BatesLine

Via Gene Veith I found an interesting new blog called Strange Maps, which is exactly what you would expect -- unusual depictions of geography both real and imaginary.

Some of the maps are of never-realized political entities, such as the county lines drawn by the 1905 constitutional convention of the proposed State of Sequoyah. The accompanying text explains the formation of the Twin Territories, the history of the convention and the reason the state, which would have included the territory of the Five Civilized Tribes, never came into being. The map has the Sequoyah counties superimposed on the same range and township grid that we still use today, so it's easy to tell that Coweta County would have been east of Yale, between Archer and the Arkansas River, with Euchee County to the west and Cooweescoowee County to the north. Oklahoma's state seal owes much to the Sequoyah seal.

What caught my eye was this map, apparently from the wall of a Niketown store, of the "United Countries of Baseball" -- an attempt to map fan loyalties to Major League Baseball teams. It's especially interesting to see where they place loyalties to teams that share a city (Cubs/White Sox, Yankees/Mets) and how they split areas that are roughly equidistant from more than one MLB city. I think the Cardinals/Rangers line is too far east; Tulsa should be right on the border.

Here is a site called CommonCensus which is collecting and using online survey data to plot the same sort of map, not only for baseball, but for other major league sports, college football, and city spheres of influence. The baseball map puts northeastern Oklahoma predominantly in Cardinal Country. There are some surprisingly large Boston Red Sox enclaves in upstate New York, particularly in the Finger Lakes and Adirondacks regions. (Guess I shouldn't have been too surprised.)

The city-influence regions seem to follow TV and newspaper market areas pretty closely. Tulsa's zone is the 918 area code, plus a bit of southeastern Kansas, minus a strip along the Arkansas border that more closely identifies with Fayetteville or Fort Smith.

commoncensus.org are still collecting data, although they haven't updated their maps in many months. You can participate in their survey from the home page.

This may look like a souvenir from my recent trip to Britain with my 10-year-old for the Tulsa Boy Singers choir tour, but it's not, although the trip reawakened an interest in it.

This is The London Game, a strategy game based on a map of the London Underground. The object is to be the first to travel to six tourist destinations and return to your starting point at one of London's main railway stations. There are "hazard" cards that either delay you or allow you to delay another player. Each "souvenir" card has a drawing and a description of the point of interest and the name of the nearest Tube station.

I remember playing this game with a friend of mine when we were probably 10 or 11. His family subsequently put it in a garage sale or otherwise disposed of it. I had always thought it would be a fun board game to have.

Three times in the past I've been to the London Transport Museum gift shop in Covent Garden, and three times I've balked at paying the asking price, not to mention wondering if I had room and sufficient spare weight in my luggage for the box. Last month, the museum shop had a special edition in a metal box for the low, low price of 25 pounds sterling -- about $50, and too dear for me. Once back home, I checked eBay and found a copy of the 1972 edition. I was the only bidder and price and shipping combined came to $15.

While my wife and our 10-year-old went to hear Weird Al Yankovic in concert last Friday, and after I put the 18-month-old to bed, the six-year-old and I played the game a couple of times. We opted not to use the station blocking rule and instead concentrated on getting familiar with where everything is on the board and how the basic rules work.

We added a rule that you have to say the name of each station as you pass through it. I figure it'll help the kids learn to pronounce Gloucester, Leicester, and Tottenham correctly and how to interpret a map and plan a route, and we'll all build a mental map of London which will come in handy when we go back as a family someday. There have been a few changes to the Tube map since 1972, but not many to the central London section that makes up the game board.

We had fun playing it, and we each won a round. I'll have to try the more cut-throat version, where you can block stations to delay your opponents, with the 10-year-old.

As I mentioned in my initial Tulsa 1957 post, I wanted to be able to create maps showing where things were back then. I finally figured out a relatively easy way to do it, using Google Earth, and I found a number of online tools to minimize the amount of development work I would need to do.

