Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Maps Work

Episode Date: June 10, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, yes, your brain may have just flash-dried from boredom at the thought of learning about maps, but it turns out they are a lot more than just tools for navigation. Maps are two-dimensional representations of how we imagine our world, with imagine being the operative word since every map in existence is riddled with errors. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everybody, this is Chuck again with another edition of Stuff You Should Know Selects, our Saturday classic edition episodes. And as you know, we're curating these one at a time, and this week I got to pick, and I picked how maps work.

And I picked this one because everyone knows I love maps, and so I thought it was a good one to rerun. Plus, I get to talk a little bit about my old high school best friend, Rad, who is a cartographer, and I'm always happy to get the word out about his work, so listen and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and I just had a bunch of peanuts, so it's Stuff You Should Know time. Circus edition. Yep. I wonder if we could get R.E.M.'s maps and legends to play, just subtly behind this entire podcast in the loop. I can answer that for you.

Nope. No. Okay. What album is that from? Or is that an album? Boy, that was the early one. I think, I don't know, maybe, like, reckoning even. No. Oh, yeah.

Again, people are homescreaming at me, because I can't call that to mind. Was that their first one, reckoning? Let's just move on. I'm afraid to get anything wrong. Yeah, that's cool. People who are in R.E.M. are really in R.E.M. Maps and Legends, good song.

Chuck, have you ever used a map? I have. I am notoriously terrible with my sense of direction, like, literally almost all the time, if I say it's left, isn't it? They say, no, it's right. We just talked about this. Yeah, because if I try to trick myself and go,

I think it's left, so I'm gonna say right, then it's left. Like, it's terrible. I've talked about it before. It's really... Yeah, we did recently. I can't place why or where. It's just my brain, man. It doesn't work that way.

So, yeah, I use maps, and I'm one of those people that has to turn the map and the direction I'm facing, and I just, it's tough for me. So, when you were using a map, you could have also said, or that you're terrible at using maps. You can say, I'm terrible at using two-dimensional, contorted, grossly misrepresentative images that supposedly stand for different data points of the Earth.

That's right. That's another way you could put maps. Because it turns out that they're actually not so great. Even though they are extraordinarily useful, they're portable, now that you can get them online, they're more portable than ever. And we would be pretty much nowhere without them as far as the imperial colonization of the world went.

But we still have not licked some very fundamental basic problems with maps. Maps and legends was on the fables, by the way. So, you didn't even hear what I just said, huh? I heard it all. And I agree, 100%. Oh, okay. Well, I'm placated.

The problem is, dude, is the Earth is not a flat piece of paper or a computer screen. No. The Earth is sort of shaped like a pumpkin. Yeah, I didn't realize that. I didn't either. Apparently, the middle's getting bigger, too. You know what?

I just realized what Tracy who wrote this meant by pumpkin. Like, she didn't mean the tall pumpkin. Well, yeah, pumpkin's come in all shapes. Right. So, which pumpkin was she referring to? I think like the shorter rounder, the round pumpkin. Yeah. But apparently, I think the Earth is supposedly

getting bigger, expanding at its center, not in the center. But it's getting more pumpkin-y, I think. Huh. More pumpkin-like. Okay, so maps are getting less and less accurate, then. Maybe. Because here's the problem. Map, like we said, it's a two-dimensional representation

of something that's three-dimensional. Yeah, it's hard to do. A map is flat, and it's representing something that's round, spherical-ish. And if you take a pumpkin, go to your pantry right now and get one of the pumpkins that you have there, and take a piece of paper off of a roll, say a newsprint, and tear enough off to go all the way around the pumpkin.

And you will see that if you take a pumpkin and mash the paper around it so that the pumpkin's completely covered, you're going to have something that's just grossly distorted. That's a map. It's a gross distortion of what's real. So much so that if you see a map that accurately represents what the continents look like

and how close they are and the amount of size they each have, you'd probably be pretty startled, because it doesn't look like what we're used to, which is called the Mercator projection. Yeah. And it's funny when I was reading this, I remember thinking to myself, if you're going to make cheats, make them in the ocean.

And I think that's a lot of times what they do. Yeah, there's no one who would notice. The good homo-lozine, the good homo-lozine, good as somebody's last name with an E, it basically distorts or chops up the world in the oceans. So it's real good for landmass. It'd be terrible if you're driving an oil tanker across the sea.

