Four maps: disturbing, useful, political, and stupid

I’ve happened upon a number of interesting maps recently.

First is the CDC’s US measles map for the first half of this year, from an informative post at the History of Vaccines Blog:


Next is the megacities map created by the IGU’s Megacity Task Force:


If you go to the page and click on the cities, you find information about the history and present of urbanization there.

Third is a Cold War era East German Berlin rail map from Strange Maps:


Finally, also political, and stupid, is “Exit Plan: Where do exiled leaders flee?” (a map of “where former exiled leaders slip away to after being exiled”):


It includes Manuel Zelaya (who, incidentally, has been back in Honduras since a couple of weeks after the map was posted) among brutal dictators. As the first comment there points out, Zelaya was completing his term as the democratically elected president of Honduras, and he didn’t flee or slip away. He was kidnapped and taken from the country as part of a military-oligarchic coup in 2009. He doesn’t belong in this map, and his inclusion sends a political message, intentionally or not. (It’s possible that it was unintentional, given that Lenin is included despite the fact that his periods of exile were when he was a revolutionary and not an “ousted leader.”) Bah.