Map Porn

Discovery of the Northwest Passage Map
PBS has the key

It's common knowledge (or at least I hope it is) that men derive more pleasure from seeing women than women derive from seeing men. Or maybe that window of time in her month when a woman becomes interested in men is very narrow, so we seldom see that kind of behavior. Men, as we know, are always interested in women, in the biblical sense. Handwaving Freakoutery has a post explaining why that might be. Best, succinct explanation, I have seen.

Succinct. That reminds of Malcolm Gladwell and his bite-sized chunks of knowledge that are easy to swallow and digest. Which is what I try to be. Partly from my desire to avoid doing useless things (like filling in forms) and partly from my desire to follow the old engineering dictum of "necessary and sufficient". I am not a speedy typer. I write a sentence and then I have to go back and spend time fixing all the typo's. Wowzers, two sentences without a typo, except Google doesn't like 'typer'. Fine, whatever.

Got that established, now we come to what got me started on this. I'm reading The Terror by Dan Simmons and he's talking about other expeditions into the frozen north that came before this fatal voyage. In the 18th and 19th Century Brits were all over navigation and maps, so surely someone has put together a map of the various voyages. And where might I find such a map? I could ask Google, but if there isn't much out there, it''s going to throw up a whole bunch of unrelated shit. and then I remembered reddit/r/MapPorn, which got me to wondering why it's called MapPorn and not Maps R Us, or Crazy Map Land, and then I remembered all the times I've read that 'so and so was staring intently at the map', which reminds me that I do fair bit of that myself, and then I realized we (men) are staring at maps the same way we stare at pictures of attractive women, hence the addition of the 'porn' suffix.

I did find one map on reddit (at the top). It's not as hi-res as I would like, but it's not cluttered with too much information. Google did turn up a couple of good links this morning:

• What We Learned In The Search For Sir John Franklin on Arctic Kingdom. A good summary of this expedition and its aftermath.
• 19th-century attempts at the passage on Britannica
• Arctic Exploration on The Canadian Encyclopedia

I suspect the quality of your results depends at least partially on the wording of your search phrase.

P.S. Asking Google for a copy of the map posted at the top, Google identified it as 'world map of nuclear power'. Google doesn't know everything.