc.

As I had already created the map in one style, I decided to allow it to just change some cosmetic things with each style and keep the layout largely the same. (Yes, I too am disappointed that it didn’t add the archaic ArcView 3.x default legend styling. Next time!)

I figured I was saving a little water and some coal burning by not proving the concept beyond a reasonable doubt. I realize it’s hot in Europe right now and it’s been well over 30-degrees C here in Minnesota and muggy too recently, so I was trying to do my part.

Anyway, I just wanted to give a glimpse of some of the schemas coming to the WebMapGPT site and/or perhaps the promptcartography.com site. I’m also working on labs for the promptcartography.com site, as well as the Canvas-ready importable assignments and rubrics. Lots going on… good thing there is football on.

Happy mapping!

P.S. Thank you, Ken, for diffusing the idea to me years ago. Now, I hope it diffuses further to more people who may sit on the idea for some time and come up with far more brilliant solutions!

Plastic Bag(-)Free Day

View Map Here

Web Map GPT Prompt (with schemas, coming soon to www.webmapgpt.com)

Please design this map to have an Albers equal area projection (unless a specific style schema says it shouldn’t) and to show Alaska and Hawaii above the fold so that the contiguous United States, Alaska, and Hawaii all appear in a single browser window. Require mobile devices be rotated to landscape mode to view the map too, please.

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# Disposable Environments

We are going to make a map of estimated US disposable bag use by state. The goal of this map is to promote “Plastic Bag Free Day” [sic] on Friday.

Continue reading →

Made in the USA Day (183/365)

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As a 14 year-old, my family migrated to the People’s Republic of China (in February 1991), back when China was an afterthought in the world economy and communism was crumbling around the world.

I was lucky enough to attend the #55 Middle School in Beijing, China, where I befriended other international students in a Chinese public school intentionally segregated so non-Chinese students couldn’t mix with Chinese ones. (Perhaps my Public Enemy cassette tapes didn’t sit well with local authorities?)

Essentially, #55 Middle School was the school for poorer international students in Beijing – i.e., the ones from countries or backgrounds that couldn’t afford the expensive American International School. (My parents were teaching English at a college in Beijing, and it paid enough for food and four bikes; so no private schooling for my sister and me. But we did get free room and board at the Friendship Hotel.)

This experience changed my life more than anything else. This little Minnesotan lad was now sharing classes with the Somali Ambassador’s son, who lived in an embassy no longer representing any government (it had collapsed).

I became great friends with the Yugoslav students – all of them. Unfortunately, I was also there when Slovenia, Croatia, and other states announced their independence from Yugoslavia. At lunch one day I stood in horror as my two (now) “Serbian” friends pummeled my (now) “Croatian” friend into near unconsciousness. In hindsight, it makes me morbidly curious what actually happened behind the embassy walls when they all returned home that evening.

But nothing compared to the North Korean students. Let’s leave it at:

“The dear leader invented LPs and therefore LPs are better than western CDs, because they are bigger, sound better, and they were invented by our very own dear leader.” (paraphrased)

Who am I to disagree with that logic? After all, the current President of my country claims to be making America an economic powerhouse again and bringing manufacturing back at an unprecedented clip. And I have some friends and family that believe him.

I’ve resigned to the fact that people will believe what they want to believe. So be it. It’s the way we are programmed. Facts don’t really matter in most cases – much to the consternation of many people who fashion themselves as scientists.

The point is this: it was the China experience that solidified for me that the world is a much bigger place than what national governments try to frame it as.

  • People are awesome and quirky no matter where they are from.
  • Everyone is just trying to survive and improve their lot in life based on their given social and environmental context.
  • Communism tends to lead to shoddy housing solutions such as the Friendship Hotel.
  • Most people, when given the choice, choose autos over biking, i.e., Beijing ditched its 12 million bicycles for cars almost immediately.
  • Nationalism is daft (i.e., Marx is right that it is a idea-meme used to manipulate the masses against one another, in my humble estimation).

But most importantly, the concept of American Exceptionalism and American economic superiority that many of my contemporary neighbors and colleagues in the US carry about with pride feels irrational. Because it’s not true. And that’s why this day irked me when I saw it on the calendar; because why shouldn’t I buy products from other countries? In fact, I may have more close friends living in other countries than here (as shown in my best friend map earlier.) It seems like a banal and juvenile day compared to others like… well… okay, some others but not compared to Banana Cream Pie Day… that one was daft too.

Over the past 20 years, America lost manufacturing dominance at an incredible pace. There literally isn’t much that’s made in America for me to buy anymore – aside from WeatherTech car mats. (And my rusty, Canadian-built Chevy Sonic hatchback already has a set of those.)

In 1991, China was a less-developed country running on coal bricks and manual elbow grease. The stores used abacuses at checkout. The country represented a tiny amount of overall global manufacturing.

