The lowest branch was trimmed off, so I can't climb it anymore, but I achieved my main goals of: 1) seeing the tree again, and 2) finding out what species it was.

It was near sunset, but after many, many years, I finally got to revisit one of the most important trees of my life, a northern red oak on the Kalamazoo College campus.

IMPORTANT: The Dutch invest €595 million annually on urban biking, resulting in €19 BILLION saved in public health care costs alone. That’s how smart govts do the math on investing in better mobility. Let’s be clear— it wastes public money to NOT do it. #CityMakingMath HT @modacitylife.bsky.social

After months, I finally remembered to put this print on my store page, so that people know where to look if they want a charmingly distressing world map. somethingaboutmaps.com/Storefront And if you'll be at #NACIS2025 in Louisville, you can see it in person and deface it with dry erase markers.

Autre travail en cours 🌐

Just two weeks till our book THE BOROUGHS OF LONDON hits the shops! 📚 Full of detailed maps, fascinating history and surprising trivia, it's a guide to every one of the 32 boroughs that make up the greatest city on Earth, from Richmond to Redbridge and Barnet to Bromley. Preorder: 🛒 bit.ly/4nIqKTW

New poster! Hachure illustrations of the highest Cascade Range volcanoes. This one took a lot of experimentation to get the layout right. If you or someone you know loves this area, check it out. www.etsy.com/listing/4373...

The Alliance of Freelance Cartographers has a new website! Thanks to @alyolli.bsky.social for getting it off the ground. It hosts past editions of the survey, as well as other resources. www.freelancemaps.org/home

New poster! Hachure illustrations of the highest Cascade Range volcanoes. This one took a lot of experimentation to get the layout right. If you or someone you know loves this area, check it out. www.etsy.com/listing/4373...

One of my fosters has a favorite toy and reminds me when it’s time to play with it.

Okay yes, Raincaster’s star is a rooster, and Wooden Nickel had pretty good chickens too, but we’ll never ever top our Burly Men at Sea chickens.

Me: "When did you last look at a map?" The general public:

I sometimes wonder if I'd be much wealthier by not making my own maps, and instead selling prints of existing copyright-free ones. Some online stores seem to do big business. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with it; the market just seems to appreciate old maps more than new ones.

The Great Oak, the tallest tree I have ever gotten to enjoy climbing, was recently trimmed. I had hoped to climb it again next month. Alas, it is now forever out of my reach. I documented one of my prior climbs: dryad.substack.com/p/9-the-grea...

#SilentSunday #Trees #Wisconsin

In the face of everything happening, it often feels pointless to spend hours figuring out how to draw the landscape of a planet with twin stars, but I’m reminded of the importance of making our art in dark times, & that what I’m up to here is intended to be a reminder of where it is we all come from

A map/diagram design doodle this evening. Historical snapshots of polities around the Black Sea, with extents taken from www.worldhistorymaps.info.

I have a plan for when I retire (if such a privilege is granted me). I want to comb through my entire archive and print out every single map that I've made. And then rent a large space and cover the walls with them all, and invite people to a retrospective gallery.

A map/diagram design doodle this evening. Historical snapshots of polities around the Black Sea, with extents taken from www.worldhistorymaps.info.

I'm trying to get back to writing on the blog on a more regular basis. Here's a reminder that you can submit maps – your own creations, or official maps that you'd like me to review – using this form on the website: transitmap.net/submit/ Remember to celebrate excellence and cool stuff!

The satisfaction of a typeface that has proper superscripts.

Home from seeing a performance of "Primary Trust" and I just want to say how great live theater is.

The projection issues others have mentioned notwithstanding, I'll pick G because that lets me cheat. Peruvian food (my favorite) is a fusion of G, F, H, E, and D.

Cats love reading Cartographic Perspectives, the journal of @nacis.bsky.social.

A rare sighting of a map being exhibited in an art gallery, at the Taubman in Roanoke, VA

A Cartographic Tour of Gold Country. Inspired by a trip to the Sierra Foothills, I made a map of the Mother Lode, paired with some vintage maps highlighting different types of mines. 🗺️ #cartography #mapping pixeum.org/exhibits/715...

