A series of MIT Media Lab maps are percolating through the internet, showing the locations and "walksheds" of independent coffee shops in San Francisco, Brooklyn, and Cambridge. These shops play an important role in urban life, as the researchers explain in their project description:

Remember 2004, when Karl Rove got a dingleberry re-elected president in part by mobilizing conservatives to vote down gay marriage in a bunch of states? Well, it's only taken a decade, but gay marriage is winning. And the pace is picking up.

What makes your state unique? Would you judge by how crappy it is? How much sex its residents are getting? Or perhaps a state's uniqueness can be nailed down to the music tastes of its Spotify listeners.

What is your city's Williamsburg? What's its hippest—or formerly hippest—or sometimes just youngest—neighborhood, the one with the art galleries and the boutiques and the lines for brunch? (And what, for that matter, is its Bushwick, or "Next Williamsburg"?) If you don't know off the top of your head, don't worry. We do, thanks to the collective knowledge of Gawker readers.

Ever wanted to know how to say a word in every European language? Thanks to this cool Google Translate/map mash-up, you can learn your geography and your languages at the same time.

Did you know that Spain leads the world in cocaine use? Or that Mongolia leads the world in Velociraptor bones? Or that Cameroon leads the world in killer lakes?

Controversial globe-trotting sex tourist Daryush Valizadeh, better known by his by-the-hour motel pseudonym Roosh V, is the only pickup artist to date to have had the honor of being labeled a misogynist by none other than the venerable Southern Poverty Law Center.

An estimated 2.1 million people die each year from air pollution. Want to know where the most polluted (and deadly) places to live are? This NASA-created map will show you.

Rats and obnoxious parties are two iconic big-city problems, but these irritants, like income, are not evenly distributed across New York City. The map above—inspired by this similar project from The Furman Center—examines two-and-a-half years of complaints to the city's 311 phone line, focusing on the calls classified as either "vermin" or "loud party/music." That's over 260,000 complaints in total, split by ZIP code.

Atlantic Cities points to an amazing Urban Institute mapping tool that lets you see where poor people lived, by race, in every American city in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Answer: Basically everywhere.

Quick, what do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage? Really? You call it... that? Wow. Well, you're wrong. Unless you said soda.

You are looking at, more or less, a portrait of the internet over an average 24 hours in 2012—higher usage in yellows and reds; lower in greens and blues—created by an anonymous researcher for the "Internet Census 2012" project. How, exactly, do you gather this much data? Well: not legally, that's for sure.

Remember how thew new Apple Maps app for the iPhone — the one that replaced the old, Google-based default — is a horrible piece of software that Apple was forced to publicly apologize for? Ha ha, of course you do, because you are reading this blog post in the middle of the Australian bush, where Apple Maps directed you when you were trying to get to Filene's Basement.

NASA has just released some nighttime images of Earth taken by an ultra-sensitive satellite 512 miles above its surface and They. Are. Gorgeous.

Some Americans are racist. We know this, though there's nothing quite like a black guy winning a national election to bring them out of the woodwork. The sheer volume of racist Tweets is disheartening, but can we learn anything from them?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has just released the newest map charting obesity across the United States of Fatlandia. Here's the verdict for 2011:

The Foreign Ministry of Iran threatened to pursue legal action against Google Thursday over an issue it has regarding Google Maps.

As promised, the island nations of Samoa and Tokelau will jump 24 hours into the future tonight, when the international date line is revised to facilitate Samoan trade with Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. (American Samoa will stay on Hawaii's side of the line.) When 18,600 Samoans and 1,500 Tokelauans go to bed tonight, it will be a Thursday. When they awake, it will be Saturday.

There are two possible explanations for these horrendously mislabeled graphics from yesterday's Special Report with Brett Baier: one, that no one at Fox News knows or cares about where Nevada and New Hampshire are; or two, that the network is somehow trying to fool the Obama administration into pumping millions of dollars into Utah, thinking that it's actually Nevada. Not sure which is less embarrassing. [via Media Matters; image via AP]

After weeks of literally protesting Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street has realized that billionaire CEOs actually don't live in lower Manhattan. So they're headed uptown! To help them, here's a map of where the richest of New York's rich live.