My first exercise was to create a KML file showing all of the more than 400 restaurants listed in the classified section of the 1957 Polk Directory of Tulsa. The usual GIGO warning applies. If the Polk Directory was wrong, the file will be wrong.

I would like to add, but have not yet added, non-duplicate entries from the Southwestern Bell Yellow Pages. I'm limited there because a quarter of a page from the "Cafes" section of the 1957 phone book was torn out.

Google Earth makes it possible to include all sorts of information in a map -- with enough time and energy, you could include images of newspaper and phone book ads and building photos.

To build the file I used Excel to enter name and address, then used an online tool called BatchGeocode to convert each address to a latitude and longitude and to create a KML file, which Google Earth can read. I had to do a bit of tweaking to get the icons I wanted, and the Geocoder had trouble with some addresses that no longer exist (e.g., the 100 block of South Main, the 500 block of East Brady and East Cameron). (I pre-modified Sapulpa Rd and Sand Springs Rd addresses to the modern day names of Southwest Blvd and Charles Page Blvd.) For some reason, Pennington's Drive-In wound up in the south Atlantic Ocean, but I fixed it.

Google Maps can load and display small KML files, but not a KML file with 400 entries. So you'll need to have Google Earth installed on your PC to get the full effect. In Google Earth, you'll be able to hover over an icon to see the name, and click on it to see the address. Here again is the link to the KML file of Tulsa's restaurants in 1957 which you can download and use in Google Earth.

For those without, and until I can figure a dynamic way to display the map online, I've provided some screenshots from Google Earth below the fold. One is zoomed out to show the location of all restaurants in the city, the other is zoomed in to provide more detail between Pine and 36th, Union and Harvard.

A cool idea for future implementation: Google Earth is able to display a fourth-dimension -- time. If you could compile the restaurant listings for each year, you'd be able to move the time slider back and forth and watch as one restaurant replaces another, and as restaurants move out toward the suburbs. What an amazing way that would be to visualize the development and undevelopment of the city over time.

Speaking of undevelopment, notice some of the clusters of restaurants. There are eateries on nearly every block downtown, and there's a linear cluster extending north of the expressway -- that's Greenwood -- the Black Wall Street of America. There's a cluster along Quanah / Southwest Blvd in west Tulsa (another urban renewal removal). Sheridan Road was the key commercial link between the airport and the rest of the city.

I hope to post more KML files in the future, covering places like drug stores, groceries, churches, beer joints, bowling alleys, and movie theaters. It would speed up the process if some of my readers were willing to help transcribe phone book entries. I'm not quite set up to accept help, but in the not too distant future, I will be able to send you an image of a page from the Polk Directory and a template Excel spreadsheet for you to fill in. Let me know if you'd be willing to help in that way by e-mailing me at blog at batesline dot com.

And as always, if seeing the name of an obscure restaurant stirs some memories, drop me a line and tell me about it.

Pictures after the jump:

This may help stir some memories of late '50s Tulsa. Reader John Brandon sent along a scan of a 1958 service station map of the City of Tulsa. He got it as an eleven-year-old, and he marked it up (in black crayon) to show changed city limits resulting from annexation and the recently proposed freeway network. Click this link to open or download the 4 MB PDF of the 1958 D-X map of Tulsa.

(It's nice to find a kindred spirit. I was (and am) fond of collecting and annotating maps, too.)

On the back of the map is a downtown grid, showing the location of important buildings, a map showing the route of the Tulsa Tour, and a county map, which shows the small cities and the locations of several rural schools, like East Central (then at Admiral and Garnett) and Rentie (81st and Harvard).