Yeah, you don't want to navigate by these things. No, and so since there's different ways to distort a map, there's different uses for different types of maps or distortions, which we call projections. We're going to do that a little more later on. Let's talk about the basics of all maps. A map is essentially a representation of, like we said, data points on Earth.

Yeah, and it can represent whatever. There's different attributes. If you wanted to show a map of distribution of golden retriever ownership, you could do that on a map. You totally could. Or the GDP of different countries or land use. It's basically an easy way, it's an easy language to show someone in picture form various attributes.

Right, yeah. And maps are created by people called cartographers, which is great. And like we said, there's some basic commonalities to all maps, right? Yeah, I kind of collect maps, by the way. I know, you told me. Not like a bunch, but I've got six or eight maps.

Any pirate maps? No pirate maps, but my entire desk, I made my desk, and I've got a map of the world on it that's like four feet by three feet. That's neat. And then I shall act over that, and that's like the base of my desk. Yeah, it's really cool, because I've referenced it a lot,

actually. I like the, yeah, I could stand to do that a lot more. New England, no idea. Well, it's like looking up a word in the dictionary when you don't know it, referring to an atlas, if you're like, hey, where's Kuala Lumpur? But I don't have a map, and suddenly, oh my god, Miss Teen South Carolina's answer has come to pass.

I don't have a map, and I'm not bad with maps, and I think if you gave me a little time, I would be able to find anything. Sure. But because I don't have a map for easy reference, like I use online maps now. Yeah. But if I had one for easy reference,

I think I would be a lot better at geography. I think everybody, forget your computer, it's very handy, but I think everyone should own a globe and or a map of the world, just to have it. Right. It's nice to have. Frame it, put it on your wall. They're very attractive.

It's art. Right. All right. I like the 50s, 60s maps, like the kind you'd find at school. Yeah, yeah. From that era. I just like the design of them, the look. Yeah, yeah.

Kevin Canane, one of the comedians, I saw at MaxFun was talking about his pillows, and how if you unsheathe his pillow, how nasty it is, and it looks like an ancient map of the world. You know, it's like brown with those lines. Yeah, what is that stuff? It's, he basically is like, you know, this stuff leaks from your head while you sleep.

Yeah. It's funny. It's a funny bit. OK, so the basic commonalities of maps are, number one, usually land masses or bodies of water. So you're going to have an outline of what you're talking about or what you're trying to show. Yeah.

Are you talking about like a physical map? Yeah. Well, I mean, any map is going to have that. But yes, a physical map is, physical maps are more like the terrain of an area. Right. That's what a physical map is concerned with. Yeah, and they use something called hypsometric tents,

variations of color to, obviously, you know, usually your water's blue and then the land can be green to brown or white, if it's like the Swiss Alps, you know. Yeah. Have you ever seen a map where the water isn't blue? The one on my desk is. It's tan. What?

Yeah, it's the whole thing is. Are you sure you're not reading it backwards? No, there's no blue. It's all tan. Yeah, it's tan. I've never seen that. You know, like the tan globe? No.

You've seen like the tan globe where the globe isn't like blue and green. That's basically what this is. It's like. I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around it. Yeah, next time you're in my home office, I'll show it to you. OK. You can have political maps that display

like different cultural information about countries. Thematic maps, obviously, have a theme like climate or GDP, like I said, or you can get really specialized, like, hey, where's the internet available in the world? Let's draw a map instead of listing a bunch of countries. Got you. You know? Yeah.

Yeah, thematic maps, those are probably the ones you see the most aside from using a map for street directions. Yeah. Thematic maps are the ones you went across. It'll be all sorts of things like you just mentioned, population density, oil exports, all that. Yeah. All right, Josh, let's talk about what they

call cartography conventions. And this is not when a bunch of cartographers get together at the downtown Hilton in Atlanta and talk about maps. Although I'm sure they do that, I'm sure there are real cartography conventions. Yeah. We're talking about conventions in the sense of off-use techniques. Right.

One of them, which I have already broken with my map, is that, like we said, water's blue. That's so weird. I don't understand. Land is green, vegetation is green, or brown, or tan. Land masses. Yeah. That's just one of the common conventions, so.

