Were you searching for a topographical representation of Bernie Madoff's victims? Your search is over. Zero Hedge took the addresses in places like Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Palm Beach, geocoded them, and then imported them into a mapping application. This is another example of the recession's silver lining: When you take the brain power on Wall Street that was once focused on making money and redirect it to other projects, great things can happen. Just imagine what would happen if you took all these hedge funders and focused them on a cure for cancer! [Zero Hedge]

LES Hotel Saturation: A Map [Bowery Boogie]

The folks over at Property Shark have kindly put together an interactive map of residential sales in Manhattan during the fourth quarter. We have a feeling the map for the first quarter of 2009 won't have quite as many big maroon dots, but let's all keep our fingers crossed, okay? [Property Shark]

Punch in your zip code and SitorSquat.com will show you all the public restrooms in your immediate vicinity. And, yes, the site offers an iPhone app, so you can take advantage of the service when you're walking down Broadway and your bladder is about to explode. [SitorSquat via Buzzfeed]

Good news, Fake America—we've marginalized The South! The New York Times reports today that based on the totally conclusive 2008 election results, no longer will The South have any impact whatsoever on National Politics, and we can safely ignore them. Here, look at this map: it is the counties that voted more Republican in 2008 than in 2004, versus the counties that voted more for Barry Obama than John Kerry. As you can see, most of the country decided they liked Obama more than they liked Kerry, except for this mysterious belt in the old Confederacy that found something... unappealing about this Obama character. What's up with that? After the 2004 elections, a website called "Fuck the South" became popular among us liberal godless coastal elite types. It is a long rant about how the fat idiots who voted for Bush are stupid fat idiots, with some "facts" about how America is basically a giant welfare system whereby New York's money is redistributed to Mississippi for some reason. It was a nice bit of angry post-election catharsis, even if it is indefensibly classist, because, you know, these states we're ranting against are often full of terribly impoverished people and no one has done anything at all to help them since LBJ, basically, and look how well that worked out for him. But! Four years later, the Democrats won the presidency! The electoral map was totally different this time, too! So the Times declares the end of Democrats having to be Southern, or having to hate Welfare. The end of The Southern Strategy too! The Southern Strategy was Richard Nixon's cunning plan to convince racists to support him, helped along by LBJ's cunning plan to be less racist, which lost the South for Democrats for a generation. Now it doesn't matter! The Republicans are finished, forever! Right?

Here's another quasi-useless application powered by Google Maps: HookupMaps.com plots out the "casual encounters" section of Craigslist, so you can now see precisely where all the ugly people are getting busy in real-time. As for the person looking for a little excitement at Ground Zero, it's a "BBW looking for West Indian man," just in case you're interested and you meet the criteria. [HookupMaps via CNET]

If NYC residents could hope for anything good to come out of this economic crisis, it would be this: the rollback of gentrification. The Observer is already writing trend stories on it, whether it happens or not! Are you worried about whether your current neighborhood will remain safe for yuppies once the economy tanks? Click through for our citywide, neighborhood-specific map showing the fate of post-recession NYC; you may not be pleased, hipsters: [The key: Purplish-pink for traditional strongholds of the rich that will remain unscathed. Red for core neighborhoods that are probably too gentrified now to roll back significantly. Pink for marginal hoods, where a recession could send gentrifiers fleeing. And grey for wilderness neighborhoods, where yuppies would fear to tread after The Poors and other non-glamorous types take them back for good.]

Attack of the Clones: The fleeting chance at tourist-snapshot immortality is enough to roil most of the costumed geeks outside Mann's Chinese from their Yoda jammies in the morning. But Google Maps immortality is nothing less than the Force itself at work — the Dark Side specifically, which commanded Darth Vader from his Chinese perch to a bit of stormtrooper recon down the street at the Kodak Theater. A disapproving George Lucas's cease-and-desist letter is no doubt on its way to Sergey Brin and Larry Page as we speak. [Google Maps via /Film]

Inside Facebook's Justin Smith used Google's Insights for Search tool to map Facebook's spread across the United States and the world. We converted a few of his slides into a time-lapse video, above, revealing how Facebook ping-ponged between the coasts before finally filling in most of the country's middle, except for a few farm states where teenagers are probably still asking "a/s/l" in AOL chatrooms or something.