Here are some interesting things I noticed; please add your observations in the comments:

• On the county map, the N-S section line roads east of Memorial aren't named and go up in increments of 17, not 16 as they do today.
• I'm pretty sure that U.S. 169 came down Boston from 11th Street to connect to Boulder Park Rd and the 21st Street bridge. This map shows it coming down Baltimore Ave.
• On the county map, no Yale between 71st and 81st. No 61st between Sheridan and Memorial.
• The intersection of 31st and Yale, evidently designed to avoid two grade crossings of the M. K. & T. tracks.
• Alsuma (51st & Mingo) is still a separate town with its own street names.
• Other odd street names: Braniff Hills and Broadmoor Hills south of Southern Hills Country Club. Hidden Hill at... well, I'll let you find Hidden Hill.
• Where does downtown stop? It's a lot harder to tell without the Inner Dispersal Loop.

MORE MAPS: John Brandon was kind enough to scan some specific parts of the map:

The central Tulsa part of the main map (939 KB)
The map's cover (1.39 MB)
Downtown inset showing major buildings (845 KB)
Tulsa County map (619 KB)
Tulsa Tour route map (1019 KB)

Wow! The Oklahoma Department of Transportation has scanned and posted official Oklahoma state highway maps going back to statehood. There are the annual maps produced from 1924 to 1996, the biennial maps produced since 1997, and a few early maps from 1873, 1907, 1916, 1919, and 1921. For most of the maps, there's also a scan and a description of the back of the map.

I've been looking at the 1916 map, which shows the highways overlaid on the township and section grid, along with railways, rivers, and county lines. Although many of the inter-town routes on the map were later incorporated into numbered highways, not all were. For example, there's the road from Tulsa to Jenks: Peoria to 71st to Lewis to the 96th Street bridge. Or from Catoosa to Broken Arrow: 193rd to 11th to Lynn Lane. The road from Tulsa to Bixby and Broken Arrow went down Harvard and 51st to Memorial, with the BA route splitting off at 71st and the Bixby route, shifting 1 mile east at 111th to Mingo. The map shows the bridge crossing about halfway between Mingo and Memorial.

If you have trouble finding your way around the tidy Cartesian grid that defines Tulsa's street network, imagine learning your way around an ancient, complex, and chaotic street network, and keeping that map entirely in your head.

From the Transport for London website:

All licensed taxi drivers in the Capital must have an in depth knowledge of the road network and places of interest in London - the 'Knowledge'. For would be All London drivers, this means that they need to have a detailed knowledge of London within a six mile radius of Charing Cross. Suburban drivers need to have a similarly detailed knowledge of their chosen sector.

From a PDF document about the Knowledge of London examination system:

In order to complete the Knowledge you will need to know any place where a taxi passenger might ask to be taken and how to get there. To do this you will need to know all the streets, roads, squares etc. as well as specific places, such as parks and open spaces, housing estates, government offices and departments, financial and commercial centres, diplomatic premises, town halls, registry offices, hospitals, places of worship, sports stadiums and leisure centres, stations, hotels, clubs, theatres, cinemas, museums, art galleries, schools, colleges and universities, societies, associations and institutions, police stations, civil, criminal and coroner’s courts, prisons, and places of interest to tourists. Such places are known as ‘points’.

How do you organize all this information in your brain? You learn 320 "runs", divided into 20 lists of 16 runs. A run connects two major points, and you learn the route from one end to the other, the reverse route (which may differ because of one-way streets and turn restrictions), all points of interest along the way, and all points of interest with a quarter-mile of each end point.

After an introductory talk, you have six months to learn the first 80 runs, then you go through a self-assessment, just to see if you've got the hang of it. You have another 18 months to learn the remaining 240 runs. Then there are four stages of oral examinations, each of which may involve multiple exams before advancing to the next stage. According to Transport for London:

On average it takes an All London applicant 34 months to learn the Knowledge and pass through the examination process, 26 months for a suburban applicant.

Small wonder that that London cabbie was able to keep his composure when he unexpectedly found himself being interviewed on TV about an Internet intellectual property case. (Hat tip on the cabbie story to The Dawn Patrol.)