What color is the land mass, then, if the water on your map is tan? They're also tan and green and brown and. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. It's really not that big of a deal. I'll go look it up. I will post a photo of this of my map online on Facebook when we do this.

And everyone will go, oh, that doesn't look so weird. OK. All right. I feel like a jerk now, because my water's not blue. No, no, it's fine. OK. I'm just having trouble understanding, that's all. Yeah.

All maps depict their subject matter from above. Yeah. That's something that you just don't even really think of. It's such a common convention. Sure. North is usually at the top. Yeah. Generally, or if it's not for some reason,

they'll point you in the right direction. Yeah. Say this is north, this is southeast and west. Yeah. They have legends a lot of times. Yeah, maps and legends. Like we talked about with REM. And scale is usually indicated.

So it'll be like 1 inch equals 100 miles. Or there's a ratio or something like that. Yeah, and this is all the gobbity gook you find on the outskirts of the map. There's usually lots of stuff written down that you may not look at. That's where you'll find this information. And this should include in the legend that Hawaii and Alaska

are not actually right next to one another in the South Pacific Ocean, as it seems. That's true. All right, that's just odd. Well, like we said, it's tough when you got around or pumpkin like world. Right. Coordinate system a lot of times or not a lot of times.

Every time you'll see a map, there's going to be some kind of a coordinate system. If it's a Thomas guide, like before the advent of online smartphone maps, when I lived in LA, the Thomas guide was your best friend. And that's just a simple grid system. Like you look up, hey, I want to go to Topanga Canyon, go to page 400, and look up F6.

And then you'll just map your way from there. Yeah, the alphabets across the top, the numbers run down the side, and you find F6 and sink someone's battleship. If it's a map of the world, they're probably going to show you longitude and latitude. Right. But not necessarily something you can navigate with, you know?

No, but it should. It should be accurate as the point. Well, accurate, but not like you don't want to take a map of the world into the woods if you're orienteering. You know? Oh, right. You want a topographical map.

Right, which is tricky to read, by the way. Have you ever looked at a topo map? Yeah, been camping and stuff. Because you were talking about hypsometric tents to indicate different changes in altitude or elevation. Topographical maps use contour lines. And yeah, you better know what you're doing, because it's not necessarily intuitive.

It's not intuitive at all. You just have to learn it. And then once you learn it, you can wrap your head around it. Usually, the closer the lines are, or every time, the closer the lines are together, the more steep the change in elevation is, right? And lines that are kind of spread out indicate like a very slow slope.

It's been a while since I've taken basic orienteering. Is that a word? Orienteering? Yeah, I've not heard it. Really? Yeah. Are you messing with me on this episode? How orienteering is when they give you a map and a compass

and send you out in the woods. Yeah, I thought that was called trailblazing. I'm sure you could. You're also trailblazing. OK. Well, hold on. Before we go any further, it's time for a message break. Suffition bow.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in,

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear.

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app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. OK, so we're back, and we're talking about map drawing conventions, believe it or not. And there's a cool, here's a cool experiment you can do. If you want to know how difficult it is to draw a map and have it look accurate, get a balloon, blow it up, draw whatever you want, but draw, you know, the United States and Mexico and South America and Canada.

Throw Canada in there. And then deflate that balloon and see what it looks like. And that will give you a little bit of insight into how tough it is to be a cartographer. Right, I mean, you mentioned lines of longitude and latitude, right? Yes. Those are coordinates on any map.

And since they're coordinates on a map, people use them to navigate by, right? Yeah. But since we're going from a sphere to a flat plane, you have to figure out how to adjust for that. And you're basically making a decision. You're going to say, OK, am I going to make it so that the angles, if somebody draws a straight line,

the angles are all going to be the same along that line, meaning you can follow that line on a compass in the real world and get there. Let's call a rum line. Or are the lines of latitude, which are called parallels? Yeah. And lines of longitude are meridians. They're going to be equidistant accurately, correct?

Like that's the conundrum. And that's the big conundrum with maps, typically. Yeah, like where do you want your inaccuracy to be? Right. Which is pretty weird. I never really thought about it, though, like that. Like you have to, it's an interesting job in that you have to know that you cannot draw a perfect map

on a piece of paper. Right. So where am I going to fudge, essentially? And you do this, you figure this out with what they call map projections. And that is basically the method that you choose to project that sphere onto a flat surface. Right.

