(Roughly) Daily

Aaron Becker‘s Mapped.Earth is an extraordinary resource…

mapped.earth is maps and geography as a way to see the planet — by Aaron Becker. The Earth rendered as data: winds, currents, terrain, borders, populations, the shapes underneath the numbers. The through-line is wonder plus clarity — here is a way of looking at the world you haven’t seen before, and here is what it means…

The living globe — a real-time 3D Earth: live winds and ocean currents from the latest forecast cycles, active fires, population as terrain, and a Time Machine that scrubs eight decades of climate history.

Map films — short, narrated films built from geographic data: unfamiliar projections, seasonal winds, shipping lanes, the way a country’s people are actually arranged on its land.

Field notes — writing that backs the maps: where the data comes from, why a projection was chosen, what the pattern means.

And now (as illustrated above), the lighthouses of the world: every charted maritime navigational light on the planet, sweeping to its actual reach, on its actual arc, and on its real cycle.

Via Jason Kottke, who recorded this short video sampler:

“Lighthouses of the World,” from @aaronjbecker.bsky.social (via @kottke.org)

* George Bernard Shaw

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As we illuminate, many will recall that this is the anniversary of the outbreak, on this date in 1871, of the Great Chicago Fire, famously blamed on Mrs. Kate O’Leary’s cow kicking over a lamp. (Though in 1997 the Chicago City Council looked into the evidence, both new and old, and passed a resolution exonerating Mrs. O’Leary and her cow.)

What many fewer remember is that on that date 37 separate fires broke out in the Great Lakes region, three were massive: the Great Chicago fire killed 300; the Great Michigan fire, 300-500.

But the Wisconsin Peshtigo fire—history’s deadliest—killed least 1,200– though data gathered from mass graves, both those already exhumed and those still being discovered, suggest that the death toll of the blaze was most likely greater than that of the 1889 Johnstown flood death toll of 2,200 people or more. The fire razed 1.2 million acres– and destroyed the Peshtigo Lighthouse, a key navigational aid in the Great Lakes region.