I went to a presentation this afternoon at Central Library about the digital version of the Sanborn fire maps. These are maps that were created for fire insurance purposes from before the turn of the 20th century through the 1960s, showing details of each structure -- number of stories, footprint, building material, and sometimes the name or type of business. It's a valuable resource for trying to reconstruct what was where at a given point in time.

Tulsa City-County Library card holders have access to fire maps for Oklahoma online, from anywhere on the Internet, via this link. If you're not in a library, you'll have to log in with your last name and library card number.

I've got an idea for a series about lost downtown Tulsa, going block by block, telling what was on each block over the years before it was turned into asphalt. These maps, combined with city directories, will be a valuable resource. Just so no one else claims it, I'll give you my working title: "If Parking Lots Could Talk."

We've all marveled over the detailed satellite photos available with Google Maps, but wouldn't it be even more useful to be able to see a street the way you'd see it from the ground?

Amazon thinks so. Via King of Fools, we learn Amazon's beta version of A9 maps is online, and for select cities and streets, you can view street level images of both sides of the street. For example, here's the 1400 block of SW 8th Street in Miami, aka Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana. (I'll explain why I picked that spot in another entry.)

One of the King's commenters couldn't see much value in this feature, called "blockimages," but I can imagine all sorts of uses. Suppose you're booking a hotel in a city you haven't visited. You could use blockimages to see what the surrounding neighborhood looks like. Or you've got to go between two places that are within walking distance; A9's blockimages will help you know if the path between the two places is really walkable.

I plan to use this feature to show you examples of good and bad streetscapes, the difference between places that are active and vital and places that are dead. Some may object that these photos only show what can be seen at street level, but for the purpose of illustrating good urban design, that's really all that matters.

I was going to include this in the roundup post below, but this deserved its own entry.

I first came across the Oklahoma Department of Transportation (ODOT) county highway maps back in the mid-'70s, when I would take the MTTA bus downtown from school on Wednesday afternoons and hang out at Central Library until Dad got off work. I could spend hours poring over maps, and became particularly fascinated with the ODOT county maps, which showed rural roads and locations of homes, businesses, farms, cemetaries, and schools outside the city limits. The maps indicated which roads were dirt, which were gravel, and which were paved. City limits and fence lines were shown, along with the odd exclaves -- places like the Tulsa Fairgrounds which are in the city but outside the city limits.

The ODOT map of Wagoner County included, as an inset, the first street map I had ever seen of my neighborhood, Rolling Hills, at the time an unincorporated subdivision in the northwest corner of the county. (We lived there from 1969 to 1978.) Most commercial city maps of the time didn't bother to show Tulsa beyond "Tulsa proper" (the pre-1966 boundaries), but even if a map did go out all the way to the new city limit, it stopped abruptly at 193rd East Avenue. So it was interesting to see, at last, how my mental map of the neighborhood, sketched by years of walking to church, riding my bike to the UtoteM and the In-N-Out (convenience stores), and visiting friends, matched up to the real distances and proportions shown by the map.

What really caught my imagination were the names and boundaries of townships -- county subdivisions that, as far as I am aware, have had no official function since the 1910s. These townships sometimes matched up to the Northwest Ordinance 36-square-mile townships, but mostly didn't. Tulsa County had Boles, Frye, Willow Springs, Lynn Lane, Wekiwa, Red Fork, Dawson, plus townships that bore the same names as still-extant towns: Collinsville, Owasso, Skiatook, Jenks, Glenpool, and Bixby. I had the idea that the old township boundaries could be put to use for city government. Tulsa (then governed by a board of city commissioners elected at-large) could have boroughs, just like New York City, using the old township boundaries to create some geographical element to city government.

When I was in college, my roommate had posters of the Landers twins and Morgan Fairchild next to his loft bed. I ordered some county maps from ODOT, used colored pencils to highlight the township boundaries, and put up Wagoner, Rogers, and Tulsa County on my side of the room. I wasn't making a statement. I just liked looking at the maps (although I'm sure not as much as he -- or I -- liked looking at the Landers twins).