So Josh, you've cracked the code. I have not. This is a very, kind of, it's tough to think of. Because we're talking about now how distortions occur. Yeah. And so there's different ways to manipulate how something's distorted. First of all, let's say you are making a new projection.

OK. Right, that's a different manipulation of distortion. Right. Right, as a projection. And you're making a brand new one. One of the things, one of the tools you can use is called TISO's Indicatrix, T-I-S-S-O-T Apostrophe-S. Oh, right.

TISO. Those are the circles? Yeah. And what you do is you just overlay the equidistant exactly the same, OK, identical circles. It's like a grid of circles. Right, over a globe. And then when you make your projection,

the circles will distort. And you will be able to see where your distortions are on different areas, how they distort, like what direction they're going to distort, and get an idea of how your projection is distorted. Right. Right? And the reason that map's distorted, again,

is because you're taking a three-dimensional spherical representation and putting it on a two-dimensional, flat surface. Right. And the projection that we're all very familiar with, the one that we use almost across the board, is the Mercator projection. And there is a guy named Gerardus Mercator, who,

in 1569, created a map of the world. And Mercator decided that I'm going to make my maps for sailors. And he made a very important decision. He made it so that rum lines, where you measure between two points on this map, and you can follow that angle with your compass in real life, and you will get there.

Right. He made it so that those were precise. But he gave up lines of longitude and latitude being precise. And he figured out how to represent this very cleverly, where on lines of, I'm sorry, not lines of longitude and latitude, just latitude. Yeah.

Since the Earth gets narrower at the top, because it's a ball, and it's widest at the middle, anything above or below the equator, as you get further away, the lines between the latitudinal lines get bigger and bigger. The space is between them. Right. So like you would see on a globe, maybe?

Yeah. It's a really clever representation of what happens when you take a piece of paper and put it around a globe, a ball. Yeah. That's the Mercator projection. OK. And the way to figure out how he did this,

or to imagine how he did it, is to take a cylinder. Like a piece of paper and roll it up into the shape of a cylinder. This is a magic piece of paper cylinder. OK. And you have a balloon, and it's a magic balloon. Is this the same balloon we've drawn our world on? It can be, but it's a magic version of it.

OK. Because we need it to have our world on it, drawn on it perfectly. OK. And you blow up this balloon until it hits an edge of the cylinder. Right. So it's just touching the inside of the cylinder

on two points, one on either side. What that balloon has just become is tangent to the cylinder. Right. The secant is where the cylinder would like intersect the balloon. But right now, it's just touching. And you take a Mercator projection,

and you've got a perfectly blown up balloon inside a cylinder. And that's what you imagine is the projection. You have to take it a little further. You blow up the balloon until it completely fills up the cylinder. Right. So now, all of the information on this balloon is pressed up against the inside of the cylinder.

Yeah. The place where it was tangent, where it touched naturally, when the balloon was just filled up and it was just a sphere, that's going to be undistorted. OK, that makes sense. The stuff that you're blowing up until the balloon is no longer a sphere, but is filling up the cylinder, that stuff becomes distorted.

And further toward the edges you go, the more distorted it is. Now, we can pop our magic balloon, because all that information has been transferred on the inside of this cylindrical paper. And you unroll it, and there's your Mercator projection. Wow. Pretty good. I think I get it.

Do you really? I got it more than I did than when I read this like eight times. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Uncle Josh coming through for me. But in the center of a Mercator projection,

the distortions are going to be the least, because it's tangent to the cylinder. That's where it's just naturally touching the edges. It's not distorted. It's not being forced into the cylindrical shape. Yeah, that makes sense. OK. You think we should call this one?

What? Maps, the sun part two. Yeah, right. It is really hard to wrap your head around. It is, especially when you're like me and you're bad with maps to begin with. Yeah. So we talked about projections.

Depending on what you want to do, different projections have their good points and their bad points. If you want to have an equal area map, you would make an equal area map. That means you preserve the correct area, and it's going to distort the shape of your land masses. It might look weird if you're looking at the entire world,

but it's area-wise it's going to be accurate. Right. If you have the pseudo-conical Robinson projection, that's the map that you're probably most used to seeing that actually looks, quote unquote, correct. But their distances and direction aren't accurate in that case. Right. So it's not good for navigating.