Today… the entire world – including the US, as today’s map shows – depends on China’s manufacturing capabilities. 

So, before we celebrate Made in the USA Day, I want to give a shoutout to China for the most epic, unimaginable economic turnaround in modern history. It’s been breathtaking to see it happen in my lifetime. 

Now, with that out of the way: Happy Made in the USA Day.

(I reckon those who celebrate today should enjoy it now, because it may continue to become more and more difficult to celebrate as the years go on, unless the current President is speaking the truth, in which case I stand corrected.)

Post Script

A note to any former North Korean peers at #55 Middle School who are out there. I want to give you all a shout-out, because you were absolutely right and I was wrong. I can’t vouch for who invented the darn things, but LPs are better than CDs.

Today vinyl outsells CDs globally, and very few of these are pressed in the US.

Strategic economic brilliance by the DPRK! I tip my Vietnam-made baseball cap.

 

1970s Soviet Styled Map

WebMapGPT Prompt (with design schema attached) Try this tool here

Tomorrow is “Made in the USA” day. I would like to make a map for this day showing just how much US manufacturing has declined since 1990 or 2000 compared to the rest of the world.

Please take a look at the dataset and come up with several good design concepts to highlight US manufacturing decline compared to the rest of the world as a map – perhaps even a centroid-based multi-temporal cartogram if that is a thing? Then we will proceed to create the map.

Also, I’m experimenting with designing maps based on pre-built schemas. For this one, I would like us to try and design the map like a 1970s Soviet Propaganda map. I’ve attached the schema to try and help you as you come up with a map concept. Thank you!

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Note: I’ve added the same datasets twice. One is a “wide” version and one is a “long” version. We will likely only need one, but we have options. 🙂

Spatial Dataset Doctor Prompt (to create the dataset) Try this tool here

I would like to make a satirical, poignant map for Made in America Day showing just how much US manufacturing has collapsed since the early 1990s until now. Or perhaps even earlier…

Continue reading →

World UFO Day (175/365)

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I was so happy when I saw UFO Day was this week – now more commonly referred to as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) now.

Not because I believe in them. But because I’m personally convinced by the surfeit of evidence that non-human, high-intelligence systems that we don’t yet understand – and perhaps never can – coexist with humans on this planet right now.

It seems to me that many of these interact with us in inexplicable ways and some of these UFOs sightings are likely evidence of this. (That got trippy fast, didn’t it? Ha!)

Openly arguing that UAPs are more likely non-human intelligence is a minority position among the educated class, but I suppose that’s par for course for me. In my mind, interesting science is always in pushing the envelope and expanding our knowledge via hypotheses (and accepting the results of tests); unfortunately, the “funded” science is often found in the regurgitation of established knowledge.

The sightings are real – not hoaxes – and quite a few are inexplicable using contemporary physics. UAP research is definitely more interesting to me than writing another article on ethics in cartography, for example.

Does that mean I naively believe every citizen UFO report or government video is evidence? Absolutely not. In fact, studies have shown that only about 4% of sightings or remotely sensed objects are inexplicable.

But I do believe that as a scientist, I need to be open to evidence that goes against my original indoctrination and expectations. And I’ve read up on UAPs a lot in my spare time; the books by scientists and reputable journalists (some sources posted at the end of this blog) investigating the topic, primarily, as well as some good articles in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harpers Magazine, and similar.

I’ve also become a fellow of the Information Physics Institute (IPI), founded by physicist Melvin Vopson. The work of Vopson has really expanded my thinking about space-time and UAPs broadly. Coupled with the stellar works of Caleb Scharf (i.e., data is the agent, humans are part of its environment) and the research of Michael Levin (i.e., “life” is a social category; intelligent systems are everywhere), and Donald Hoffman’s evolutionary evidence that humans cannot possibly perceive or measure reality – oiur environment is a hallucinated construct – it seems far more likely that non-human intelligent systems run amok all around and even through us than not.

But the cool thing about science… it doesn’t matter what I think, you think, what anyone thinks. 🙂 We can build hypotheses and test them with evidence. And the tide is turning. More and more scientists are sincerely engaging with the topic and coming to the same conclusion – currently inexplicable sh*t is going down. That’s what excites me; no matter what we discover.

Which brings me to today’s map…

I was stoked to design a visualization that promotes some of the more famously documented experiences throughout history, as well as the 2026 www.war.gov/ufo releases that have videos. Note: You can view the videos from the maps and the support documents. You can filter by shape, credibility of the people who reported the sightings, year, etc.

The goal is to educate the public that largely still believes UAPs and UFOs are a giant hoax or only spotted by naive humans seeing things.

Perhaps this map won’t change minds at all, and that’s okay. Again, it doesn’t matter what we think. Something is there. That’s based on evidence.

