Map of the Week - Beijing Olympic Venues

Friday is 8/8/08 and 8 being a very lucky number to the Chinese it will be the starting date for the Beijing Olympics. The Beijing 2008 website has this nice interactive map, showing the location of the venues. You can mouse over the dots to get basic information and a click on them will get pictures, diagrams, architectural drawings, links to schedules, game rules and much more. What's lacking is a mileage scale so it's not clear how close these places are to each other. Also some transit and/or parking/driving tips would be helpful. You can find that information in the "Spectator Guide"s but they could have put it in a more obvious place.
Hope your favorite country proves their athletic prowess to the world!

Map of the Week 126-The Olympic Torch Relay

The Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee has put together a nice interactive map of the torch relay route.
You can click on any city on the map and get some pictures (like this one from Wuzhishan in Hainan) and some other basic cultural and demographic information.
Clicking China gets you details from each province. If you want to follow the torch or go protest the government's treatment of Falun Gong, Tibetans or Chinese here's how you know where to go.
As of this post they are either in Suzhou or on their way to Nantong, just north of Shanghai. So light the passion and share the dream!

Map of the Week 125-Asian Disasters

It's been tough finding good maps of the earthquake area in China. The BBC wins out again with this map although the scale is a bit too zoomed in to get a good sense of the surrounding areas. You do get a sense of how close Chengdu, a city of about 4 million people, is to the epicenter and how severe the quake was there. You can click on the affected cities and get more information - or just scroll down on the same page.



One of the more tragic aspects of the China quake is how it has made many of us forget about the cyclone in Myanmar-Burma (Whatever you prefer to call it) where another city of 4 million Yangon-Rangoon (Whatever you prefer to call it) has been hit.
This is a set of before and after satellite images of Cyclone Nargis from the NASA Earth Observatory. The after image shows the extent of flooding as of May 5th using a combination of color and infrared light to clarify the floodwaters.
Anyway be thankful if you're not in one of these places and hopefully we'll all donate a little to help these people-it could be any of us next time.

MOTW #1

Map of the Week #1

Program Note: Map of the week has been an e-mail list since some time in 2005. This was probably not the first one but it is the first map after I decided to keep track of them.
Note 2: Most of these first 50 or so maps did not have comments and some of them are unattributed. I will try to give credit where due fr these. Hopefully nobody gets bent out of shape about that.

This is a map of Avian Flu courtesy of the UN World Food Program.