CIA Declassifies Lots of Cool Maps
December 17, 2016 12:55 PM   Subscribe

 
There's an obvious comment that could be made here about CIA leaks and Yahoo emails/passwords being compromised, but it's frankly too obvious. Instead, these are actually some pretty interesting maps and images - and there's over a thousand of them. Thanks for the post!
posted by Wordshore at 1:21 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


the Cartography Tools are fascinating.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:53 PM on December 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


I used to sell everything on that tools link. Bought everything I could get as items were discontinued. Those intense kids. "I hear you have..."

If you can't make a map...
posted by Mr. Yuck at 2:16 PM on December 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


These are very, very neat but the "Never miss a post from Central Intelligence Agency / Sign up with Yahoo" pop up is hilarious to me.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 2:21 PM on December 17, 2016 [10 favorites]


the Cartography Tools are fascinating

"Germans... I hate their fascism, but I love their device for measuring the area of irregular 2D shapes by tracing its outline."

Part of what's awesome about those tools is how worn so many of them look, yet still perfectly functional, except you have no idea how to use them properly and you might as well just dump a 1/4 cup of black ink on yourself and go home and the president can just bomb the whole fucking country because your map is not helping anybody today.
posted by fatbird at 3:51 PM on December 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


Part of what's awesome about those tools is how worn so many of them look, yet still perfectly functional, except you have no idea how to use them properly and you might as well just dump a 1/4 cup of black ink on yourself and go home and the president can just bomb the whole fucking country because your map is not helping anybody today.

I'm pretty sure you can work out what they're for just by looking at them and knowing they're relevant to cartographers.

That three-sided thing is just a ruler with different scales on it, the 10-pointed thing fans out perfectly equally so I bet that's for measuring planning where you need to know where you are at certain increments along the way (Checkpoints? Logistics? lots of possibilities...)

That "map measuring tool" is basically a ruler you can steer around a corner, for measuring curved routes so you can get real distances traveled from that plus the scale of the map. Slide rule is there to help with that.
posted by mhoye at 4:39 PM on December 17, 2016


Ha! I do get the basic function of all of them, it's that a lot of them are used with black ink either by dipping or using a brush to charge them, and from painful experience I know there's a level of confidence and dexterity to successfully making lines or letters with them that takes a lot of practice. I actually had some of the tools for making lines of a specific width. The lettering templates alone make we want to order a set and start making labels.

If I could steal just one of the things from that museum, it would be the device that subdivides a distance into ten equal parts. So obvious when you look at it.

The one that really blew me away was the wheeled device for making dotted lines. omg.
posted by fatbird at 5:05 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


10 point dividers were also used by the Navy back in the day of analog sonar systems. If you print out a waterfalling fourier transform (spectrogram) on paper, you can space out the harmonics with the 10 point - get the width just right and every harmonic in that set will line up - then divide the total width by 10 to get your fundamental frequency. Of course that's all done digitally these days.

(They also hurt like hell when thrown)
posted by MrFTBN at 6:15 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


the Cartography Tools are fascinating.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:53 PM on December 17


Thank you so much for posting that secondary link, lmfsilva. My dad was a cartographer with the Army during the Vietnam War so I sent it his way. He said he used many of those same tools and said he probably still has some of those pens and nibs stored away somewhere. Now he kind of wants to go dig them up. Much appreciated.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:04 PM on December 17, 2016 [3 favorites]


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