I hope you have fun exploring the map. If you haven’t seen the videos released this year, they are available in the relevant info windows. Some are silly – balloons, likely. Others… I can see why President Obama refuses to say aliens aren’t real. 🙂

Further Reading (for those interested)

View Map Here

Web Mapper LLM Suite (www.webmapgpt.com/agents.html)

# Intention
Create a cool, non-sensational, but aesthetically spot on, map highlighting the most famous UAP sightings, alien encounters, and most mystifying US military photos and videos.

Continue reading →

National Hydration Day (174/365)

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The US is obsessed with hydration. It’s pretty amazing how many people carry around water bottles compared to when I was growing up. So it makes sense that someone, somewhere, came up with a National Hydration Day.

There are many reasons this day makes no sense.

First of all, hydration is temporary. Hydrating an entire nation in one day does not increase national life expectancy.

Second, and I’m loath to get into vegetal politics here given that I have already been accused of “bashing vegetarians” this week by an anonymous reader online, but… Should humans really promote hogging water for themselves? Politically, I have to side with flora over fauna – at least when it comes to hydration

But as you can see, this celebratory day is as ridiculous as many others.

Unless, I suppose, you’re actually feeling parched today. In which case, hydration could save your life.

So today I decided to map US drought data from the most recent date available (June 9, 2026).

I first  had GIS Dataset Doctor find the drought data across all US counties with a python script it wrote and also to determine the total area of different counties in different levels of drought. That was cool!

It also scraped some US Census data with that API to get populations and did a very rough, not-modeled equal population distribution analysis (i.e., definitely not overly accurate) of how many people were in different drought zones in each county.

It put it all in a single dataset for me and that was that.

I then asked Web Mapper to create a map that epitomizes dryness (hence the sandy/brown color scheme). And now we have a map showing which counties are parched today, on National Hydration Day, which have the most people likely/roughly living in parched areas, and where you can probably imbibe in hydrating today without feeling overly guilty… unless you aren’t into vegetal politics, in which case, I recommend drinking as much water as you like on any given day. 🙂

P.S. The bivariate legend doubles as a multi-select filter, and you can search for any county using a search menu.

View Map Here

Web Mapper Prompt (webmapgpt.com)

Please use the attached dataset(s) to design and create a map that fulfills the following, noting the caveats.

  • Must show drought index severity by county.
  • Must show what percentage of county is in different types of drought by area
  • Should have a bivariate representation of this at some point
  • Should be designed to look parched, dry, and very matter-of-fact scientific.
  • Would be cool to include Puerto Rico too.

Can you use an Albers Equal Area map, though, with Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left? I don’t really care for leaflet. Unless this will cause massive loading problems or mobile campatibility issues. Also, for Mobile Versions: please design a simple header title and hamburger dropdown menu for all legends, sources, modal, etc., to be hidden under.

National Kissing & National Onion Ring Day (173/365)

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Today is a two-fer: two ridiculous national days merged into one, statistically spurious bivariate choropleth map. Because… why the heck not?!

I was dreading this day when I saw it on the calendar. There wasn’t much of interest. National Kissing Day… meh. National Onion Ring Day? … meh. I’ve done hugging already and cheese/heart disease already. So… what to do… what to do…

I am really enjoying creating these, admittedly largely unreadable but quite beautiful, bivariate maps recently. And I like the movie American Graffiti well enough – probably George Lucas’s best film, if not Harrison Ford’s.

So I decided maybe I should mash up youthful kissing and drive-ins that serve onion rings. But… that seemed a little odd. That’s when I wound up with mapping the “kissing disease” (i.e., “mono”) and restaurant density by US county. This map shows you where you can get onion rings and if you kiss after the date, you have a higher likelihood of catching mono.

That seems relevant… sort of. And weird. And quirky. And American Graffiti really is a stellar film, even though I’m not sure it has onion rings in it, and I’m positive “mono” plays no part in it either.

View Map Here

 

Web Mapper Prompt (webmapgpt.com)

# Goal
I’d like your help in designing a stellar webmap using the attached datasets and the JSON schema.

# Aesthetic
It should be absurd/satirical – making fun of the overly serious journalistic approach to mapping data cleanly, solemnly, and as though visualization is more than art – it is a monastic way of life – no matter how ridiculous the data being mapped?

We can iterate but let’s start with minimalist serious, journalist style and evolve from there. This dataset represent serious stuff, after all.

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If a CSV is easier to create a map with, I can share that too. I have attached a Geopackage, though, because it already has the geometries, etc.

Also, as always, I would like this map to have an Equal Area Projection and place Alaska and Hawaii in the lower left of the browser window. Thanks!

Excited to work together to build this map in honor of National Kissing Day and National Onion Ring Day… on the same day! w00t!