It's good for being like, oh, so this is how the continents are situated. That's where Russia is. Is it Asia or is it Europe? Yeah. But depending on where you begin, the cartographer has a lot of leeway in deciding what is going to be the center of the world in this map.

Yeah. So Russia may not actually be over there, depending on the map. It can be up and to the left a little more in reality. Right. And it may be a little smaller. It just depends on, remember where the balloon touched the inside of the cylinder

and that was the tangent, wherever you position the cylinder around the world where it's going to touch, that's your line of least distortion. And that can be the center of your whole map. But it doesn't necessarily mean that in reality, it's the center of the world. Yeah.

So it's up to the cartographer what choices they're going to make to make what the center, what's where, and then, again, what they're going to distort. Right. If you want to be accurate with your distances, you're going to create an equidistant map projection. Yeah. And if you want your directions, if you

want like a navigational map you can actually use, that's when you're going to have to use those run lines. So your compass bearings will actually, you can use this map to get around. Right. You can make a straight line on the map and follow that same straight line, because if your run lines aren't straight,

they're going to be curved. But if your run lines are straight, then your latitude and longitude are curved. Yeah. So you're sacrificing one for the other. But another thing you can do to get around this distortion is to just tear out pieces of your map. Yeah.

There's something called gores that they use this to make globes. Right. Because a globe can start out as like a flat piece of paper, but then they cut out angles so that when you fold it, it doesn't crumple, it just kind of lays in perfectly. Yeah. Right? Gores usually go on lines of longitude.

That's where they separate. And it's just kind of random. So like a part of a landmass will be like completely separated by this nether region that doesn't really exist, except in two dimensions. Right? Right. That good projection, one of my favorites,

and it's also the logo for the UN, cuts out these things called tears, not gores. Oh, is that the very famous, yeah, I know which one you're talking about. Yeah. And they just cut through the ocean because. Looks like a bunch of footballs. Yes.

Connected at the top by the Arctic. Yeah. Which itself is a little bit cut up. But yeah, that's the same one. That's my favorite. I like it. It's very land-centric. Yeah, I like land-centric.

Me with my tan oceans. So like we said, maps are visual expressions of measurements. So if you go to make a map, what you're probably going to be working on is all the maps that have come before. Like it's definitely like an aggregate thing. And you can make your brand new map, of course. But over in antiquity and history, maps were made by going out and measuring things

and writing that stuff down. And eventually, the more we discovered, the more accurate the maps were. And they were just sort of, it was a big group effort, basically, to land on what eventually was an accurate map. Took a long time. It did take a long time. The oldest maps date back to, I think, 3,500 BC.

The Babylonians were making maps. Great, great. And their anthropologists and archaeologists disagree. But there may be even earlier maps. But among these. Like cave drawings? Yeah, but the anthropologists are like, is that a painting of an area, or is it a map?

Yeah. And you can't really say what the intention of the crew was. I call it a map. I mean, it might just be, here's Tuk Tuk's fortress, and here is where the fire is, and here's where the dinosaurs are. But that's still a very crude map to me. So I vote for map.

OK. Surveyors are going to come in handy, obviously, to take these precise measurements of both land and water. These days, they have GPS is going to make things a lot easier and more accurate. They have something called remote sensing, or aerial and satellite photography.

They use that a lot now, and that actually was used back in the 1800s. Yeah. 1858. Yeah, that was when they first used aerial photography. But it really came into its own in World War II when we had all these reconnaissance photos to use that sort of to map out your data.

Yeah, cartographers were like, can we have those when you're done? Yeah, exactly. And map making kind of exploded after that. So Tuk, we talked about thematic maps, right? Yeah, like where are all the trout in the United States? So it's basically like the basis is a physical map. You've got mountains, rivers, all that stuff.

You can overlay political maps if you start to carve that terrain up by national or state or county or city borders. Yeah. And then on top of that, you can lay a thematic map. Right, like a census or whatever. And that's when the cartographer becomes researcher, basically, and uses a lot of the same methods

that a writer would. They need accurate information. They need it as up to date as possible. Most maps like that will actually have citations just like a research paper might, like, hey, we got in touch with the World Bank for this map or the World Health Organization, is who we're citing for these numbers.

