Maryland Democrats safely control both houses of the state legislature, along with the governorship. What a great opportunity to draw a bold Republican-screwing congressional map! See, they want to turn the state from a 6-2 Democrat advantage in the House of Representatives to a 7-1 advantage. How do you do that? Well, look at the funny squiggly picture up top, also known as a "Maryland redistricting draft map."

At 8:35PM GMT, respected British news source The Daily Telegraph broke news in its Amanda Knox liveblog: "Thanks to the wonders of modern technology we can see that Knox's plane is currently over Canada's Auyuittuq National Park on planefinder.net."

Although racism north of the Mason-Dixon line was thought to have been eradicated in 1964, government researchers claim to have spotted it in the wild just recently, lurking in "the remote meadows and forests of upstate New York."

Remember the super cool New York movie map we posted last week? The genius at Alien Loves Predator who created it have posted the answers to the 91 movies that were on it. How many did you get right?

The Obama administration has gone through all of the properties the federal government owns and come up with "roughly 14,000 buildings and structures currently designated as excess and thousands of others that are underutilized." It plans to sell "or get rid of" as many of these as possible over the next three years, which will supposedly save $15 billion.

Those geniuses at the website Alien Loves Predator created this rad map of film icons and where they were filmed loving (or destroying) New York. There are apparently 91 movie references on the map. Think you can spot them all?

PhD student Alex Davies has set out to discover the happiest places in the world by analyzing Tweets. A noble project! But one that may need some tweaking, given that according to his data, the happiest U.S. state is Tennessee (tied with Arizona as the eighth most-unemployed state in the union) , and the happiest country is Germany (which, c'mon, it's Germany; if it were a happy country we wouldn't have had two different world wars).

Attention, data nerds! Numbers from the 2010 Census are being released, which means it's time to start crunching numbers and making colorful maps. New Geography has a bunch, including these two showing the concentrations of black and Hispanic respondents, respectively. Multiply the numbers in the legend by 100 to get the population percentages. [New Geography via Sociological Images]

This is a map of Japanese nuclear power plants that was featured on Monday's episode of Fox News' Your World With Neil Cavuto This is The International Atomic Energy Agency's list of Japanese nuclear plants. You might notice that "Shibuyaeggman" appears on the Fox News map, but not on the IAEA list. Probably because it is actually a nightclub. Media Matters' Simon Maloy explains:

The World Health Organization just released a report about global alcohol consumption. Conclusion: Our planet is wasted!

Accuweather.com is already sounding the alarm about next week's "Groundhog Day Storm" that could affect "more than 100 million people… from the Rockies to the Plains, South, Midwest and Northeast." Sounds scary! But not nearly as scary as their maps.

This is 1.5 million geotagged tweets posted between March 9th and April 12th, 2010, mapped according to frequency of profanity. Mountains are the sweariest, valleys the cleanest. Seems the more people live in a place, the more people swear there.

The New York Times has funneled new Census Bureau data into a handy ethnic map of New York City. This is Brooklyn: Each blue dot equals 100 black people, each green dot 100 white people. Never the twain shall meet.

Here's a map of the world, as drawn by Facebook (click to enlarge it). What does that mean? Well, basically: The entire image is defined not by topographical features or political boundaries, but by Facebook friendships.

Wired magazine logged nearly 35,000 complaint calls to 311— New York's call-and-whine help line—and put them in this handy graph based on nature of complaint and time of call. They also break it down by bitchingest neighborhood

Italian officials today launched a probe into Google, which has been accused of collecting mounds of personal information through unsecured Wi-Fi networks with its Street View cars.

We're all familiar with Google Map's cool/creepy satellite imagery, great for spotting airplanes and busting illegal backyard pools. The technology has received a significant boost recently. (Though not, as some conspiracy theorists believe, thanks to drone technology.)

The Guardian is running a map during Pope Benedict's visit to the UK where people can report seeing the Popemobile, masses, protests and miracles. One user in north London reported seeing a "Cloud that looked like the Pope. I wept."

Hey, look, a website that crowdsources information on the price of weed in various world cities, then calculates averages and charts it on a Google map. File under: Synergy, Inevitabilities, Reasons To Move To The Pacific Northwest. [PriceofWeed.com]

Hurricane Earl is "gathering strength" off the coast of Puerto Rico, and may send squalls all the way to Maine this week. Earl has kindly agreed to leave the Gulf coast alone, though, because it's got enough to deal with.