Subways Built by Slime Mold / / No Comments Subway Sim: Watching a City Think In 2010, researchers in Tokyo ran a slime mold experiment on a map of the city.They placed oat flakes on a map of the Greater Tokyo Area, positioning each flake over a metropolitan center. Then they released a slime mould – Physarum polycephalum – at the location of Tokyo itself.Slime moulds are single-celled organisms with no brain, no nervous system, Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Built, Mold, Slime, Subways
How Big is Big? / / No Comments META is building a massive (AI)-focused data centre in northeast Louisiana. The site footprint is 2,250 acres of land – making the Hyperion Data Center one of the largest data-center construction sites ever attempted in the United States. It is a nearly five-mile-long, one-mile-wide tract of land that is being developed to power Meta’s AI ambitions.It is hard to understand the true scale of a Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps
Building a UI for Gemini File Stores / / No Comments Back in November of last year I wrote up a blog post talking about a new (at the time) Google Gemini feature, File Stores: "Gemini File Search and File Stores for Easy RAG". In that post I discussed what it was, how it worked, and built up a simple example. You should definitely read that post first, but if you want the TLDR, here ya go: File Stores (referred to as "File Search") expands on Gemini’s previous ability to work on files in a temporary fashion by allowing you to create a permanent "store" of folders. You can use this for RAG systems and use flexible metadata filter for complex queries. This feature has been out for a few months now and I’ve... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: building, file, Gemini, Stores
Make a Map Poster / / No Comments Ankur Gupta has created an impressive Map Poster Generator. The code for which is available on GitHub.While the original repository is fantastic for developers, it also requires a local Python setup, terminal commands, and the installation of geospatial libraries like OSMnx and GDAL – which can be intimidating if you aren’t a coder.I’ve therefore adapted the core logic into a Google Colab Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Poster
Using Chrome AI to Rewrite Monstrous JSON / / No Comments Happy Saturday folks, and while this is a topic I’ve covered many times here, I was bored and wanting to write some code, so I whipped up a quick demo. One of my favorite uses of AI is to take abstract data and write a human readable form of it. Now to be clear, this is not something you need AI for. Given that you know the shape of your data, you can create your own summary using hard-coded rules about what values to show, how to present them, and so forth. What I like about the Gen AI use-case for this is the amount of randomness and creativity you get in the responses. In the past I’ve done this with weather forecasts and chart data, but today I thought I’d try something... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Chrome, JSON, Monstrous, Rewrite, using
Did You Win the Global Lottery? / / No Comments Are you feeling lucky? You probably should be. Based on where most Maps Mania readers are located, there’s a good chance you’ve already won the birth lottery.The Birth Lottery map makes global inequality tangible by illustrating how much our quality of life depends on chance. With a single spin, the map randomly “re-births” you somewhere in the world based on real statistics. It poses a simple Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: global, Lottery
War Atlas: Mapping 3,500 Years of Conflict / / No Comments War Atlas is an interactive, web-based map that visualizes 8,500+ historical battles spanning from around 1500 BC to the present day – providing users with a guided historical tour of human conflict.At its core, War Atlas is an interactive timeline-driven map. Users can select a specific war, explore through time using a slide control or through inputting a specific year, and see battles Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: 3500, atlas, conflict, Mapping, Years
Where are the Most Expensive Houses? / / No Comments Homes Are Expensive is an interactive map that can help you find the cheapest and most expensive places to buy a property in the United States. The house prices are based on data from Zillow listings.The map visualizes property prices across the USA using data scraped via hasdata.com in November 2025, and provides a comprehensive look at the 1.85 million homes currently on the market. What makes Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Expensive, Houses, most