Source: xkcd.com

I was riding my bike during Labor Day weekend and chanced upon a yard sale with an old globe going for $4 (of course I bought it and rode home one-handed).  There were some clues that it wasn’t a recent globe (The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia still existed and Burkina Faso was labeled Upper Volta and Zimbabwe was listed as Rhodesia). I knew that if I wanted to know what year this globe was produced, I would need this XKCD guide. XKCD is a comic strip that deals with many intellectual issues, but it can also be a wealth of quality scientific information.  This infographic (hi-res) is amazingly useful if you are trying to find the map of an undated map, but the flow chart also is a wealth of global history and moments that ‘changed the map.’

 

Tags: XKCD, art, infographic, mapping, trivia, cartography.

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