My previous boss was professional aerospace engineer. She had worked for one of the two major airplane manufacturers and a satellite company before joining academia.

It was always interesting going to meetings across the US with her, because she refused to get on a plane. Often she would have to leave a few days before me (e.g., to get to Boston) due to taking a train or driving.

Why wouldn’t she take a plane? I’ll let her quote stand out:

“If you know how those things are designed and built, you wouldn’t ever get on one again either,” she would say, not joking. She said every plane is literally riddled with human error.

I believe her. (It’s one reason I trust LLM output more than my own, often times. Humans hallucinate more than LLMs and certainly can’t hold attention as long – in my experience.

And that’s why I’m always grateful when I’m on a plane that we have amazing airplane maintenance technicians. (It helps that my uncle used to work as an on-call maintenance troubleshooter for flights in duress while in air, and would talk the crew about things they could try to fix midflight to not crash and die. Yeah, he retired early… it was stressful.)

So happy Aviation Maintenance Technician Day! These people deserve to be celebrated far more than odometers in my opinion.

Ignorance is bliss, and one reason we can all be so ignorant about how just precarious commercial flight is comes down to our maintenance technicians. So let’s celebrate this day and be grateful that overall, things are pretty safe in the air. Phew!

Play Map Here

NOTE: The first Version of this was to be a Euro-style card game with a map board of international flight routes. But wow, was it a snooze to play. I love Euro-style board games, and I couldn’t even stomach it. So I started over. The prompt below are the revision directions I used to create the final app.

New Prompt Web Mapper GPT

Can you refashion this concept entirely. Let’s ditch the board game idea. Let’s come up with a new idea, based on this theme, and refashion it as a simple 16-bit-style videogame where there are 1-5 flights circling around an airport and you have to click on things or solve simple little puzzles (with a mouse and keyboard) to help flights land. Should have a map of planes flying around an airport.

Please come up with a simple puzzle videogame overview, plan, synopsis, and structured JSON. The game should last about five minutes total. It should have little puzzles where you have to order shapes in certain patterns within a certain amount of seconds. Or you need to find airplane-based words in a word search. Etc. Something fun and simple to celebrate Aviation Mechanical Technicians. Thanks.

I’m a big taffy fan, so I hate to admit it, but this did not turn out as I envisioned.

And given it’s a holiday weekend here in the US, and it was merely a conceptual attempt to create a stretchy, pully, tacky map about taffy, I’ve decided to leave well enough alone and post it as is.

It was an idea I had. The LLM implemented it coding wise, but I can’t seem to get it to fix the CSS enough to make it compelling. And that’s where I”ll leave it.

Static Image Version

Better than the interactive screen capture below but still… distasteful.

Interactive Sticky Version
Get Stuck Here

Original Prompt

# Intention
Make a silly map for National Taffy Day.

I would like a map of the United States. When the user clicks anywhere on it, and then moves the mouse, a stretchy taffy-looking animation should stretch from the place they clicked to where the pointer goes, eventually (randomly but after a significant distance) disconnecting and laying on top of the map. If the taffy is still stretching when the user clicks somewhere else on the map, the original stretch stops and stays where it is, and a new stretch begins. With more clicks and drags the map will become indecipherable adn covered in taffy. Each state should be colored one of five Laffy-Taffy style colors. The stretching and taffy smearing should be the color of the state the user originally clicked in.

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I don’t know what’s more bizarre:

1. So many days named after random and really dumb things like, well, odometers. Or…
2. So many software engineers publicly insisting that their job is going to remain relevant into the future, because they can do something LLMs can’t.

Yes, I say that to be inflammatory. It’s a conversation starter. (Perhaps a fire starter too… let’s find out. 🙂

I don’t want people to suffer, lose jobs, discover that what they’ve spent 10, 20, 30 years of their lives obsessing over is suddenly not particularly useful. That’s painful. And pain sucks.

But just because I don’t want something to happen (i.e., because something really sucks) doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.

Personally, I believe that platitudes and logical fallacies are more damaging to society than recognition and acceptance. I’m purposefully focusing on software devs here, but similar points could be made about GIS professionals and cartographers as well. I address these in my forthcoming book.

Nonetheless, even if my “devs are doomed” perspective proves wrong, which it very well may, it needs to be posted. Particularly because this past week I’ve seen numerous articles, posts, and diatribes online by GIS devs and mid-level GIS bloggers about how traditional dev and GIS human skillsets will be needed and more important in the future. I even had to read a completely daft section in a blog about how our brains will atrophy if we don’t keep coding. (A comment that appears akin to what a mathematician might have blogged about in the 1960s when the first scientific calculators were being produced – your brain will atrophy if you use that thing, keep doing everything longhand!)

