@youwillmakemaps
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Vocational cartographer, design @durinmining • https://nitter.cf/t.co/X5SvX8aR3h • The best maps lie ahead, and you’re going to make them
Los Angeles, CA
Joined February 2024
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- Followers11.5K
- Likes43.5K
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The Best Maps Lie Ahead
I want my favorite material culture to live.
I want people in 2130 to cherish a map made in 2030.
I want to see another Turgot-level map produced before I die (pic related).
In 1910 you could buy a 5-cent rail route pamphlet that looks better than nearly any map you can buy today. This couldn't be otherwise, considering who makes today’s maps:
• Atlas cartographers: mostly gone, those who remain can’t pick colors (exception: @ClarkGeomatics @BenchmarkMaps ).
• GIS managers: their job is to manage the sewer pipe database and make maps for 8.5x11" PDFs, can’t design or don’t have time.
• Editorial cartographers: under tight deadlines, editors don’t care, art directors don’t know how to shape or commission nice maps (Exception: Laris Karklis, Carl Churchill).
• Government cartographers: almost all GIS managers, the maps just gotta reflect the database, nobody cares how they look (exception: Anna Eshelman).
• Nonprofit cartographers: too busy with GIS tasks, boss doesn’t care about nice maps.
• Big tech cartographers: Google/Apple’s maps are database outputs, too constrained by people poking at the map to make them look nice (exception: Nat Slaughter).
• Academic/critical cartographers: not rewarded for making nice maps, rewarded for writing recondite PDFs about maps.
• Capital A Artists: too into deconstruction to make a sincere attempt (exception: Ido Michaeli).
• Biz intelligence cartographers: who’s gonna cherish a bunch of hex bins and choropleths?
Everyone likes old maps because olde timey cartographers started with a blank page and built up; the computer inverted this, letting you start with a cluttered page full of someone else's data and toss what you don’t want to show.
So the computer grants insane leverage to mapmakers (drafter, illustrator, scriber, letterer, colorist, engraver used to be separate jobs) but at an aesthetic cost:
1) You have to actively fight your tools to make the map look like you care about how it looks (████ Esri)
2) A good map requires attention over every square inch. This was built into pre-computer maps because a cartographer couldn't make his/her marks without looking over every bit, but now it’s an extra step that no one’s getting paid for, so it's relatively rare.
There are still dozens of excellent cartographers working today, on and off the computer. In my opinion the best contemporary mapmakers are commercial illustrators; they still start with a blank page, they care about gestalt and composition first, and they don't just affirm software's idea of what a map should look like. Cf. the work of @thisismikehall , Rodica Prato, Neil Gower, Kevin Sheehan, Alex Hotchin.
What is to be done?
Every beautiful map that makes you think "they don't make 'em like they used to": it can be made right now, and better. They had "time, strength, cash, patience," but while attenuated, those things are still around. A patron could pay an illustrator to walk around a city for years and draw every building he saw, like the Prévôt des Marchands of Paris did in 1734.
The bad news is there is no living memory of this art, no old hands to teach how the past's rich maps were constructed. We start from scratch. The good news: we know exactly what to aim for. A time and money problem sounds tractable to me.
The best maps of the future, computer-mediated or otherwise, will require 1) people who care enough to make them and 2) close-range instruction.
Unfortunately there’s no building in the U.S. to combine those two, where the enthusiastic meet the skilled and learn to make beautiful maps. Formal cartographic education does not exist in America; I have a (free) M.S. in cartography and all of the looks-nice mapmaking I did was extracurricular.
Today’s talented anglophone mapmakers taught themselves. The autodidacts are my favorite, but you shouldn't have to bootstrap your own training to make nice maps.
I'm a pro cartographer and I learned the trade by sitting at Daniel Huffman’s elbow and asking 2 years of stupid questions. There's no substitute for sharing a desk with a great cartographer.
This is solved with one building, a few million bucks and ten instructors, i.e. a school with a 1:1 instructor ratio, i.e. map apprenticeships.
Provide a nice space for pro mapmakers to work, students with extant art/design chops pick their mentor do their scut work (shoving around thousands of labels is a rite of passage) and receive a bite of their mentor's project fees. The teacher gets a useful helper and thus can accept more ambitious projects.
If you know a pile of money who wants the future to have great maps, tell them to DM me, I got plans.
Pictured: 1739 Plan de Paris, commissioned by Prévôt des Marchands Michel-Etienne Turgot, an ~8x10 ft. print made from insanely detailed engravings, took six years to complete. Money-fine, enormous, you'd go blind before you counted all those trees someone had to scratch into brass...
Evan Applegate retweeted
The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site.
Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20801…), and in August, hydrogen (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20847…).
Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide.
Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade.
But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well.
Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch.
Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: terraformindustries.wordpres…
TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand.
Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank.
As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses!
The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin.
With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer.
Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!
Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site.
WTAF?
Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW.
Terraform's single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn't enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years.
Rather than linger on this point in response to experts-with-spreadsheets who said this was not only beyond my team, it was forbidden by known laws of physics, let me tell you a bit about how we actually pulled this off.
We started building this test site in March. Once the panels and electrics were in place the CO2 team were the first to demonstrate production on site. Close behind them the electrolyzer team planned the logistics necessary to project substantial operational ability into a hostile test site in the middle of nowhere. It's no good to find you're missing a wrench half way through the day!
Much of the test prep was completed before dawn, when the panels go live. The sun came up and the stack immediately started splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team carefully monitored purity and flammability as the sun climbed through the sky. As designed, the stack warmed up and conducted even more power, maintaining solid production until late afternoon when the setting sun shaded the panels.
Terraform's synthetic fuel system is uniquely designed to follow the sun and extract the maximum possible value from cheap solar panels.
Hydrogen is a pernicious molecule. It leaks through and embrittles metals, burns almost invisibly at a wide range of mixtures in air, burns hot and fast and can easily undergo detonation transition, and has about half a dozen other spookily dangerous properties. My advice is to never work with it unless you absolutely have to. The Terraformer produces and consumes H2 in one compact discrete area with a minimum of complexity and fuss, and as expected this demo was completed in accordance with our rigorous safety standards and no unscheduled excitement!
This successful demonstration was also a profound milestone for the team after a testing anomaly last December compelled us to finally rip off the bandaid and move decisively towards the "future design" with half the parts but considerable complexity in assembly. No-one else makes electrolyzers this way and we, more than anyone, know exactly why. And also how to do it anyway, translating directly into a unique cost advantage.
A huge congratulation to Ken, Sherman, @ckalitin, Nikhil, Abdullah, and Aaron for their successful test campaign.
Terraform's hydrogen and CO2 are the chemical precursors for synthetic methane and methanol, which we make in our own synthetic fuel reactor.
Combined, we make oil and gas out of sunlight and air. We are breaking the geological and geographical monopolies on oil production.
In the limit, Terraform will deploy these electrolyzers by the millions and they will all be plug-and-play with solar PV arrays.
The Muroc smoke test campaign is far from over.
We will win!
160x130 ft concrete relief map of Scotland at the Barony Castle Hotel, Eddleston, Scotland
Built between 1974-1979, designed by cartographer Kazimierz Trafas, funded by Polish WWII vet and hotelier Jan Tomasik who married a Scottish nurse in 1942
A million golden sparks on your desk...... @ancildesign
really neat periodic table of plasma
plasma.bagelgen.com/
How to make a colorful backlit map:
① Pick a high-res map image, I like ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/view… for USGS topos
Or see nitter.cf/youwillmakemaps/status… for so many other maps
Or make your own map......if you got the stones..........
nitter.cf/youwillmakemaps/status…
② Print your map on Duratrans/a generic transmissive inkjet-on-polyester substrate, I like this shop
posterprintshop.com/services…
③ Mount in an LED lightbox, here's a steal for a snap frame, the spring-loaded edges hold the print down
ebay.com/itm/227500947933
You can DIY the panel by lining the edge of a thick acrylic sheet with LED strips, but I'm not soldering anything ever so I get custom flat panels from
dsasignage.com/product/led-l…
Get one with RGB LEDs to customize the light color, or pick The Good Color Temp with a film gel
usa.leefiltersdirect.com/pro…
④ I like a real flat print so I recco sandwiching the print between two clear panels: an expensive piece of low-glare TruVue Museum Glass up front, then the print, then a piece of acrylic. tapplastics.com/ or a local plastics distributor will sort you out
⑤ To hang this on the wall I like a french cleat
amazon.com/French-Cleat-Pict…
I can't wait to see your DIY glowing map.
Or for an easier, likely better result, send me several thousand dollars: radiantmaps.co/
1970 and 2010 editions of "Map of Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park and Wilderness, California, Mariposa County" by the U.S. Geological Survey, 39x16"
Evan Applegate retweeted
If you've ever wondered about what you're flying over, I just released a complete rebuild of my app Flyover Country. It's got a ton of new features I'm excited about but the augmented reality mode has gotta be the most special. flyovercountry.app
The Venice of America, collected in the Historic American Engineering Record
loc.gov/resource/hhh.ca1696.…
Shane Loeffler’s app adds labels to your window seat shots
nitter.cf/shane98c/status/210135…
If you've ever wondered about what you're flying over, I just released a complete rebuild of my app Flyover Country. It's got a ton of new features I'm excited about but the augmented reality mode has gotta be the most special. flyovercountry.app