I strongly second this. Images like this steal part of your soul. Some of us have to watch horrific things because it's part of what we do as journalists. It's part of being honest and bearing witness, looking so others don't have to do the same. If it can be avoided, avoid it at all costs.

The David Rumsey Map Center is holding their biennial cartography conference 10/8 - 10/10. It’s free and there’s an online option. The theme is “Above and Below” and will feature talks on “cartography of anything but the earth’s surface.”Register at www.eventbrite.com/e/barry-lawr...

Each year, the @americangeo.bsky.social Geography Educator Initiative offers AP Human Geography teachers across the US a chance to win a $300 grant to enhance their students’ learning with geography or geospatial-related activities or resources. Apply here! www.americangeo.org/geoboost

Work in progress. Mashing some Cascade Range peaks together.

Taking a moment to reminisce about Trade Wars 2002. I miss dialing into a local BBS and playing with friends. And I still love the art.

Shared Responsibility. @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social

After years (more than a decade!) of thinking I should try to figure out how to automate contour smoothing, I finally did it. I’ll be sharing my process with GDAL + Python at the 2025 @nacis.bsky.social meeting in Louisville, KY this October. #dataviz 📊 #cartography 🗺️

PSA for my GIS friends. I just updated the GIS files for our local League of Women Voter's Voter411. It's one of those things that's easy for us mappy folks, but harder for those not used to working with GIS. So, looking for a way to help keep voters informed? Email your local LWV and offer help!

Cincinnati in 50 Maps, by Nick Swartsell and me, is off to the printer, so you can get your pre-orders in now for the December launch! beltpublishing.com/products/cin... Get this, folks: I counted and there are 125 individual maps. That's 75 extra maps for free!

I made this starter pack of transit map makers on Bluesky back when I first joined. It's been while and I bet there are more of you out there now. Who are we missing? Let me know! bsky.app/starter-pack...

I ran into my member of Congress a couple months ago at an event. He said "Oh yeah, hey how are you? You're still doing The Map Center? It's still.... in business?" Eh, it's nice to be remembered. To answer, I wrote a State of the Map Store blog entry here: www.mapcenter.com/blog/blog-po...

The Big Map is up in the Kent Free Library! This is a project highlighting the history of our South End, a neighborhood of immigrants, Black southern migrants, and railroad workers. communitygeography.kent.edu/index.php/20...

Do you have questions about the near-future and COVID vaccination access? (I do.) Fortunately for us, my colleague @meghanbartels.bsky.social has answers. I'm so grateful for the information she pulled together in this article. www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-...

Extraordinary terrain shading in this pre Civil War map of Colorado River. from www.raremaps.com/gallery/deta... #cartography 🗺️

Have you ever wanted to map satellite data like temperature, cloud cover, and vegetation with GDAL? I wrote a tutorial for that! medium.com/@robsimmon/a...

The “correct” map The Mercator map creates distortions. Just like the Peters map and any map with any projection on a plane. This is the story of the correct map, the map that does not exist. www.cartographerstale.com/p/the-correc...

Oh here it is! youtu.be/Dj9uKpk3Idk?...

Seriously folks, get your asses to Mastodon

If you'll be at #nacis2025 this year and are interested in helping out @nacis.bsky.social, I need folks to assist in doing some projector set-up and take-down. It's a brief time and a simple set of tasks commitment; send me a DM if you're able to help.

Make donating free libraries cool for billionaires again

I thought we’d collectively agreed that just pointing and laughing at people’s “bad” maps, without offering constructive advice for improvement, was something that we’d confined to the regrettable past?

Working on a map of trees in my HOA. I have lidar points for vegetation, so I made random fill patterns in QGIS (varying rotation/color/size). Off to a good start, though it needs some manual cleanup and curation: missing trees, artifacts, etc.

Soldiers know that what's this administration is trying to do to DC is wrong. No one joins the National Guard to terrorize American families. No one joins the National Guard to chase down and arrest food delivery drivers. The administration is trying to normalize all this. Do not let them.

A new species to add to my climbing list. My first Ulmus rubra (slippery elm). A very technically challenging one, too. Haven’t had a workout like that in a long while.