Right, I mean, if you're doing something like smallpox outbreaks from 1872 to 1915, then you could cite World Health Organization statistics and show that on a map just by using some colors. Yeah. That's spam. That's a thematic map right there. Yeah, and in 1852, Francis Guthrie, he was in England,

and he said, you know what? I have this theorem that all you need is four colors. And everyone said, shut up. And he said, no, really? They said, shut up. He said, you need your blue. Well, I actually don't know the four colors. I guess it'd be blue, brown, green, and white.

Apparently tan. Apparently you just need tan. That's brown. I guess so. But that became known as the four color theorem. And he proposed that you could map out all the counties of England just with those four colors. Why make it more complicated than that?

And people said, OK, maybe you're right. And he was. You need skill as an artist, obviously, if you want to be a cartographer. Yeah. With computers these days, geographic information systems, GIS, they have automated a lot of these tasks. But as Tracy points out, the best maps

still come from skilled artists. Yeah. And map making is, I get the impression that it really blew up after World War II, thanks to aerial photography. And we had some really great maps that were created as a result. But I feel like the internet has really ushered

in a new era for maps that has not been seen since the age of exploration, where it's like people are making maps for everything. They're a lot easier to make, although they still require a great deal of skill. I think what I mean is the tools are there to make a map easier to make. They're more accurate, they're more up to date.

The time between starting and releasing a map or publishing a map is a lot shorter. And people just, I think, tend to use them a lot more. And they're having a lot more impact thanks to things like Google Maps. Sure. And people are discovering entire lost cities thanks to Google Maps, like Google Earth.

Yeah. There was a war that broke out over Google Maps, I believe, between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, maybe. Really? Yeah, in 2008, 2009, there was a skirmish. And I believe it was Nicaragua and Costa Rica. There was this little disputed bit of land, and some rogue lieutenant said, you know what?

I found a Google map that sites this as ours, and I'm going to go colonize it. And it started an international incident between the two countries. Holy cow. Yeah. So I mean, they still have like a very, maps have a huge impact on world and culture.

And I think also a lot of people assert that they have an impact on the way people think of a nation or a continent or a group of the people who inhabit that area. Something that's big and in the center of a map, that must be an important place. Something that's small and off to the side is marginal. And I think that that has an impact

on the psychology behind maps. And I think probably a good cartographer takes that into consideration. Yeah, for sure. I think, well, something else that you have to consider is what is your purpose of the map, period? Like what information are you trying to get across? Because that'll determine what kind of data they're into.

And then what's the audience, just like if you were writing a story or a paper, you want to cater your map to who's going to be using it. Right. You know, this is for a children's website, or is it for getting around the big city? Right. But also, I mean, are you asserting the domination

of Europe over the rest of the world and your artist Mercator? And it's the 16th century. So you put Europe in the center of your world and make it way bigger than South America, which is actually twice its size. Yeah. It's a good point.

I think these days, cartographers fall into their different niches. Like you might be into political maps, and so that's what you do. Or like, actually, we can just get to this now. One of my best friends, one of my oldest friends, is a illustrator and cartographer. And he does, well, here, let me show you what he's done. He does everything from ski maps to ski slopes.

Oh, that's a nice map. Isn't it? It is. To the rivers of Utah or the rivers of this certain part of Africa. It's like really cool maps like that. It's pretty. Yeah, it's very pretty.

His name is Rad Smith, and we're looking at him. Oh, yeah. Raddington, Rad Key, I can't remember. Radford. Radford. Yeah, I've told you about that. You mentioned him before. So I sent Rad a few questions, actually,

just to spice this thing up, because when you have a cartographer at your beck and call, might as well use them, right? Ben Franklin, I think, said that. So I just threw a few quick questions at him earlier in the day, and he was kind enough to respond. And you can see Rad's work, by the way, at radsmithillustrations.com, if you're so inclined.

Or illustration, no S. So I asked him what kind of personality traits. He's like, what kind of person becomes a cartographer? And he said, patience is obviously a big, big thing, because you can't just whittle off a map in a few minutes or a few days. He says, especially in relation to having the ability to source and seek out existing data,

because every county, state, university, federal agency, et cetera, has their own data clearing house and GIS library. So finding the right data for your needs can really be a challenge. It also has become a crowdsourced resource. As data libraries are growing every day, I think having a strong mathematical background and understanding of scale and perspective is important, too.

