Frank Jacobs

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Frank Jacobs

Journalist, writer, and blogger

strange maps

Frank Jacobs is Big Think's "Strange Maps" columnist.

From a young age, Frank was fascinated by maps and atlases, and the stories they contained. Finding his birthplace on the map in the endpapers of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings only increased his interest in the mystery and message of maps.

While pursuing a career in journalism, Frank started a blog called Strange Maps, as a repository for the weird and wonderful cartography he found hidden in books, posing as everyday objects and (of course) floating around the Internet.

"Each map tells a story, but the stories told by your standard atlas for school or reference are limited and literal: they show only the most practical side of the world, its geography and its political divisions. Strange Maps aims to collect and comment on maps that do everything but that - maps that show the world from a different angle".

A remit that wide allows for a steady, varied diet of maps: Frank has been writing about strange maps since 2006, published a book on the subject in 2009 and joined Big Think in 2010. Readers send in new material daily, and he keeps bumping in to cartography that is delightfully obscure, amazingly beautiful, shockingly partisan, and more.

Everything Videos Articles
A map with various yellow and brown faces showing different emotions, representing different regions.
Strange Maps
Chernoff faces: The data-rich maps that stare back at you
50 years ago, Herman Chernoff proposed using human faces to represent multidimensional datasets. It was a good idea in theory — but a disaster in practice.
Frank Jacobs
Map of the world showing tropical cyclone tracks from 1985 to 2005. Paths are marked with lines indicating storm movement over time. Dense clusters appear in the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean.
Strange Maps
Hurricanes never cross the equator. Here’s why.
Thanks to the Coriolis force, hurricanes never cross the equator.
Frank Jacobs
Line chart showing body mass index (BMI) trends for various countries. Lines are labeled by country, with silhouetted figures for normal, overweight, and obese categories on the left.
Strange Maps
How is France dodging the global obesity trend?
Waistlines are expanding in most countries, except for a skinny list of nations bucking the trend.
Frank Jacobs
A Venn diagram depicts the overlapping groups of Nordic countries, Scandinavia, Danish Realm, Baltoscandia, Finno-Ugric, Baltic countries, and Balts, with the flags of respective countries.
Strange Maps
Baltoscandia: The geopolitical ghost that may just have a future
Because of their large and unfriendly neighbor to the east, the Baltics would rather be Scandinavian.
Frank Jacobs
A fictional map of a continent named eneropa, showing various regions like tidal states, ccsr, and solaria with topographical details and a scale.
Strange Maps
Europe remapped: What the energy utopia “Eneropa” would look like in 2050
A radical proposal reimagines Europe as a carbon-neutral continent where national boundaries are replaced by regions defined by renewable energy capabilities.
Frank Jacobs
World map illustrating various countries color-coded by their happiness levels with symbols indicating the most and least happy countries in each region.
Strange Maps
Mapped: The highs and lows of the world’s happiness landscape
The Gallup World Poll reveals regional peaks and valleys of happiness across all of the continents.
Frank Jacobs
A graphical representation of network connections superimposed on a dark map, highlighting major nodes with bright orange and yellow lines.
Strange Maps
The Enlightenment had its own internet: The Republic of Letters
Digital analyses of Enlightenment-era letters are teaching us a thing or two about Locke, Voltaire, and others.
Frank Jacobs
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