Ride the City is an online tool that will help find you a safe bike route to your destination.  How does it work?  Enter your starting and ending address or drag the cyclist and stop sign icons onto the map.  That's it!

Unfortunately, it's only available in New York City, Austin, Seattle, San Diego, Chicago and Louisville, but they are working on adding more cities.  Be sure to check out the Ride the City blog for updates and additions.

Curtis Melvin is a PhD student from George Mason University who is on a mission to uncover the secrets of North Korea by plotting unknown sites into Google Maps. 

Aaron Hotfelder from Gadling writes:

Using knowledge gleaned from his own trips to North Korea, as well as tips from many others who have visited, Curtis and his crew of civilian spies have managed to plot into Google Maps previously unknown sites in North Korea such as secret prison camps, vast burial mounds, and missile storage facilities. His interactive project, called "North Korea Uncovered," has literally thousands of entries and is the most exhaustive map of North Korea to date.

Here is a map which shows the first moonwalk done on July 21, 1969.  Link to full image.

flickrvision is a site where you can see images uploaded to flickr throughout the world in real-time.  It has a 3-D view, however, I'm unable to try out at the moment because it's being hit hard by digg users.  From what I hear it's a very cool feature.  Someone should definitely make a screensaver out of this.  Link.

Here is a map which shows how obesity has increased throughout the entire U.S. population over the past 20 years. Link to full map [via digg]

Previously:
The Fat Kid Epidemic: Car seats are inadequate for overweight children, Worldmapper, a new way to look at the world

Here is an interesting map that depicts the languages of Europe.  Click on the link to view the original map and language key.

With Gracenote's Music Maps you can find out who is listening to what and where throughout the world.

I zoomed in on Minnesota and "J.K. Rowling" came up in the "Current Top 10 Artists".  Unless they are referring to books on tape, since when did she start her own rock band? 

It wasn't until a couple days ago when we realized how devastating the fires in San Diego have become.  We got word that family has been evacuated from their home and may not have a home to go back to. 

Half a million people have been evacuated making this a comparable natural and national disaster to Hurricane Katrina.  You would think news coverage on this tragedy would be 24/7, however, on our local Minneapolis channels it has only been deserving of 2 minutes of coverage on the 5 and 10 o'clock news.  Very sad.  (I guess we'll have to break down and purchase cable to get any real news or just rely entirely on the internet.)

Here is a Google map of the fires in the San Diego area so for those of you who don't live in the sourthern California can see how expansive these fires have become.  [via digg] 

Here are some sites with continuing coverage on the fires:
California Wildfires (CNN.com)
Bush declares major fire disaster (BBC News)

Chris Harrison created three maps which display how cities are interconnected.

The Dimes Project provides several excellent data sets that describe the structure of the Internet. Using their most recent city edges data (Feb 2007), I created a set of visualizations that display how cities across the globe are interconnected (by router configuration and not physical backbone). In total, there are 89,344 connections.

Illustrator James Turner created The Map of Humanity in order to describe the human condition in an organized map form based on names from history and fiction.  Here James Turner describes the map in his own words.