I think such arguments are not only wrong; they are dangerous. If you’re a GIS or code-first cartographer who wants to stay gainfully employed and feed your family in the near future, you need to start hitting the proverbial books (i.e., online lessons and ChatGPT, or maybe a textbook? ;-). What we’ve been doing our entire careers was important and valuable. It’s much less so now. It sucks, but it is the situation. A new technology has come along. The workforce no longer needs human beasts of burden to do coding or create a map manually via GUI or CLI.

Obviously, for a couple more years, until LLM workflows are established, human devs and GUI/CLI-based cartographers will still be useful in the workforce. But coding and engineering maps… as a skillset? Skillsets only exist because they are useful. Skillsets go extinct based on market demand – not how much we cherish them.

Which is why I shudder a bit when cartographers chant to themselves at conferences that “Cartography matters”. Admittedly, it’s fun, but history shows that chants and parades to fervent believers spell the end of an institution, not a high point. (Just ask Viktor Orban.)

With LLMs, coding knowledge has no practical goodness of fit for human evolutionary purposes. It’s akin to knowing cursive or, perhaps more aptly, how to take notes in shorthand.

You can learn how to do all of these things – even today. But in today’s job market you’ll never get paid well to do it.

It’s absolutely startling how quickly LLMs have turned the market for coders and web map creators on its head. It terrifies me in fact. I began playing with prompt cartography for fun and quickly saw the writing on the wall. In the last two years, it has advanced more than I could have ever imagined. But it’s also allowed me to create maps in my spare time that blow my mind. I can’t imagine what a full-time practicing cartographer could actually do using prompt cartography full-time today.

Anyway, this is what ran through my head today, as I waited roughly four or five minutes to create the following map.

Two prompts:

• one to create the dataset.
• one to create the map.

In fact, writing this blog took longer.

Ah, I digress again! To conclude…

Is today’s map a masterpiece? Absolutely not. It’s a four-minute, one-off puff piece, in journalistic speak.

Is it AI slop? Nope, It’s not that either. It’s better than a lot of graduate student project work I’ve seen, for sure. (And completed in four minutes, not a semester.)

And really… is that not good enough to prove that prompt cartography is going to change everything we ever knew about how to make a map with computers?

Because coming full circle, I’m creating a map about… odometers?!

What the #@$%?!

Who would be able to spend the time to make such a map in any other world? Proof my brain hasn’t atrophied from LLMs coding for me; I’ve been liberated to be more creative than ever before. Personally, I find it absolutely amazing!

Thanks for reading today’s mini-rant. (There was an essay-length version, but I took it out so devs and cartographers don’t show up at my door with pitchforks.)

Oh, and of course, one major caveat I need to mention: I’m wrong – a lot. 🙂

But I just want to counter the current narrative I’m hearing that seems, from my perspective at least, to be a 100% logical fallacy. I feel like I’m watching lemmings follow B-level bloggers over a cliff, and I can’t stomach not saying something.

View Map Here

GIS Dataset Doctor GPT

GPT free to everyone here.

Hi. I’d like to create a map for National Odometer Day. I’m trying to come up with some tongue in cheek maps that aren’t overly complex but still informative.

Continue reading →

Well, well… here we go. World Awareness Day… an odd one indeed, but one that everyone can relate to. Most of us have dealt with our own egos tripping us up from time-to-time. And I haven’t yet met a person alive who hasn’t felt that someone else’s ego was too big by at least half. (I left Geography at the University of Wisconsin due to one person’s ego suffocating me…)

And my kids often remind me to keep my ego in check when I start ranting to them about humans being nothing more than software running on two-bit DNA code. Something about getting canceled – and being an absolutely insane position. I plead the fifth.

Fortunately, there have been a variety of large surveys done on narcissism and egotistical behavioral traits around the world. Unfortunately, most of them involve self-reporting and self-assessment, which is the surest way to break the scientific method when studying ego, because… well, um… yeah, people’s egos.

Alas, it’s what we have. I collected all of the “scientific” surveys / studies I could find. Then merged the data using Perplexity Pro. Then, because the mini-golf map consumed so much of my energy yesterday, I decided to write a relatively short and flippant prompt for Web Map GPT to decipher and do something with – I also gave it my dataset.

Low-and-behold, the map it produced was, though by no means perfect, half-decent. I decided to have it offer the user numerous color ramps and different classification schemes again.

Understandably, no non-map nerd would ever want that stuff, but I like testing what prompt cartography can allow you to do in about two sentences of text. Plus, I wanted to see it decide which Color Brewer schemes to use. Yes, you can read them; but, no, they rarely look good. The bane of intelligent design, I suppose.

But there’s my ego again… if I don’t like how the Color Brewer colors look aesthetically (and again, they are readable, which is important!), why don’t I create my own version of a color mixer? The Muehlenhaus Color Masher or something?

Hmmm… not a bad idea. Maybe I’ll ask my agents to start helping me build that after dinner.