And enjoying looking at the world from a map perspective as a plus. He said he never gets tired of looking at maps, old and new. And this was a dude that we used to sit around and watch at the Weather Channel together in high school, just for fun. It really panned out for him. Yeah, and he would be doodling, and I would be writing stories, and look at us now.

That's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah, he uses the GIS systems and GPS, because he asked him if, like, how much is actually field work. And I think, generally, he works in conjunction with people out in the field. And then asked him how he got started, and he said he always loved maps. He started painting watercolor maps for a magazine.

He would paint background textures to suggest terrain water and other geographic features. I bet he didn't paint it brown. No, I bet he's all about the blue water. He's a surfer. That may have been when we talked about it. Oh, and finally, I asked him, like, how long? And that's the worst question ever.

Like, hey, how long does it take to do a map? But that Moonlight Basin scheme map I did, he said, took 170 hours to create. It looks like it. Yeah, he said he worked from dozens of aerial photos, topographic maps, satellite images, building plans to piece it all together. So it's very cool.

It's like kind of figuring out a puzzle, I think. Yeah, that's neat. And then relaying it in a way that is both accurate and interesting to the user. Yeah, and I like looking at maps, too. There's a bunch of cool ones all over the internet. I think if you just search, like, strange maps, it'll bring up some pretty cool sites.

Yeah, and it's fun to look at, too, the old, I'm into what people used to think the world looked like, and the land masses were shaped like. Oh, yeah. Well, if you look at certain projections now that are supposedly very accurate, it looks really weird and nothing like what we think of as well. Maps is done.

Ta-da. You got any more? I got a note. Way to add the cartographer at the end, that's nice. Yeah, thanks, Rad. Thanks, buddy. Thanks a lot, Rad. He's pretty excited about this, I think.

Oh, yeah. Well, sure. Cool. Anytime someone's highlighting your field, he does other illustrations, too. He's not just a cartographer. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's just what he does on the site.

If you want to know more about maps and cartography, you can type maps into the search bar at howstuffworks.com, which means, since I said search bar, it's time for listener message break. Stuff you shouldn't know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And how about some listener mail? All right, I'm going to call this Fraternity in Drag.

OK. All right, this is from Cameron. Hey, guys, and Jerry. First off, I'm a big fan of the show. Recently listened to the episode on Drag Queens. I thought I'd share a little bit about my organization. I'm the president of the XI chapter. XI.

I think that's right. I think it is too XI. Of Delta Lambda Phi, International Social Fraternity at UC Davis in California, where a special interest fraternity for gay, bisexual, and progressive men. For the past almost 25 years, we've put on Northern California's largest drag show called Davis is Burning, the name inspired, obviously,

by the documentary, Paris is Burning, which you guys mentioned. The show is a night of gender-bending fun, as many of our brothers dress up and perform in drag for an audience of almost 1,000 students, staff, and community members. So that's awesome. It's like everyone's getting involved in this.

Additionally, we have local celebrity drag performers from Sacramento. They're Sacramento celebrities in San Francisco. There you go. The audience gets involved, too, in our famous drag king and queen competitions. While the show serves mainly as a fundraiser for the chapter, we donate a large amount of money from the show

to The Trevor Project, an anti-suicide hotline for at-risk LGBT youth. I think it's great that you guys featured this piece on the show about drag queens and had some fun with the lingo. Did a great job. Feel free to check out our website for the show at davisisburning.com. That is from Cameron. Thanks, Cameron.

We got some good replies. Did you see the guy who he and his partner met one of the veterans of the Stonewall riots? Yeah, down in Puerto Rico. Yeah, still in drag and just like living history right there. So very cool. Very cool. So thanks to them.

Although I'm sure she would not like you to refer to her as living history. Hopefully she doesn't listen to this. Why? Living history? What's wrong with that? That just makes her sound old. Well, she is old, but she's part of history and she's alive.

Anyway, I hope she's not listening. He also hit him at the end of the email, in the PS. Oh yeah, what'd he say? He's like, hey Chuck, if you ever decide to swing over our way, give me a call. He's like, Josh is too skinny for me, but. That's hilarious. Yeah, I guess he's into the.

Bears? Yeah, the chubby bearded ones. Bears. Yeah. I didn't even notice that. To scroll down further, my email's from Noah. You should. The PS is always riveting.

If you got a PS that you want us to hear, you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com. And as always, you can join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you listen to podcasts.