Yesterday the Washington Post wrote about Nikolas Schiller, a man who works with maps and contorts them to make an interesting sort of urban art.

Early in January 1995, he created an interactive web map of the Inaugural Parade Route in DC and blocked his site from search engines. He kept track of who found and who visited his site, and like Edward Tufte, translated that dynamic web traffic into a static map. His is an interesting proposition, and an interesting site.

I remember being taken on a trip to Santa Cruz by my mother's sister, Aunt Jean, because "I was good with maps." I carry this idea with me to this day, although I was undone in Austria trying to make sense our of the German maps while my newly-wed husband drove the main streets, frantically calling out "Here? Turn here?" I scanned the green lines and the orange lines, while trying to flip back and forth between interminably long street names and trying to find the strasse name on the maps. Finally I hollered back, "Pull Over!" After that, he navigated and I drove, which wasn't always a good combination either. ("Take a left when you get a chance." (and then) "Why didn't you turn left at that street like I told you?") Several of our most spirited interchanges have been on interchanges.

So, I envy this language that Schiller traffics in, and his ability, like Tufte, to leave flatland behind, understanding the idea that these orange and green squiggles have a corresponding relationship to how you get through town, how you navigate the world.