girl eat machine.

Another burst of brilliance by the Washington Post’s Tom Toles. (HT @stereogab)

Speaking of great new transit maps, this weekend’s design/greennerd blogosphere has turned up a gem:

I, for one, am 100% comfortable with a mass transit themed meme. The more people appreciate the cultural tropes of subway travel, (one hopes) the more attachment and value people invest in the system. (Again, we hope.)

So far there are U.S. highway and cosmos maps riffing on the metro. To get a better peek at Sam Loman’s interpretation of the body, you can click the image above. (When you land, be sure to take a stroll around the data visual goodness that is Information Aesthetics.)

Do you know what you should read right now? Jonathan Lethem’s essay The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.

Lethem doesn’t just pen a worthy and beautiful ode explaining and celebrating the culture of sharing — that is Our Culture, or to be even clearer, all culture — he also includes a Surprise of Genius Proportions. (So, my Skimming/Half-Reading Kin, if you really want to know why this is such a great read, you’ll just have to make it through to the end.)

I know “Long Form” articles can be a struggle in the World of a Thousand Browser Tabs, but whether you’re an old copyleftist or someone still trying to wrap your head around “this whole free culture thing,” take the time to treat your mind by clicking here.

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated… (John Donne)

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Found this running a Google image search for “bizarre backgrounds.” I’m going to present these without context because, well, that’s exactly how I found them:

Some coworkers passed along a link to this incredible portrait of the US rail system as told by Amtrak. Cameron Booth, the map’s creator offers some insight about his project:

Presenting the latest in my series of transit-styled diagrams, the entire Amtrak passenger rail system in the style of a subway map. Surprisingly, I haven’t seen another take on this anywhere else on the internet, but I guess it is a fairly monumental undertaking (Good thing I’m the patient type!). Every last station is shown, the result of a lot of research on both Amtrak’s official site and Wikipedia. This version has all station names and route information listed.

You can read more about the map on his blog.

As for what this says about Amtrak, well, either this confirms that Chicago is the center of the universe and New England is the only bastion of society left in a chaotic and drifting world — or that we have to do a heck of a better job reaching out to the central United States. I know large tracks of the West are farmlands and that people and cities tip towards the water, but that’s no excuse for investing too little time into exploring more thorough connections of rail system. Although Amtrak may consider these low-populations density areas a suck on their revenue, there are bigger things at stake than making profit. When we leave areas with a lower populations density without access to public transportation, what we’re doing is further isolating the isolated: both in belief systems, limited employment options, their dependence on cars, and any number of other things a progressive can whine about.

So, let’s see some public encouragement for more rail development. Amtrak may not be ideal — it’s a monopoly, it’s subsidized by the government, it’s the best rail service, it’s the worst rail service, it’s the only (national) rail service — but its rails give great foundation for sensible expansion with smart urban development. Let’s hope $8 billion for high-speed rail projects the Obama Administration allocated from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will do (at least some of) that.