Stranger Maps of Space (and other things)

Strange Maps recently put up some interesting astronomically themed maps. The one above is "A Better Sky." Well, not actually better, but at least more current. Someone took a constellation map and replaced the star groupings by fable, with star grouping by recent world leaders. Does this make more sense? My verdict: sort of. It doesn't involve pretending that Aries somehow resembles a ram...or anything else. Plus people like Einstein, Darwin and Roosevelt get stars named after them. On the other hand, Mussolini has his own star too, in the "Tyrants" constellation (with Hitler, Robespierre and other fun friends!). At least the sunspots would run on time. Wait a second, there is a Quebec star? Nein!

Next up, the "Unnamed Methane sea on Titan."

Hmm. This is pretty much what it sounds like. There may be a bunch of liquid methane on Saturn's moon, and, basically, um, scientifically speaking, there is a "sea" of it. And it doesn't have a name. May I propose dubbing it the Sea of William Carlos Williams? He got left off the constellation map somehow...

In actuality though, we don't know whether there is liquid methane there, this map was just made by looking at "dark spots" on some radar maps of the surface. Nonetheless, Titan is pretty fascinating. When you crash into it, it looks like this:



...to a probe. (The video is Huygens' decent in 2005, time-compressed from four hours.)

I have to say though, as cool as these maps are, they have nothing on Area Codes in which Ludacris Claims to have Hoes:

“In this song, Ludacris brags about the area codes where he knows women, whom he refers to as ‘hoes’,” says Ms Gray, who plotted out all the area codes mentioned in this song on a map of the United States. She arrived at some interesting conclusions as to the locations of this rapper’s preferred female companionship:

• “Ludacris heavily favors the East Coast to the West, save for Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.”
• “Ludacris travels frequently along the Boswash corridor.”
• “There is a ‘ho belt‘ phenomenon nearly synonymous with the ‘Bible Belt’.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the entire state of Maryland.”
• “Ludacris has a disproportionate ho-zone in rural Nebraska. He might favor white women as much as he does black women, or perhaps, girls who farm.”
• “Ludacris’s ideal ‘ho-highway’ would be I-95.”
• “Ludacris has hoes in the Midway and Wake Islands. Only scientists are allowed to inhabit the Midway Islands, and only military personnel may inhabit the Wake Islands. Draw your own conclusion.”

Yup.