After college, newly empowered with my own car, I bought an atlas collecting all 77 county maps in a single book: The Oklahoma Wildlife Federation's County Maps and Outdoor Guide to Oklahoma. The counties were each squeezed down to a single page, two at most, which made the maps hard to read at times, but it still was a helpful companion on my Saturday rambles around the state. I'd look for paved routes that were off the state numbered highway system: a shortcut from Skiatook Lake to Prue, Kenwood Road in Mayes and Delaware Counties, the road from Oaks to Rocky Ford to Moodys in Cherokee County, Jones and Hogback Roads in Oklahoma County. The atlas was also handy for spotting old highway alignments, like old US 75 as it winds through Vera, Ramona, and Ochelata, another segment of old 75 from Beggs to Preston to Okmulgee, and US 62 through Headrick, Snyder, Indiahoma, and Cache -- places where a beeline connecting cities 50 miles apart replaced the twists and turns that connected one little town to its neighbor.

Some years later, Shearer Publishing incorporated data from these ODOT county maps with topographical data to produce The Roads of Oklahoma, a full-color atlas with a consistent scale throughout.

So it was nice to see that ODOT now has the full set of county maps online, along with the current official state highway map and other publications.

I learned about these online maps from a fascinating new blog about our great state: blogoklahoma.us. And I learned about blogoklahoma.us from Mike of Okiedoke's latest Okie roundup.

The Map Room links to Hipkiss' Scanned Old Maps. The site owner is scanning and posting maps from books in his collection, like this map of London, suburbs, railways and postal codes, from the 1922 Bartholomew Pocket Atlas. He also has links to other online collections of maps old and new, and offers an RSS feed, so you can easily find out when he has a new map available for your perusal.

There's a new blog called Mapping Hacks, which is also the name of an upcoming book from O'Reilly Associates. The focus of blog and book is the democratization of mapmaking. I've long had the yearning to make my own maps, particularly for political purposes, but the tools for the task have been expensive and cumbersome to learn. That's all changing, and the open source revolution is behind the change.

A couple more cool map links:

Here's a collection of historical maps of Ireland. These maps will be especially helpful for someone working on Irish genealogy. The collection includes maps of Irish baronies, which have been hard to find outside specialist libraries.

And here's an online British Museum exhibit called "The Unveiling of Britain," revealing through maps the evolution of the understanding of Britain's shape from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1600.

Hat tip for all of the above to The Map Room.

From the headlines to tonight's bedtime reading:

"That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never carry a map in their heads."

"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy.

-- from Chapter 9 of Prince Caspian, by C. S. Lewis

(Hat tip to Captain's Quarters for the link to the CNN story above.)

This is pretty cool. Someone has tried to combine all the various transit services in the NYC metro area on a single diagram (not a scale map), in the fashion of the London Underground diagram. The standard maps from the various transit services (MTA, NJ Transit, Port Authority) generally only show you their own services, so it's useful to know -- for example -- that you can drive in from the Jersey burbs, park your car near the Lincoln Harbor development in northern Hoboken, take a Hudson-Bergen Light Rail car to Hoboken station, then catch a PATH train to Herald Square for some shopping at Macy's, then hoof it over to Penn Station for Amtrak to anywhere.

Could've used this a week or so ago.

[Hat tip to the Map Room.]

Found some wonderful London Underground map links and a blog devoted to maps.

The Map Room features links to all sorts of maps. Recent entries (here, here, here, and here) focus on our recent elections, with links to maps that present election results in creative ways, like this New York Times map which uses population density to show red and blue America in a way that may be somewhat less scary to the blue blue voters.

The Map Room also links to an archive of maps of the London Underground from 1905 to the present, and to this Grauniad article about Henry Beck, the man who designed the distinctive Underground diagram.

