This is in England, in a lot where cars and vans are stored before being shipped out to dealers. When Hawkes flew overhead, it just happened to be red SUV day.

What the hell is this? Balls? Trash? Grain? No. These are heaping piles of tomatoes dumped along a river in France.

Sadly this is not a set of mining platforms for sucking ultra-dense deuterium out of the Jovian atmosphere. These are the Maunsell Sea Forts, built in the UK's Thames and Mersey estuaries during World War II.

Check out more of Hawkes' brilliant photography on his site. (via Boston Globe's Big Picture)

Using data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, researchers from Austin-based economic development consulting firm TIP Strategies created a map that uses simple but effective visualizations to help people understand the way economic disaster spreads geographically. If you visit their site, you can watch the map slowly slide through each quarter since 2004, with job gains and losses ballooning outward when various sectors grow or shrink.

It's worth quoting at length from their analysis:

The timeline begins in 2004 as the country starts its recovery from the 2001 recession, following the bursting of the dot-com bubble. At first, broad economic growth was apparent across most of the country. Two notable exceptions are the Bay Area - the hub of the tech boom that drove job growth during the prior decade - and several metropolitan areas within the Midwest. The map reveals that much of the industrial Midwest never fully recovered from the previous recession, as manufacturers continue to shed jobs while other parts of the country were adding them in large number.

Equally telling is the short-lived expansion of construction- and real estate-related job growth in Sun Belt states, such as California, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona, during the middle of the decade as the nation's appetite for new homes increases. During this period, the map also captures the dramatic job losses in New Orleans in 2005 as a result of Hurricane Katrina, as well as the city's slow recovery driven largely by construction-related employment.

By 2007, regional evidence of the coming economic downturn starts to appear. Employment growth in California and Florida starts to wane, with the first signs of actual losses beginning in the middle of the year in Los Angeles and Tampa. At the same time, layoffs accelerate in the nation's manufacturing heartland. By the first quarter of 2008, job losses in the Southeast and Midwest begin to spread, setting off a chain of losses in neighboring areas until the two regions unite in recession. The same pattern appears on the West Coast, with the epicenter in Los Angeles marching eastward to the Front Range of the Rockies.

Check out all the maps, and the full study, on the TIP website.

Of course, these join other disasters such as toxic spills, vehicle accidents and more.

Updated minute-by-minute in astonishing detail, the AlertMap gives you an interesting perspective on what counts as a "disaster," as well as how they spread across regions. Clicking on each disaster brings up the latest information about it.

Alert Map [via National Association of Radio-Distress Signalling and Infocommunications] Thanks, MissMercyStreet!

The British archipelago of Tristan da Cunha offers not one, but several island retreats, in the most remote locale on Earth.

Tristan da Cunha sits 2,816 kilometers from the coast of South Africa, and 2,430 kilometers from its closest neighbor, the island of St. Helena, where the Emperor Napoleon lived out his final days in exile. The main island of Tristan da Cunha does have a small permanent population: roughly 270 people living mostly in the capital city of Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.

A team of six weather researchers study on far off Gough Island, but the other specks of land, Nightingale Island, Middle Island, Stoltenhoff Island, and the aptly named Inaccessible Island, remain uninhabited. And, the islands are so tiny (the main island is just 98 square kilometers), that they show up on very few maps, although they cannot escape the all-seeing eye of Google Earth.

Although Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited region on Earth, there are certain drawbacks to setting up your lair. Outsiders are forbidden from buying or selling land, or even settling on the islands. And the UN has declared Inaccessible Island and Gough Island as wildlife preserves, which could put a damper on any killer-robot tests you planned to run.

A better bet might be Norway’s Bouvet Island, the absolute most remote island on Earth. The subantarctic island was not only the setting for the film Alien vs. Predator, but also may have already been the site of some mad scientific testing. In 1979, satellites detected a flash coming from the island, which may have been the result of nuclear weapons testing. But whether testing occurred and who was responsible has never been resolved. It could be the perfect place to hide your own experiments, provided they can survive the sub-freezing temperatures.

Tristan de Cunha info from Dark Roasted Blend.

On his website, Leskiw gives us a terrifically detailed portrait of this imaginary Pacific Island nation (see a much larger version of the map here), with an especial focus on the future of its road systems:

This nation consists of three principal islands: Breda: the most populous island and home to the nation's capital city, St. Paul and largest metropolitan area, Aberdeen-Portsmouth-Oxford; Wright: the smallest and least populous island; and Mann: the largest island in area, but dominated by mountains and an active volcano and thus largely wilderness, although the western coast is densely populated and home to Wellington, the nation's third-largest city.

The nation is located somewhere in the south Pacific and was most likely a British colony at one time and consequently roundabouts and European interchange designs are prevalent. The nation's roads are divided into five classes and each one is identified by it's own unique color-coded signage. Motorways are blue, primary highways are green, secondary highways are red, regional roads are yellow, and local roads are white. Motorways are identified by the label Mx beside the international symbol for limited-access highways, primary and secondary highways are identified by a black on yellow Australian-style shield affixed on the appropriate background color, and regional and local roads are referred to by name or primary destinations. All motorways and the Route 99/Manton Bay Tunnel are tolled.

Prior to 2007 all motorways on the Isle of Breda operated on a system-wide toll ticket system, however the M2 extension. M8, and M9 were opened using electronic toll collection via overhead gantries and in 2025 the entire system on the Isle of Breda switched over to this system eliminating the need for toll booths. The M7 and M10 motorways employ mainline toll booths. Driving is on the left; distances are in kilometers; national speed limits are 120km/h: motorways, 90km/h: rural, and 40km/h: urban, however dual carriageways are usually posted at 100km/h and urban arterials at 60-70km/h.

Roads are a crucial part of the landscape in most countries, and yet we rarely think of them as a storytelling medium. Still, Leskiw manages to explain through his fictional maps what the future of a small nation might look like. He considers very pragmatic details about what the future might hold for mundane objects like toll booths. You can call this world-building for everyday life. We've got no zeppelins or floating cities - just overhead gantries for toll collection.

Because he lives in Michigan, Leskiw has also created a map of an alternative Michigan, above. I'm not sure what region this is supposed to correspond to, or what exactly changed historically to make his alternate Michigan come into existence. I love the idea that he's traced Michigan's road history back to some critical point and changed one or two things so that the state's road system evolved differently.

Here is another one of Leskiw's imaginary islands, called Pellie Island (bigger version here). He's been designing these road maps for years, and has dozens on his website. He also collects old road maps of actually-existing regions. His eccentric, beautiful work is a reminder that science fiction stories lurk in every medium, even the humble road map.

The Map Realm [Leskiw's fictional map gallery]

Bob Douglas took this in Hawaii, at the Pu`u`O`o vent on the Kilauea Volcano, where lava meets water. Here you can see lava being hurled into the air, and as it hits the ocean it sends up those intense, thick clouds of steam in the background. You can see more of winning photos at the National Geographic website, and download extra-large sizes for your desktop.

International Photography Contest Desktop Wallpaper [via National Geographic] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!