More goodies came to me in email this morning, this one (from the Edge newsletter) about the Serpentine Gallery: Maps for the 21st Century.

Click on the Serpentine link above and you will be taken to the first map in a gallery of 57 fascinating maps.

Here are a few examples.

The creator of the following map (“The True Size of Africa”) , Kai Krause, explains how he hopes it will overcome “immappancy:”

“A map about the complete inability of the general public to gauge the relative sizes and distances, the areas, the population….Often there are extremely basic assumptions with distortions that would be hilarious, if they weren’t at the same time so deeply sad as well…Analogous to illiteracy and innumeracy I coined the term “immappancy.”

Here’s a map created by theoretical physicist Sean Carroll. He explains it:

“A somewhat fanciful depiction of a multiverse consisting of a background empty spacetime giving birth to baby universes, as proposed in my 2004 paper with Jennifer Chen. Artwork by Jason Torchinsky.”

This one is by physicist Gino Segré. He says:

“A temperature map of the Universe 400,000 years after the Big Bang.This was the end of thermal equilibrium and the beginning of all we see now.”