Speaking of the Underground, you can find another tube map archive here, the rules for the game Mornington Crescent (and a simplified Java version) here, and a funny but practical "Ultimate Guide to the London Underground" here. The London Transport Museum has an online shop, which offers among many other products customized clothes with your favorite station name or slogan. My favorites (and it is my birthday, hint hint) are a London trivia game with the tube map as the game board, and a CD containing the TrueType and Postscript versions of the Johnston font used on Underground maps and literature. (The font in the logo for this site is Gill Sans, which is similar but not an exact match for Johnston.) (The font is available less expensively here.)

The parade of nations, opening the Olympic Games in Athens, is being conducted in alphabetical order according to the Greek name for each nation. I took a couple of semesters of Greek in college, so I wasn't surprised to see the "Saint" countries at the front of the line, with places named for female saints (e.g. St. Lucia) preceding places named for male saints (e.g. St. Vincent, San Marino), because the Greek word for "Saint" is also the word for "holy": Άγία (hagia) is the feminine nominative singular form of the adjective, Άγιος (hagios) is the masculine equivalent. That little quote mark in front of the alpha -- a rough breathing mark, actually -- is sounded as English "h", and sometimes proceeds a vowel at the beginning of a word, but doesn't affect the alphabetical order. The "Z" countries get to come much earlier than usual -- zeta is the 6th letter of the Greek alphabet, while countries beginning with "Ph" or "F" come near the end, because phi is the 21st letter.

More puzzling was seeing some countries whose names begin in "B" in English in the expected order -- Belgium, Bermuda, Bosnia, Bolivia, Brazil -- while others marched in the midst of the Ms -- Barbados, Bahamas, Belize, Benin, Botswana. I caught a glimpse of one of the country name signs, and it looked like the Greek version of the names of the latter group began with ΜΠ -- "mp" if we wrote it in the Roman alphabet.

A quick Google turned up this list of country names in Greek. Barbados in Greek is Μπαρμπάντος -- Mparmpantos. Botswana is Μποτσουάνα -- Mpotsouana.

The only explanation I can think of for this is that in modern Greek, beta is pronounced closer to the English "v" (Vietnam and Vanuatu got to march close to the front with the rest of the beta nations), so the mu-pi combination may be the only way to represent the wholly foreign sound of an English "b".

Incoming Signals links to a proposal for reforming the Electoral College by redrawing state lines so we end up with 50 states of equal population, thus reducing the slight edge given to small states in the allocation of electoral votes. (It would also mean the end of small-state powr in the Senate.)

I remember being fascinated, as an eighth grader, by the entries in the People's Almanac about alternatives for subdividing the United States. One plan, by geographer G. Etzel Pearcy, split the US into 38 states, with lines drawn to keep metro areas within a single state. Pearcy believed there would be less government spending by reducing the number of state governments. He also believed that uniting each metropolitan area within a single state would simplify providing services on a regional basis -- the sort of thing now routinely accomplished through multilateral agreements between states, such as the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

I won't ridicule these efforts -- I spent a fair amount of time the summer after my eighth grade year devising my own plan. As I grew older, I came to appreciate the fact that states under our Constitution are not meant to be mere administrative arms of the Federal government, even if they often take that role. And despite the metropolitan identity that may cross state lines around major cities, those state lines mean something after existing for hundreds of years. Different laws have been in place and those have affected how people live and how people think about themselves.

The author of the Electoral College reform plan suggests redrawing state boundaries after each decennial census to retain equal population. This would put an end to the ironic observation that the U. S. Senate races are more competitive than House races, and therefore the make-up of the Senate better reflects changes in public mood because you can't gerrymander state lines.

Here's another effort at redrawing state lines for equal population, using existing state boundaries as much as possible.

Instapundit linked to a Doc Searls entry about the new liberal talk radio network. The article includes an interesting digression about AM radio propagation and has links to radio-locator.com, a database of information about broadcast stations in the USA. Each entry includes the station's website and the URL of any streaming broadcast, transmitting power, number and location of towers, ownership information, and -- this is the cool part -- links to daytime and nighttime coverage maps. Here's the entry for 1170 KFAQ. Advanced search will allow you to find all the stations with a certain frequency, and will do a fuzzy search around a frequency. There's even a mobile edition for downloading info to your PDA.

