Political Cartograms: Vote NO on Contiguous

A fascinating phenomenon, the "contiguous" cartogram. Hideous, illegible, nightmarish. But I'll admit, I tried it once in college.

In 1999 I briefly toyed with chucking it all and becoming the King of Cartograms. This warp of the lower 48 (resized according to 1990 population) was fun to play with but I immediately said uch.

Surprisingly, people do publish these. Ugly, like Spitting Image or mushroom clouds. But usually unreadable too; for example, where are pistachios grown? China, and . . . India?

Uch. I vote no and urge you to do the same.

For October we're geeking out on political mapoids. Thanks always to the University of Adelaide. 1999-06, -34.9202 138.6057, though I think the GIS lab was right on North Terrace by the yummy pumpkin sandwiches. The second image is the last frame in case the animated GIF doesn't work. As the title frame says, I did not know (or care) how wrong the sizes still were after these eight rounds of warping. Wikipedia, Spitting Image, Trinity (nuclear test) 25 ms after explosion. Worldmapper.org, 2016 Pistachio Production. Robert Wellman Campbell, "Political Cartograms: Vote NO on Contiguous," RSS Longa, PD via CC0 1.0, 10 October 2024.