Just what we've been waiting for! Thanks to FamilyWatchdog.us, you can now create a map of all the sexual offenders in your neighborhood. [Gawker]

There's probably been a time or two when you've been tempted to check out a restaurant or bar simply because some celebrity supposedly "owns" it. Maybe I'll see Justin Timberlake devouring a plate of ribs at Southern Hospitality! Or I'll spot Robert De Niro slurping on some pasta at Ago! Restaurateurs know this, too, of course, which is why they're all so eager to attach a celebrity name—any one will do!—to their ill-conceived bistro, brasserie, speakeasy, lounge, or barbecue shack. We don't want to be the ones to crush your dreams and tell you that there's no chance you'll see these famous faces at these venues. Just in case you're the more optimistic type—or just curious who has a stake in what—we happily introduce the Cityfile celebrity-owned restaurant/bar map!

So, what the heck's been happening in the Middle East since the dawn of civilization five thousand years ago? Well, I don't have the time-or the knowledge-to explain it all, so watch this handy video illustrating who ruled what, and when, in just 90 war-filled seconds!

Ever wonder why the CEO at your company has a $10,000 telescope parked in the corner of his office? It's not to admire the birds. Or even to peek at the woman in the neighboring office building who changes her blouse at precisely half past five. It's to look in the offices of other CEOs, obviously.

Google maps mashup site Startup Warrior bills itself as a tool entreprenuers can use to "find a startup job, explore your neighborhood, or decide where you should start your own company." But we feel the site is best used by wary VCs, hassled journos and cynical M&A types looking for regions to avoid. Be warned: Enter into any of the ten regions mapped below and suffer elevator pitches, pleading looks and limp handshakes at your own risk. Update: Apparently Startup Warrior didn't do much in the way of researching the actual addresses of these startups — many are listed by only by city and state, leading to clumps in central neighborhoods.

Google has announced plans to blur all the human faces in its "Street View" service, which allows you to take a virtual photographic tour of interesting places like Manhattan so that you never have to leave your dank apartment in real life. This is, in all likelihood, to prevent you from seeing any inadvertently captured interesting moments, like drug deals or people crashing their bikes. Google says ""The purpose of Street View isn't looking at people, it's looking at buildings and locations." Whatever. Somewhere on there is a picture of a Google programmer flagging down a hooker. Occam's Razor, people. [AFP]

Just as we always suspected (we always suspect!), the nation's neurotics are concentrated on the East Coast. Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class author, and a team of psychologists compiled "hundreds of thousands of individual personality surveys" and found that "personality types are not spread evenly across the country. They cluster," he writes in the Boston Globe. They cluster, in fact, exactly to our preconceived regional stereotypes! After the jump, see where the other sorts of people live—the ones who are "agreeable," "open to experience," "extroverted," and "conscientious." You know, the people who think they're better than us, or whatever.

Did you know that there are people in certain parts of the world who have never even seen an iPhone? Fortune has helpfully mapped out the fetishized Apple product's availability. The countries where one can procure an iPhone (at least by this summer) are marked in red. (Sucks to be you, Russia!) Of course, the map does not include black-market iPhones. [Fortune]

New York's subway map is a monstrosity, the worst of all possible graphical worlds, neither visually legible nor geographically accurate. For his 1972 map of the system, Massimo Vignelli at least made a clear choice: he sacrificed scale to space out the stations and the lines and present a diagram that commuters could at least read, something along the lines of London's famous tube map. Vignelli has been commissioned to update his long-lost design-for Men's Vogue, of all places, which displays the full map. (Writes Jonathan: "I'm going to print it out and then make a show of obsessively checking it on the train. People will think I'm a tourist. Then they will see it, and know I'm a time traveler.")

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Newsweek is considering a move from Midtown to SoHo. It would join media outlets already in place that range from high-end names like New York Magazine to many of the country's most popular blogs and other online operations. Is the SoHo area NYC's new media district? Rents are cheaper than Midtown, and it's an easier commute for the critical mass of Brooklyn-based writers. Plus, it's just cooler. Take a look for yourself: more than a dozen of the eclectic downtown media neighbors, mapped above.

Even if the Brooklyn Literary Scene is dead, or as Colson Whitehead put it, annoying and irrelevant, there still are a lot of writers kicking it in the borough of churches. In today's New York Observer, Fort Greene's own Doree Shafrir made an extensive list of the Brooklyn literarati, including neighborhood listings. Not to sound like an asshole, but even I didn't know about some of the writers and editors on the list. The Observer's non-college educated readership will be totally lost.