The coverage maps only show propagation of the ground wave, so if you remember Billy Parker's ads for the 50th anniversary of KVOO (now KFAQ) and the reference to "38 states, Mexico, and Canada", you'll be disappointed.

AM radio. Maps. These are a few of my favorite things.

Here's another city with an online, map-based way to browse property information. Wichita's system lets you drill down to the block, look at age, value, and ownership of property, zoning district, when annexed, and more. There are even convenient hyperlinks to the city zoning code, so you can see what a zoning designation signifies.

When will Tulsa catch up to Wichita?

Note: This site is not Mozilla-friendly, so you'll have to use IE.

The University of Oklahoma has a great Geo Information Systems (GIS) website at http://geo.ou.edu. Free maps available include municipal boundaries, school district boundaries (statewide and by county), county precinct maps, and maps relating to the oil and gas industry. There's also geographical boundary data that you can download and use in your own mapping applications.

Remember me pointing out Savannah's wonderful land use database, called SAGIS, which layers real estate ownership and valuation, aerial photos, zoning districts, and about any other bit of useful geographical information all in one map browser? The GIS department at OU was involved in that project, merging data from city, county, and regional government sources! Wouldn't it be nice if Tulsa would get OU's GIS department to do the same thing for us?

Andrew Sullivan links to this fascinating map, showing the balance of contributions to Republican and Democrat presidential candidates by three-digit zip code region. You can also look at the same data by state and by county and see for each candidate where their money is coming from -- just use the pulldown menu to change candidates. Elsewhere on the site are rankings showing who's pulling money from the grassroots and the fat cats. Bush draws well from both grassroots -- measured by the number of small donations -- and fatcats. Lieberman and Kerry have the wealthiest donors on average.

So far most of the money donated from Oklahoma is going to Democrats, particularly Lieberman, Dean, and Edwards.

The Tulsa County Assessor's office has online maps showing school districtboundaries and municipal boundaries. More impressive is the collection of maps showing subdivision boundaries, lot and block numbers, and lot dimensions. Each square mile is an Adobe Acrobat file.

It's nice to have those maps there, but I'm really impressed with SAGIS, the Savannah Area Geographic Information System, which allows for zooming in and out, and you can click on a lot and find out who owns it, what it's worth, how big the lot is, how it's zoned, and even who the city alderman and county commissioner are for that location. Another click takes you to the property card, with the physical characteristics of the buildings on the property. You can control layers of information on the map, and see property lines and zoning lines overlaid on an aerial photo. This is a great tool for property owners and potential buyers and investors. I hope we can get something like this for Tulsa very soon.

See a strange area code on caller ID? The website of NANPA (the North America Numbering Plan Administration) is the place to search for information about area codes, find up-to-date area code maps for North America, and up-to-date info on recent and upcoming area code splits, and on the dialing rules in each area. Where can I use 10-digit dialing? Where must I dial all 10 digits?

Remarkably, 13 states -- mostly in the Mountain West and in New England -- and DC still are managing with a single area code.

And here's a site with the history of area code numbering. Oklahoma became a two-area code state when 918 was created in 1953 (mandatory in 1954). The rationale behind the original numbering -- most populous areas got the fewest pulses -- New York had the most favorable area code, then Chicago and Los Angeles.

The University of Texas has a wonderful online collection of maps, both current and historical. One of the treasures to be found is the complete contents of Shepherd's Historical Atlas -- both 1923 and 1926 editions. I remember time spent poring over these detailed maps, marveling at the complexity of pre-unification Germany and wondering about the claims of the 13 colonies to western territories. (And Jefferson's proposal to organize the Northwest Territories as 10 states. Interesting that the proposed state of Metropotamia today has one of America's highest concentrations of Mesopotamians.)