But first, here is a map of egos and narcissists across numerous surveys that you can pick and choose from.

According to the surveys, German males turn out to be the worst. Again, though, and in defense of German males everywhere, even those living vicariously through their spouse’s name, this was self-reported data. In reality, perhaps what this survey is showing is that German males are the most honest and most other self-reporting males are lying liars who lie… or something?

In other words, don’t read into the map too much. Just enjoy the color selection, and make sure you take a moment to enjoy Ego Awareness Day this year.

Thanks.

View map here.

Web Map GPT Prompt

# Intention
Next week is International Ego Day or something silly like that.

I have collected some data on about 50-plus countries and their unofficial level of narcissism and ego.

Please create an equal earth map of the world with a beautiful layout and legend titled “Ego Checker”.

Create a stylized interactive legend that allows the user to change the classification scheme, number of classes (between 4 and 7), and select from a variety of Color Brewer approved palettes. Include Standard Deviation (diverging color chemes needed), natural breaks (default, 5 classes default), equal interval, and quantiles.

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I wasn’t sure what to map for this one. I asked my family what to map, and the most entrepreneurial one (i.e., the youngest) of us, answered: average allowance rates!

And so the map idea was born. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find (nor could my LLM assistants) any great datasets on allowance rates by county, much less states. So I used some agents to create our own approximation, by calculating median household income, and a variety of other factors. It should be in the provenance file.

Anyway, it’s a daily map. And it’s done. And my daughter is going to ask for a giant raise, I think, because $5 a week to (most often merely say she’s going to) wash the towels won’t cut it anymore. 🙁

View Map Here

Original Web Map GPT Prompt

Please just create a map with a choropleth map of different state average allowance rates using a standard deviation class break system and diverging color scheme. Highest is 92% black and lowest is pure red. Diverge from the middle. Please put a legend in the lower right of the map. Keep it simple with the five classes. Make it look professional. Continue reading →

Today is US National Mini Golf Day – as opposed to international mini golf day in September.

I figured we will probably only make one miniature golf map this year, so I made a golf game that tours the world.

I’ve also been playing with a bit with a Commodore 64 emulator that I installed on my Raspberry Pi 400 so, I thought, why not create a Commodore 64 mini-golf video game of the world? Right?!

Right! (The Commodore 64 was not a great system for making maps, but it was the system for video games back in the day. I figured it was a match made in heaven.

See if you can make par. It’s not easy. May take a few tries. You can share your score online too.

VieView Map and Play Some Miniature Golf 1980s Style Here

Spec Outline I Fed to Web Map GPT to Begin Creating the Game

Create Mini Golf Day World Tour

A compact browser game concept for a Commodore 64-inspired mini-golf website in which a pixel world map acts as the level selector and nine tourist-city holes form a playful global tour.[1][2]

Creative direction

The game should feel like a travel postcard rendered by an 8-bit home computer: chunky geometry, limited palette, simple bounce physics, and legible landmark silhouettes rather than realistic urban modeling.

The most effective scope is a static single-page HTML5 Canvas game with a world map menu, nine holes, drag-to-aim controls, stroke counting, simple hazards, and a faux travel-computer presentation layer.

Design principles

• Landmark essence over geographic accuracy; each hole should parody a city through one or two famous forms rather than reproduce a real street network.
• Readability first; every obstacle should be understandable as a rectangle, circle, polygon, moving blocker, or hazard tile.
• One signature mechanic per city; each course should have a memorable gimmick such as a roundabout bank shot, canal reset, moving crossing, or bridge tunnel.
• Short-session fun; each hole should be completable in 30 to 90 seconds by an average player.

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Happy World Password Day!

I had fun with the Scrabble Map a while ago. I love games. So I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to create a game for World Password Day.

Your goal: crack the password for every country in the world using three hints. Some are easy. Some are trickier. Your score is accumulated based on how m any countries you successfully solve divided by time. When you’re done, you can share your results on social media by clicking the button in the upper right.

Good luck! Can you #AccessEarth?

View map and play game here

Dataset

Created with Dataset Doctor GPT

Prompt Used (Web Map GPT)

Thursday is World Password Day. For this day, I would like to make a map very similar to the International Scrabble Day map we made about a month ago. I can share that map zip file with you if you would like to look at it.

However, I would like this map’s theme not to be Scrabble-oriented, but instead 1984, MS-DOS style graphics. Black background, green font. Equal Earth projection again.

Also, instead of dragging letters, the user will type letters in to solve passwords – similar to the computer and password used in the classic movie “Wargames” starring Matthew Broderick.

Please use DOS-era cursor blinking, etc. Allow full keyboard control to answer the questions.

# The Dataset
The dataset you have includes major countries of the world that are not small islands or city states.

The dataset includes the name of the country, some anecdotal key facts about the country, and **MOST IMPORTANTLY** a password value and three hints fields.

Continue reading →